Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T07:25:21.924Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The place of Edward Gresham's Astrostereon (1603) in the discussion on cosmology and the Bible in the early modern period

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2020

BARBARA BIENIAS
BARBARA BIENIAS*
Affiliation:
Institute for the History of Science, Polish Academy of Sciences, Nowy Świat 72, 00-330Warsaw, Poland. Email: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article situates Edward Gresham's Astrostereon, or A Discourse of the Falling of the Planet (1603), a little-known English astronomical treatise, in the context of the cosmo-theological debate on the reconciliation of heliocentrism with the Bible, triggered by the publication of Nicholas Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543. Covering the period from the appearance of the ‘First Account’ of Copernican views presented in Georg Joachim Rheticus's Narratio Prima (1540) to the composition of Astrostereon in 1603, this paper places Edward Gresham's commentary and exegesis against the background of the views expressed by his countrymen and the thinkers associated with the Wittenberg University – such as Philipp Melanchthon, Caspar Peucer, and Christoph Rothmann. Comparing the ways in which they employed certain biblical passages – either in favour of or against the Earth's mobility – the paper emphasizes Gresham's ingenious reading of the Hebrew version of the problematic excerpts, and his expansion of the accommodation principle.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , December 2020 , pp. 417 - 442
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The research was conducted as part of the Tradition and Novelty: Copernicanism, the Idea of a Plurality of Worlds, and Astrology in Edward Gresham's (1565–1613) Astrostereon grant project, financed by the National Science Centre, Poland (OPUS 8, DEC-2014/15/B/HS3/02490). The project's ultimate aim is to publish the first critical edition of Gresham's Astrostereon. I am indebted to Dr Amanda Rees for her editorial comments and to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. I am grateful to Prof. Jarosław Włodarczyk and Dr Maciej Jasiński (Institute for the History of Science, Polish Academy of Sciences) for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this text. I would also like to thank Dr Sara Miglietti (Warburg Institute) for her help in obtaining a copy of the book essential for completing this article, and Ms Agnieszka Bogdalska for her assistance with Hebrew.

References

1 Compare Wilson, Arthur, History of Great Britain, Being the Life and Reign of King James the First …, London: Printed for Richard Lownds, 1653, p. 70Google Scholar.

2 Compare Venn, John, Alumni Cantabrigienses, 2 parts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922, part i, vol. 2, p. 264Google Scholar; and Bernard Capp's entry for ‘Edward Gresham’ in ODNB (23 September 2004).

3 Compare ‘Cecil Papers: January 1605, 16–31’, in Giuseppi, M.S. (ed.), Calendar of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House, vol. 17: 1605, London, 1938, pp. 15–43Google Scholar. British History Online, at http://british-history.ac.uk/cal-cecil-papers/vol17/pp15-43 (accessed 21 December 2016); Sparke, Michael, The Narrative History of King James for the First Fourteen Years. In Four Parts, London: Printed for Michael Sparke, 1651, pp. 20–1, 43Google Scholar; anon., Observations upon the Strange & Wonderful Prophecies …, London: Printed for J.H., 1680, p. 1.

4 Dawson, Mark, ‘Astrology and human variation in early modern England’, Historical Journal (2013) 56, pp. 31–53, esp. 31–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Gresham, Edward, A new Almanack and Prognostication for the Yeere of our Lord God 1607, London: Imprinted at London for the Company of the Stationers, 1607Google Scholar, sig. B2r.

6 Compare Johnson, Francis R., Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England: A Study of the English Scientific Writings from 1500–1645, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1937, pp. 249–50Google Scholar; Russell, John L., ‘The Copernican system in Great Britain’, in Dobrzycki, Jerzy (ed.), The Reception of Copernicus’ Heliocentric Theory, Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1972, pp. 189–239, 213Google Scholar; McLean, Antonia, Humanism and the Rise of Science in Tudor England, London: Heinemann, 1972, p. 128Google Scholar; Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London: Penguin Books, 1991 (first published 1971), p. 416Google Scholar.

7 Gresham, op. cit. (5), sig. B2v, italics in the original.

8 Gresham, Edward, A new Almanack and Prognostication for the Yeere of our Lord God 1606, London: [s.n.], 1606, sig. B7vGoogle Scholar.

