Owen Gingerich. An Annotated Census of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566).

(Studia Copernicana Brill's Series, 2.) Boston and Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002. xxxii + 402 pp. + 63 b/w pls. index, append, illus, bibl. $132. ISBN: 90-04-11466-1.

Gingerich began his pursuit of the extant copies of Copernicus' work in 1970 after discovering a copy annotated by Erasmus Reinhold (1511-53), the leading professor of astronomy at the time, and creator of the first astronomical tables based on Copernicus' geometric models. This led to an international and collaborative effort carried on in libraries and collections for more than three decades in dozens of cities on four continents. Gingerich has personally examined almost all of the nearly 600 known surviving copies of the two sixteenth-century editions.

Listing of current locations is by country, with each then subdivided into public, private, and institutional libraries, private collections, and book dealers. Provenances and prices paid are provided; bindings, watermarks, and condition of the pages are noted. Comments made by various owners are reproduced in the plates and have been translated into English. Among the appendices are auction records, and a translation of the 1620 decree of the Inquisition, indicating corrections and deletions to be made in De revolutionibus, after it had been placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1616. Useful indexes list provenances and locations, authorities, and cited authors. An analysis of the history of Copernicus' work and the significance of its annotations is provided in a useful introduction.

The census has yielded some interesting information. Some of the original annotations were duplicated in other copies, and owners sometimes entered the names of those from whom they had obtained their copies. De revolutionibus was owned by a majority of astronomers, and was annotated by them and their students. The Inquisition's decree was far from fully enforced; only a twelfth of the copies were censored, including sixty percent of the copies in Italy. In France, however, hardly any were censored, nor were any at all in Spain.

Copernicus' work lived on in an evolving intellectual milieu among challenges to ancient and traditional views and efforts to maintain them. Reinhold's marginalium "The axiom of astronomy: Celestial motion is uniform and circular, or composed of uniform and circular motions" (269), would be challenged by new observations and the advantages of the Copernican system. The copy inscribed and presented by Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514-74), Copernicus' first disciple, who initially oversaw the publication of his opus, noted that its original title had been modified and an anonymous foreword, affirming the immobility of the Earth, had been inserted.

Paul Wittich (ca. 1546-86) owned four heavily annotated copies. One, subsequently owned by Tycho Brahe, shows a system with the planets circling the Sun, which revolves about the stationary earth, and may have been the source for the Tychonic geoheliocentric system.

Lengthy marginalia entered by Michael Maestlin (1550-1631), Kepler's teacher, over a period of five decades, included a comment approving Copernicus' doctrine. The Copernican theory, he held, is validated by its ability, through the Earth's motion, to provide a unified system, and to remove the ambiguity in the order of the innermost planets and the Sun. Further, a traditional function of epicydes as a means of accounting for the apparent retrograde motions of the planets is unnecessary on the assumption of the Earth revolving about the Sun.

The copy owned by Johannes Kepler has an inscription indicating that Andreas Osiander (1498-1552) was the anonymous author of the foreword. Its former owner had also marked two sections, which were later to become important in Kepler's thinking: a query on whether the center of the universe was the Sun or the center of the Earth's orbit; the other marked a passage indicating a non-circular path of a planet at which the former owner had written "ellipse."

This work provides a partial, but significant, guide to the manner in which the Copernican theory was received, as well as to the nature of astronomy and of the astronomical community of the later sixteenth century. It summarizes and adds details to earlier published studies, which are noted. The annotations reveal a discipline and its boundaries in flux. The volume is a rich source for exploring these issues, as well as intellectual practices during the Renaissance. It is useful as well for scholars of early modern printing and is a model for this sort of enterprise concerning works of similar importance.

WILBUR APPLEBAUM

Illinois Institute of Technology