Drawing on a half century of scholarship, of Polish studies of Copernicus and Cracow University, and of Copernicus's sources, this book offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of Copernicus's achievement, and explains his commitment to the uniform, circular motions of celestial bodies, and his views about hypotheses.

Taking into account the most important results of the scholarly literature since 1973 and the best Polish scholarship of the past century, this is the first comprehensive study of Copernicus's achievement in English that examines Copernicus's path to heliocentrism from the perspective of late medieval philosophy, the Renaissance recovery of ancient literature and science, and early-modern editions of books that Copernicus used. The principal goals are to explain his commitment to the existence of celestial spheres, and the logical foundations for his views about hypotheses. In doing so, the work elucidates the logical and philosophical background that contributed to his accomplishments, and explains the limitations of his achievement. Medieval and Early Modern Science, 12

An account of the Copernican Revolution, focusing on the significance of the plurality of the revolution which encompassed not only mathematical astronomy, but also conceptual changes in cosmology, physics, philosophy, and religion.

Between Copernicus and Galileo is the story of Christoph Clavius, the Jesuit astronomer and teacher whose work helped set the standards by which Galileo's famous claims appeared so radical, and whose teachings guided the intellectual and scientific agenda of the Church in the central years of the Scientific Revolution. Though relatively unknown today, Clavius was enormously influential throughout Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries through his astronomy books—the standard texts used in many colleges and universities, and the tools with which Descartes, Gassendi, and Mersenne, among many others, learned their astronomy. James Lattis uses Clavius's own publications as well as archival materials to trace the central role Clavius played in integrating traditional Ptolemaic astronomy and Aristotelian natural philosophy into an orthodox cosmology. Although Clavius strongly resisted the new cosmologies of Copernicus and Tycho, Galileo's invention of the telescope ultimately eroded the Ptolemaic world view. By tracing Clavius's views from medieval cosmology the seventeenth century, Lattis illuminates the conceptual shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy and the social, intellectual, and theological impact of the Scientific Revolution.

Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in Florence in 1632, was the most proximate cause of his being brought to trial before the Inquisition. Using the dialogue form, a genre common in classical philosophical works, Galileo masterfully demonstrates the truth of the Copernican system over the Ptolemaic one, proving, for the first time, that the earth revolves around the sun. Its influence is incalculable. The Dialogue is not only one of the most important scientific treatises ever written, but a work of supreme clarity and accessibility, remaining as readable now as when it was first published. This edition uses the definitive text established by the University of California Press, in Stillman Drake’s translation, and includes a Foreword by Albert Einstein and a new Introduction by J. L. Heilbron.

The book examines why and how Copernicus became a Copernican and what his affirmation of heliocentrism and geokinetism means in the context of the Scientific Revolution. In examining his texts and sociocultural context the work analyses the appearance of a revolutionary figure of Copernicus as a Platonist astronomer-philosopher.

The contributions to Making of Copernicus examine exemplarily how some of the Copernicus myths came about and if they could hold their ground or have vanished again. Are there links between a factual or postulated transformation of world images and the application of certain scientific metaphors, especially the metaphor of a revolution? Were there interactions and amalgamations of the literary and scientific enthronement, or outlawry of Copernicus and if so, how did they take place? On the other hand, are there repercussions of the scientific-historical reconstructions and hagiographies on the literary image of Copernicus as sketched by novelists even in the 20th century? The history of the reception of Copernicus shall not be dominantly dealt with from the point of view of a factual affirmation and rejection of the astronomer and his doctrine but rather as accomplishments of transformation respectively. Thus, the essays in this volume investigate transformations: methodological, institutional, textual, and visual transformations of the Copernican doctrine and the topical, rhetorical and literary transformations of the historical person of Copernicus respectively.