9 BL: Sloane MS 3936, Sloane MS 753, Sloane MS 3279; BLO: Ashmole MS 192 (II), Ashmole MS 1807 (I).

10 Compare Parry, Glyn, The Arch-conjuror of England: John Dee, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013, p. 265Google Scholar.

11 Edward Gresham, Astrostereon, or A Discourse of the Falling of the Planet, British Library, Sloane MS 3936, ff. 3r–45v, fol. 4v. All further quotations from Astrostereon come from this copy. For the convenience of reading, all the contractions and special signs have been expanded. Otherwise the original variants of spelling have been kept (including the references to the books in the Bible). Some missing letters have been put in square brackets. Italics have been retained. Original punctuation has been preserved whenever possible.

12 John Gadbury, Ephemeris: or, A Diary Astrological, Astronomical, Meteorological for the Year of our Lord 1700, London: Printed by J.R. for the Company of Stationers, 1700 (and for the following years).

13 Bernard, Edward, Catalogi Librorum Manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae in Unum Collecti, cum Indice Alphabetico, 2 vols., Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1697, vol. 2, p. 221Google Scholar.

14 Gadbury, John, Collectio Geniturarum: or, A Collection of Nativities, London: Printed by James Cottrel, 1662, pp. 179–80Google Scholar.

15 John Gadbury, Ephemeris: or, A Diary Astrological, Astronomical, Meteorological for the Year of our Lord 1701, London: Printed by J.R. for the Company of Stationers, 1700, title page.

16 See Capp, Bernard, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800, London: Faber and Faber, 2008Google Scholar (first published 1979), p. 191; and Thomas, op. cit. (6), p. 389 n. 22.

17 Włodarczyk, J., Kremer, R.L. and Hughes, H.C., ‘Edward Gresham, Copernican cosmology, and planetary occultations in pre-telescopic astronomy’, Journal for the History of Astronomy (2018) 49(3), pp. 269–305, 270CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Włodarczyk, Jarosław, ‘The pre-telescopic observations of the Moon in early seventeenth-century London: the case of Edward Gresham (1565–1613)’, Notes and Records (2020) 74, pp. 35–53, 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2019.0009.

19 Compare Hill, Christopher, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012 (first published 1997), p. 47 n. 170Google Scholar.

20 Compare Westman, Robert, The Copernican Question, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2011, p. 309CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Compare Westman, op. cit. (20), p. 309; and Tredwell, Katherine and Barker, Peter, ‘Copernicus’ first friends: physical Copernicanism from 1543 to 1610’, Filozofski vestnik (2004) 25(2), pp. 143–66, 143–4Google Scholar.

22 Compare Westman, op. cit. (20), p. 309.

23 Compare Tredwell and Barker, op. cit. (21), pp. 144.

24 Compare Westman, op. cit. (20), esp. pp. 245–6, 310, 320–3.

25 Compare Hill, op. cit. (19), p. 46; and Johnson, op. cit. (6), p. 252.

26 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 38r.

27 Włodarczyk, op. cit. (18), 47.

28 Ben Jonson, The Devill Is an Ass, in The Works of Ben Jonson: Bartholomew Fair. The Devil Is an Ass. The Staple of News. The New Inn. The Magnetic Lady, vol. 6 (ed. Charles Hereford and Percy Simpson), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966, p. 169.

29 Compare Greville, Fulke and Wilson, Arthur, The Five Yeares of King Iames, or, The Condition of the State of England, and the Relation it Had to Other Provinces, London: Printer for R.W., 1643, p. 19Google Scholar.

30 Compare Kassell, Lauren, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005, pp. 29–30Google Scholar.

31 Eccles, Mark, ‘Elizabethan actors IV: S to end’, Notes and Queries (1993) 40(2), pp. 165–76, 166Google Scholar.

32 See Bienias, Barbara, ‘Edward Gresham's Astrostereon, or A Discourse of the Falling of the Planet (1603), the Copernican paradox, and the construction of early modern proto-scientific discourse’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A (2020) 82, pp. 44–56, esp. 46, 52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 See Bieńkowska, Barbara, ‘The heliocentric controversy in European culture’, in Bieńkowska (ed.), The Scientific World of Copernicus, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1973, pp. 119–32, esp. 119–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Harrison, Peter, The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 133CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Snobelen, Stephen, ‘“In the language of men”: the hermeneutics of accommodation in the Scientific Revolution’, in van der Meer, Jitse M. and Mandelbrote, Scott H. (eds.), Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: Up to 1700, 2 vols., Leiden: Brill, 2008, vol. 1, pp. 691–732Google Scholar.

