The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order

5. The Wittenberg Interpretation of Copernicus’s Theory

141 5 The Wittenberg Interpretation of Copernicus’s Theory Copernicus’s reputation as a learned astronomer was established very quickly in the two decades after the appearance of the Narratio and De Revolutionibus . Although he was highly regarded in Catholic circles before the appearance of his main work, the publication of De Revolutionibus now spread his ideas all over Europe. His name became known, and his main work, in spite of its terse Latin style and its forbidding technical material , was widely read.1 How easy it was to grasp is another matter. The remarks of the learned Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius were not atypical. Commenting on Copernicus’s discussion of the precession theory, he wrote: “He speaks confusingly, and he explicates and describes with extreme difficulty, so that soon it appears to me to be written so that everything is in conflict with everything else.”2 The Kassel mathematicus Christopher Rothmann acknowledged that Copernicus had not explained well how the Earth’s axis maintains its orientation : “I know that in this regard Copernicus is quite obscure and is not easily comprehensible.”3 To the readers of his Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596), Kepler, following the suggestion of his teacher Maestlin, recommended the persuasive explications of Rheticus’s Narratio Prima and acknowledged that “not everyone has the time to read Copernicus’s books On the Revolutions.”4 In 1615, Galileo remarked that the book was not “absurd ” but was “difficult to understand.”5 More than a century after its first publication, the Dutch Copernican Martin Hortensius complained that Copernicus’s major work was “too obscure in his writings to be understood by everyone”; moreover , his theory would not have been condemned so readily had astronomers presented it “popularly ” in the form of visualizable material globes.6 The point is significant because even globe makers , who were well disposed to Copernican astronomy for its improvements in such areas as lunar theory, eclipse prediction, and the securing of stellar longitudes (among them Gemma Frisius and Gerhard Mercator) did not make Copernican orreries of the sort that became commonplace in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries .7 Hortensius’s comment attests to ambiguities in Copernicus’s style that afflicted even some contemporaries—and not without reason.8 But De Revolutionibus was not the only resource for disseminating Copernicus’s views. After Reinhold’s Prutenic Tables appeared in 1551, Copernicus’s renown within the literature of the heavens became firmly anchored to the domain of practical astronomy, even among constituencies unfamiliar directly with De Revolutionibus itself.9 From the perspective of the historical agents, there is a simple explanation for this state of affairs : the dominant preoccupation of those who possessed techniques of celestial investigation was the making of knowledge about the future. And in the mid-sixteenth century, those concerns and competences were most powerfully located in the circle of students and scholars gathered around Philipp Melanchthon at Wittenberg. 34. Copernican orrery illustrated in Deane 1738, described by the author as “a true Representation of the Motions of the Heavenly Bodies themselves.” The orrery contributed to the naturalization of the Copernican system in the eighteenth century. Witnessing the geared motions of the gilded ivory balls on stiff wires in the five-foot-diameter fine ebony frame, under a canopy of silvered celestial arcs and circles supported by brass pillars, was supposed to convince observers of the model’s validity in a way that tables, calculations, and diagrams could not: “Those Gentlemen and Ladies who delight in the Study of Astronomy and Geography, will, by seeing this Grand Machine, comprehend at one view the Reason of the several Phaenomena, or Appearances, in the Heavens, resulting from the various Motions of the Bodies which compose this Solar System; and will edify more from a few Lectures, than by a year’s close Application to Study” (90–91). For further discussion, see Westman 1994, 110. By permission of San Diego State University Library, Special Collections, Historic Astronomy Collection. The WiTTenberG inTerpreTaTion 143 Marburg (established in 1527), Königsberg (1544), Jena (1548), and Helmstedt (1576).13 Melanchthon’s vision of the Reformation was thus firmly spread through the schools and through men who carried with them Wittenberg models of teaching and scholarship. Forty years later that spirit was still very much alive: “To Philip and the school of Wittenberg for a long time by God’s grace this praise was peculiar, that he...