With Annotations on the Zodiac
SACROBOSCO, Johannes de; Elie VINET. Sphaera Ioannis de Sacro Bosco, emendata. Paris: Guillaume Cavellat. 1562.
8vo. Nineteenth-century vellum-backed boards with marbled sides; ff. 102; a–m8 n6; bound without folding woodcut plate at end, as often (see below), quire n misbound; numerous woodcut diagrams in the text, woodcut headpieces and initials, woodcut Cavellat device to title and final leaf; volvelles wanting (f. 31r with resultant small hole to centre), somewhat foxed throughout (heavier to first quire and last few ff.), uniform toning, dampstaining to quires e and m at head, short closed tear to inner margin of f. 96; contemporary marginal and annotations to 67 pp. in Latin in a French hand (see below).
Rare edition of Vinet’s commentary on Sacrobosco’s (d. 1256) De sphaera, used as an introductory astronomical text at universities throughout Europe, printed by the Catholic publisher Cavellat and including Melanchthon’s preface, our copy extensively annotated by an early reader.
One of the first universities to adopt Vinet’s Sphaera was the Lutheran University of Wittenberg, where a dedication from Melanchthon to Simon Grynaeus was added (ff. 3–8, here dated 1540 but authored in 1531), ‘extolling the value and utility of astronomical knowledge. This preface was widely reprinted in editions of the Sphere, even in Catholic countries, and Cavellat included it in his editions.
Although Melanchthon’s works were all placed on the Index of prohibited books in 1559, Catholic publishers like Cavellat continued to include this preface, although they frequently removed Melanchthon’s name. Cavellat’s editions of the Sphaera emendata were richly illustrated, with about fifty different woodcuts, including volvelles’ (Crowther et al., p. 10). The same preface to the 1559 Cavellat edition had appeared with the names of Melanchthon and Grynaeus, and the preface was almost always excised from previous Cavellat editions; this is seemingly the first edition in which their names are suppressed to avoid censorship.
Here, Sacrobosco’s treatise is followed by Pedro Nunes’s Annotatio in extrema verba capitis de climatibus, translated by Vinet (the two had at some point been in contact) and first appended to the Sphaera in 1555/56 (ff. 51v–57r); an excerpt of the third book of the Epitome of Ptolemy’s Almagest by Regiomontanus (ff. 57v–58r); an extract from Al-Farghani (Alfraganus) on heliacal rising and setting; the anonymous De ortu poetico (ff. 60r–74v), ‘which provided all the information needed to inventory and to interpret the astronomical passages in classical texts’ (Pantin, p. 282); Piero Valeriano’s Compendium in sphaeram (ff. 75r–97v); as well as a brief extract by Proclus on eclipses and a poem dedicated to Valeriano by Donato Villalta (1510–1560).
Our copy bears numerous contemporary annotations, largely to the Sphaera emendata. The annotator frequently adds labels to the numerous woodcut diagrams (e.g. adding the signs of the zodiac and the length of each planet’s orbit to the Ptolemaic Primum mobile) and makes reference to a wide range of sources, including the fifteenth-century astronomer Georg von Peuerbach, Alfonso X of Castile, Regiomontanus, Theodosius, and Euclid. Many of the annotations are concentrated within the second book of the Sphaera, particularly with regard to the signs of the zodiac, making note of temperaments and elements associated with each sign as well as adding a diagram visualising Sacrobosco’s concept of the signum, where each sign is represented by a thirty-degree, wedge-shaped section with its centre at the Earth’s core. Our annotator also adds a drawing of a cordiform map, divided longitudinally, to f. 43r. One additional annotation, to Valeriani’s Compendium in sphaeram, flags up ‘stupid opinions’ regarding ancient practices of shouting and banging cymbals when faced with a lunar eclipse.
This copy is bound without the final leaf, containing parts of moveable diagrams to be cut out and mounted to corresponding figures in the text; the volvelles were at one point cut out and attached, but have since perished.
We find three copies of this edition in the US (Chicago, NYPL, Wisconsin-Madison) and two in the UK (Leeds, NLS).
USTC 203084; P6c in Pantin, ‘Borrowers and Innovators’, in Valeriani ed., De sphaera of Johannes de Sacrobosco in the Early Modern Period (2020); Pettegree & Walsby, French Books 75682. This edition not in Adams, Alden (cf. vol. I 556/40), or Houzeau & Lancaster (cf. no. 1657). See Crowther et al., ‘The Book Everybody Read: Vernacular Translations of Sacrobosco’s Sphere in the Sixteenth Century’, in JHA 46.1 (2015), pp. 4–28.
SKU: 2125775