35 Harrison, op. cit. (34), p. 107.

36 See Howell, Kenneth, God's Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern Science, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002Google Scholar.

37 ‘Who can declare the order of the heavens, or who can make the harmony of the heaven to sleep?’ I use the Douay–Rheims Bible (DRA) for all translated quotations from the Vulgate, and the Tolle Lege Press edition of the 1599 Geneva Bible (GNV) for those from Hebrew.

38 Compare Russell, op. cit. (6), p. 211.

39 McLean, op. cit. (6), p. 147.

40 Recorde, Robert, The Castle of Knowledge, London: Imprinted by Reginalde Wolfe, 1556, pp. 164–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For English proto-Copernicans see Omodeo, Pietro D., Copernicus in the Cultural Debates of the Renaissance, Leiden: Brill, 2014, pp. 37–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Johnson, Francis R., ‘The influence of Thomas Digges on the progress of modern astronomy in sixteenth-century England’, Osiris (1936) 1, pp. 390–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Recorde, op. cit. (40), p. 165.

42 See French, Peter J., John Dee: The World of the Elizabethan Magus, New York: Routledge, 2013 (first published 1987), pp. 97–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Digges, Thomas, A Perfit Description of the Coelestiall Orbes …, London: Imprinted by Felix Kyngston, 1605 (first published 1576), sig. M1vGoogle Scholar.

44 Compare Jalobeanu, Dana, ‘A natural history of the heavens: Francis Bacon's anti-Copernicanism’, in Neuber, Wolfgang, Rahn, Thomas and Zittel, Claus (eds.), The Making of Copernicus: Early Modern Transformations of the Scientist and His Science, Leiden: Brill, 2014, pp. 65–87, 75–7Google Scholar. See also Stephen A. Johnston, ‘Making mathematical practice: gentlemen, practitioners and artisans in Elizabethan England’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1994, pp. 77–83.

45 Compare Westman, op. cit. (20), p. 274.

46 Westman, op. cit. (20), p. 279.

47 McLean, op. cit. (6), p. 147. See also Wightman, W.P.D., Science and the Renaissance, Edinburgh: University of Aberdeen Press, 1962, vol. 1, pp. 116–17Google Scholar.

48 Feingold, Mordechai, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship: Science, Universities and Society in England, 1560–1640, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 13Google Scholar. See also Hill, op. cit. (19), p. 20 n. 22.

49 Compare Feingold, op. cit. (48), pp. 39–42.

50 Mebane, John S., Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992 (first published 1989), p. 73Google Scholar.

51 Compare Waters, David W., The Art of Navigation in England and Early Stuart Times, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958Google Scholar; Hill, op. cit. (19), p. 61; and Hill, Katherine, ‘“Juglers or Schollers?”: negotiating the role of a mathematical practitioner’, BJHS (1998) 31, pp. 253–74, 256CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 See Johnston, Stephen, ‘Mathematical practitioners and instruments in Elizabethan England’, Annals of Science (1991) 48(4), pp. 319–44, doi: 10.1080/00033799100200321CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cormack, Lesley B., ‘Mathematics for sale: Mathematical practitioners, instrument makers, and communities of scholars in sixteenth-century London’, in Cormack, L.B., Walton, S.A. and Schuster, John A. (eds.) Mathematical Practitioners and the Transformation of Natural Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Dordrecht: Springer, 2017, pp. 69–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Compare Chapter 15 in Wright's, L.B. Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935Google Scholar; and Harkness's, Deborah The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007Google Scholar.

54 Mason, S.F., ‘Science and religion in 17th-century England’, Past and Present (1953) 3, pp. 28–44, 28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Mason, op. cit. (54), p. 28.

56 Compare Kocher, Paul, ‘Use of the Bible in English astronomical treatises during the Renaissance’, Huntington Library Quarterly (1946) 9(2), pp. 109–20, 119CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Feingold, op. cit. (48), p. 15.

57 Kocher, op. cit. (56), p. 113.

58 Blundeville, Thomas, M. Blundevile his Exercises Containing Sixe Treatises …, London: Printed by Iohn Windet, 1594, p. 181Google Scholar.

59 Blundeville, op. cit. (58), p. 181.

60 Hill, Thomas, The Schoole of Skill, London: Printed by T. Iudson, for W. Iaggard, 1599, p. 49Google Scholar. The text was written much earlier.

61 Hill, op. cit. (60), p. 49.

62 See Wright, op. cit. (53), pp. 534, 565. Compare also Westman, op. cit. (20), p. 590 n. 1.

63 See Westman, op. cit. (20), pp. 129–30.

64 Edward Wright's laudatory address in Gilbert, William, On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies, and on the Great Magnet the Earth. A New Physiology Demonstrated with Many Arguments and Experiments (tr. Mottelay, P. Fleury), London: Bernard Quaritch, 1958, p. xliiGoogle Scholar.

65 Wright, op. cit. (64), pp. xlii–xliii.

66 Henry, John, ‘Animism and empiricism: Copernican physics and the origins of William Gilbert's experimental method’, Journal of the History of Ideas (2001) 62(1), pp. 99–119, 107CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Gilbert's approach to heliocentrism see Kelly, Suzanne, The ‘De Mundo’ of William Gilbert, Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1965Google Scholar.

67 Kelly, op. cit. (66), p. 42, 67.

68 Compare Kelly, op. cit. (66), p. 67; and William Gilbert, De Mundo …, Amsterdam: Lowijs Elzevier, 1651, p. 120.

69 Freudenthal, Gad, ‘Theory of matter in William Gilbert's De Magnete’, Isis (1983) 74(1), pp. 22–37, p. 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Freudenthal, op. cit. (69), p. 33.

71 Compare Bennett, James A., The Mathematical Science of Christopher Wren, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 (first published 1982), pp. 57–60Google Scholar.

72 Copernicus, Nicholas, Six Books on the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (tr. Rosen, Edward), Warsaw and Kraków: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1978, p. 5Google Scholar.

73 Compare Rosen, Edward, ‘Galileo's misstatements about Copernicus’, Isis (1958) 49(3), pp. 319–30, esp. 321–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 The full printed title of the treatise reads Epistola, Cujusdam Anonymi De Terrae Motu. Robert Westman refers to the text as Opusculum; compare Westman, op. cit. (20), p. 131. Here I use the notation used in Omodeo, op. cit. (40).

75 Tiedemann Giese to Georg J. Rheticus, 26 July 1543, quoted in Freely, John, Celestial Revolutionary: Copernicus, the Man and His Universe, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014, p. 160Google Scholar.

76 Hooykaas, Reijer, G.J. Rheticus’ Treatise on Holy Scripture and the Motion of the Earth: With Translation, Annotations, Commentary, and Additional Chapters on Ramus-Rheticus and the Development of the Problem before 1650, Amsterdam and New York: North-Holland, 1984Google Scholar. The two most convincing claims are (1) the fact that the author refers to a ‘Praeceptor meus’ – the same phrase used by Rheticus in Narratio Prima, and (2) that he mentions another treatise which he wrote and in which he recounted the astronomical aspects of the heliocentric theory (a very probable reference to Narratio Prima).

77 Hooykaas, op. cit. (76), p. 97. The passages are discussed on pp. 95–6.

78 Hooykaas, op. cit. (76), p. 68. Compare Westman, op. cit. (20), pp. 130–1. See also Snobelen, op. cit. (34), p. 702.

79 Hooykaas, op. cit. (76), p. 71.

80 Nienke Roelants, ‘Lutheran astronomers after the Fall: a reappraisal of the Renaissance dynamic between astronomy and religion (1540–1590)’, PhD dissertation, Universiteit Gent, 2013, p. 244.

81 Compare Howell, op. cit. (36), pp. 60–1.

82 Compare Blair, Ann, ‘Mosaic physics and the search for a pious natural philosophy in the late Renaissance’, Isis (2000) 91(1), pp. 32–58, esp. 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 Rheticus, Georg. J., Narratio Prima, Danzig: Franz Rhode, 1540, p. 27Google Scholar.

84 Hooykaas, op. cit. (76), p. 94. Compare Howell, op. cit. (36), p. 65.

85 Hooykaas, op. cit. (76), p. 94.

86 Compare Howell, op. cit. (36), p. 66.

87 Westman, Robert S., ‘The Melanchthon circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg interpretation of the Copernican theory’, Isis (1975) 66(2), pp. 164–93, 166CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Compare Westman, op. cit. (87), p. 166.

89 Westman, op. cit. (87), p. 181.

90 Melanchthon, Philipp, Initia doctrina physicae, Wittenberg: Johannes Crato, 1585 (first published 1549), p. 62Google Scholar. Compare Westman, op. cit. (87), p. 173.

91 Kusukawa, Sashiko, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 172 and n. 208CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92 Compare Westman, op. cit. (87), p. 179; Kusukawa, op. cit. (91), p. 142; and Barnes, Robin B., Astrology and Reformation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 139Google Scholar. See also Omodeo, Pietro D. and Regier, Jonathan, ‘The Wittenberg reception of Copernicus: at the origin of a scholarly tradition’, in Omodeo, P.D. and Wels, V. (eds.), Natural Knowledge and Aristotelianism at Early Modern Protestant Universities, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2019, pp. 83–108, 93Google Scholar.

93 Westman, op. cit. (20), p. 160. See also Peter Barker, ‘Kepler and Melanchthon on the biblical arguments against Copernicanism’, in Van der Meer and Mandelbrote, op. cit. (34), vol. 2, pp. 585–604, 589; and Katherine Tredwell, ‘The exact science in Lutheran Germany and Tudor England’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2005, p. 135.

94 Barnes, op. cit. (92), p. 147.

95 Barker, Peter, ‘The role of religion in the Lutheran response to Copernicus’, in Osler, Margaret J. (ed.), Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 59–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 60–1. See also Kirschner, Stefan and Kühne, Andreas, ‘The decline of the medieval disputation culture and “The Wittenberg interpretation of the Copernican theory”’, in Neuber, Wolfgang, Rahn, Thomas and Zittel, Claus (eds.), The Making of Copernicus: Early Modern Transformations of the Scientist and His Science, Leiden: Brill, 2014, pp. 13–37, 37Google Scholar.

96 Compare Barker, op. cit. (93), p. 590.

97 Compare Miguel A. Granada, ‘Tycho Brahe, Caspar Peucer, and Christoph Rothmann on cosmology and the Bible’, in Van der Meer and Mandelbrote, op. cit. (34), vol. 2, pp. 563–83, 566; and Barker, op. cit. (93), esp. pp. 592–3.

98 Compare Melanchthon, op. cit. (90), pp. 63–4.

99 Compare Peucer, Caspar, Elementa doctrinae de circulis coelestibus et primo motu, Wittenberg: Johannes Craton, 1551, sig. G3v–4rGoogle Scholar.

100 Compare Tredwell, op. cit. (93), p. 135; and Barker, op. cit. (93), p. 589.

101 Compare Westman, op. cit. (20), p. 163.

102 Granada, op. cit. (97), p. 567.

103 See Randles, W.G.L., The Unmaking of the Medieval Christian Cosmos, 1500–1760: From Solid Heavens to Boundless Aether, New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 58–63Google Scholar; see also Granada, Miguel A., ‘Astronomy and cosmology in Kassel: the contribution of Christoph Rothmann and his relationship to Tycho Brahe and Jean Pena’, Acta historiae rerum naturalium necnon technicarum, new series (2004) 8, pp. 244–5Google Scholar.

104 The text was first printed in 1619. Nonetheless, Rothmann had sent an incomplete version of the text to Brahe. The discussion of its contents was published in their correspondence (e.g. in the letters of 20 January 1587 (Brahe to Rothmann) and 21 September 1587 (Rothmann in reply to Brahe)). See Goldstein, Bernard R. and Barker, Peter, ‘The role of Rothmann in the dissolution of the celestial spheres’, BJHS (1995) 28, pp. 385–403, esp. 385–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

105 Howell, op. cit. (36), pp. 79, 92–3. Compare Christoph Rothmann's letter of 19 September 1588, discussed below.

106 Compare Håkansson, Håkan, ‘Tycho the Prophet …’, in Killeen, Kevin and Forshaw, Peter J. (eds.), The Word and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 137–56, 140CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

107 Compare Granada, op. cit. (97), p. 573; and Howell, op. cit. (36), p. 108.

108 Compare Howell, op. cit. (36), p. 100; and Granada, op. cit. (97), pp. 579, 581.

109 See Moran, Bruce T., ‘Christoph Rothmann, the Copernican theory, and institutional and technical influences on the criticism of Aristotelian cosmology’, Sixteenth Century Journal (1982) 13(3), pp. 85–108, esp. 100–1CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Granada, Miguel A., ‘Christoph Rothmann und der Copernicanismus: Die Evidenz im “Scriptum de cometa”’, Acta Historica Astronomiae (2010) 40, pp. 35–46Google Scholar.

110 The Latin versions of the letters come from Tychonis Brahe Dani Opera omnia (ed. J.L.E. Dreyer), 15 vols., Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1913–29 (hereafter TBOO), vol. 6, p. 159, ll. 19–26 (tr. Miguel A. Granada), quoted in Granada, op. cit. (97), p. 571.

111 John Calvin, Calvin's Complete Bible Commentaries, The first Book of Moses called Genesis [1554] (tr. John King [1848]), s.l., 2011, p. 72.

112 Calvin, op. cit. (111), p. 72. On Calvin's anti-Copernicanism see Rosen, Edward, ‘Calvin's attitude toward Copernicus’, Journal of the History of Ideas (1960) 21(3), pp. 431–41, esp. 440CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stauffer, Richard, ‘Calvin et Copernic’, Revue de l'histoire des religions (1971) 179(1), pp. 31–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hooykaas, Reijer, ‘Calvin and Copernicus’, Organon (1974) 10, pp. 139–48, 140Google Scholar.

113 See Westman, R., ‘The Copernicans and the churches’, in Lindberg, David C. and Numbers, Ronald L. (eds.), God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1986, pp. 76–113, esp. 95–6Google Scholar; and Blumenberg, Hans, The Genesis of the Copernican World (tr. Wallace, Robert M.), Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2000 (first published 1975), pp. 329–30Google Scholar.

114 Charles Webster, ‘Puritanism, separatism, and science’, in Lindberg and Numbers, op. cit. (113), pp. 203–4. See also Mason, op. cit. (54), p. 28; and Hill, op. cit. (19), p. 25.

115 Hooykaas, op. cit. (112), p. 142.

116 Hooykaas, op. cit. (112), p. 143, original emphasis.

117 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 20r.

118 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 20v.

119 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 20v.

120 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 21r.

121 Should be Psalms 19:6 (GNV).

122 Psalms 104:19: ‘He appointed the moon for certain seasons: the sun knoweth his going down’ (GNV).

123 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 21r.

124 ‘For he hath founded it upon the seas: and established it upon the floods’ (GNV).

125 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 21r.

126 ‘For the stars of heaven and the planets thereof shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine’ (GNV).

127 ‘8 All the lights of heaven will I make dark for thee, and bring darkness upon thy land, saith the Lord God. 9 I will also trouble the hearts of many people, when I shall bring thy destruction among the nations and upon the countries which thou hast not known’ (GNV).

128 ‘The earth shall tremble before him, ye heavens shall shake, the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining’ (GNV). Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 21r.

129 Compare Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 20r.

130 Compare Psalms 104:5. Gresham quotes from the Geneva Bible.

131 Hebrew for ‘fall’, ‘decline’, ‘collapse’; Psalms 93:1 תֵּבֵל בַּל־תִּמֹּוט (‘so that the world does not fall’).

132 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 20v.

133 ‘The world also shall be established, that it cannot be moved’ (GNV).

134 ‘Surely the world shall be stable, and not move’ (GNV, original emphasis).

135 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 21r.

136 Psalms 89:37: ‘He shall be established for evermore as the moon’ (GNV); literally this fragment reads, ‘Like the moon it shall be established’.

137 Psalms 8:4: ‘the moon and the stars, which you have set in place’ (translated from the Vulgate); in GNV: ‘the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained’. Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 21r.

138 Compare Feingold, op. cit. (48), p. 41.

139 See Grafton, Anthony, ‘Edward Lively, cosmopolitan Hebraist’, in Feingold, Mordechai (ed.), Labourers in the Vineyard of the Lord: Erudition and the Making of the King James Version of the Bible, Leiden: Brill, 2018, pp. 82–104Google Scholar.

140 Feingold, op. cit. (48), p. 117.

141 Gresham uses these terms in Astrostereon (fol. 35r) in order to explain how divine emanations are conveyed.

142 Gresham, A new Almanack and Prognostication for the yeere of our Lord, 1604, London: for the assignes of J. Roberts, 1604, sig. B6v, original spelling and emphasis.

143 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 15r.

144 ‘And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven’ (GNV).

145 ‘Thus saith the Lord, which giveth the sun for a light to the day, and the courses of the moon and of the stars for a light to the night’ (GNV).

146 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 15v.

147 In Chapter 3.3, Gresham illustrates the primeval state of planets quoting a passage from Job 38:9, in which he finds a Hebrew paronomasia: ‘from חֲתֻלָּתוֹ [hatulato; his garment] to הֶבֶל [hevel; vapor/steam] a confused Masse to a positiue-platt, or habitable-plaine’; Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 31r. Gresham compared the words which sounded similar in order to show their alleged connection.

148 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 18v. The sources of this mistaken etymology in the early modern period lie in the simplification and misreading of certain rabbinic commentaries. See Alison Knight, ‘Audience and error: translation, philology, and rhetoric in the preaching of Lancelot Andrewes’, in Feingold, op. cit. (139), pp. 372–95, esp. 385–8.

149 Peucer to Brahe, 10 May 1589, TBOO, vol. 7, p. 185, quoted in Howell, op. cit. (36), p. 105.

150 Brahe to Rothmann, 17 August 1588, TBOO, vol. 6, p. 134, ll. 34–8, my translation.

151 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 19r.

152 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 19r.

153 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 19v.

154 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 19v.

155 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 20r.

156 Compare Randles, op. cit. (103), p. 59.

157 See Rosen, Edward, ‘The dissolution of the solid celestial spheres’, Journal of the History of Ideas (1985) 46(1), pp. 13–31, 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Randles, op. cit. (103), p. 70. See also Donahue's, William H. The Dissolution of the Celestial Spheres, New York: Arno Press, 1981Google Scholar.

158 See Randles, op. cit. (103), p. 59 n. 7.

159 ‘all creatures, ffeeles, sees & knowes it, namely that goodlie Orbe of ffyre – not the Philosophers foolishe Spheare off fyre, the ffourth Materiall Elemente, which true Philosophie never yet founde nor sacred Caball acknowledged, but the Sunne, that perpetuall ffounte of ffyre’, Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 23v.

160 In De subtilitate libri XXI, lib. II, p. 23; see Randles, op. cit. (103), p. 61 nn. 13, 15. See also Brahe's letter to Rothmann (17 August 1588), TBOO, vol. 6, p. 134, ll. 29–32.

161 Compare Cormack, Lesley B., ‘Handwork and brainwork: beyond the Zilsel thesis’, in Cormack, L.B., Walton, S.A. and Schuster, John A. (eds.) Mathematical Practitioners and the Transformation of Natural Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Dordrecht: Springer, 2017, pp. 11–35, 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

162 Compare Barker, Peter, ‘The reality of Peuerbach's orbs: cosmological continuity in fifteenth and sixteenth century astronomy’, in Boner, Patrick J. (ed.), Change and Continuity in Early Modern Cosmology, Dordrecht: Springer, 2011, pp. 7–32, 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

163 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 32r.

164 Howell, op. cit. (36), p. 223.

165 Gresham, op. cit. (11), fol. 39v.

166 Compare Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005 (first published 1980), esp. Chapter 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.