“As I illustrate below in preliminary fashion, Capuano’s Expositio of the Sphere is considerably more significant, both on its own terms and in relation to Copernicus, than the modest earlier scholarship on him has realized.6 It reveals a late-fifteenth-century university master grappling with the motions of the Earth and their physical consequences, freely mingling natural philosophical arguments with
the astronomical material he was teaching. While commenting on Sacrobosco’s elementary text of the mathematics curriculum, Capuano also brings together salient arguments from the Physics and De caelo commentaries of the previous century, including the possibility of mixed circular motions and of combined rectilinear and circular motions. When Capuano examines hypothetically the arguments
for the motions of the Earth, he of course discusses its rotation, a familiar hypothesis in fourteenth-century natural philosophy. Surprisingly, he also attempts to refute a hypothetical two-fold motion of the Earth. Although Capuano defends the Earth’s immobility, his commentary significantly enriches our understanding of aca demic discussions of astronomy at the time of Copernicus.

The number, quality, and spec ificity of these resonances suggest the hypothesis that Capuano’s commentary on the Sphere may have served as a sparring partner for Copernicus, who is notoriously silent about his debts to con temporaries. These intriguing echoes are probably not coincidental, for this text is certainly connected to Copernicus’s circle, and prob ably to Copernicus himself.

…

An imperfect version of Capuano’s commentary on Sacrobosco
first appeared in a 1499 Venetian astronomical compendium, which also reprinted his Peuerbach commentary. His title in that edition suggests that he was still teaching at Padua as a layman. By the time Capuano had revised his commentary on the Sphere in 1505, he had become an Augustinian canon. In later editions, he men
tions a lunar eclipse of 15 August “in the current year of 1505,” which “we saw with all the associates and fathers” (36va).’3 This is evidently a reference to members of his order, to which he had introduced the mathematical sciences, teaching for at least twelve years, presumably in the Veneto.’4 The revised version of the com
mentary on the Sphere (with a new preface) did not appear until the astronomical compendium of 1508. At least two editions of both commentaries appeared in 1518 and two more in 1531. Capuano’s commentary on Sacrobosco was perhaps the longest of the genre until Christopher Clavius’s a century later.15

[Shank, Michael H. “Setting up Copernicus? Astronomy and Natural Philosophy in Giambattista Capuano Da Manfredonia’s ‘Expositio’ on the ‘Sphere.’” Early Science and Medicine, vol. 14, no. 1/3, 2009, pp. 290–315.  Evidence and Interpretation: Studies on Early Science and Medicine in Honor of John E. Murdoch (2009)JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20617787.%5D

Now to move almost two decades back.

 300J   JOHANNES de SACRO BOSCO. (c. 1195 – c. 1256) (also called John or Johannes Halifax, Holyfax, Holywalde, Sacroboscus, Sacrobuschus, de Sacro Bosco, or de Sacro Busto) And Georgius de Monteferrato

Figura sphere cu[m] glosis Georgii de Mo[n]teferrato artiu[m] [et] medici[n]e doctoris : gradiam [et] gloriam dabit dominus.

Venice [Jacobus Pentius, de Leuco] for Georgius de Monteferrato 1500, die 28 ianuarii. $11,000

(“The use of type 68G and of woodcut capitals in this book connect it with the latter part of 1500 and it is therefore taken to be dated ‘more veneto’ (BMC)
Quarto, 8 ½ X 5 ½ inches . 26 lvs, A-E4 F6 . There is a large woodcut on title page ‘sphera mundi’, see to the left and three other large woodcut diagrams in text. Woodcut capitals, also spaces with guide-letters. Tear repaired in corner of f. 2, with some text loss.

This copy is bound in full laced cased later vellum, blue edges,and recent marbled endpapers.  This is a illustrated incunable printed by Jacobus Pentius, de Leuce who started printing in 1495, his press was chiefly active after the turn of the century.
In 1220 Sacrobosco wrote Tractatus de Sphaera  in four chapters. The first chapter deals with the shape and place of the Earth within a spherical universe. The second chapter deals with various circles on the sky. The third chapter describes rising and setting of heavenly bodies from different geographical locations while the fourth chapter gives a brief introduction to Ptolemy’s theory of the planets and of eclipses.
This book, which predates Grosseteste’s astronomy book, is well written and was widely used throughout Europe from the middle of the 13th Century.
Sacrobosco’s De sphaera mundi was the most successful of several competing thirteenth-century textbooks on this topic. It was used in universities for hundreds of years and the manuscript copied many times before the invention of the printing press; hundreds of manuscript copies have survived. The first printed edition appeared in 1472 in Ferrara, and at least 84 editions were printed in the next two hundred years. The work was frequently supplemented with commentaries on the original text. The number of copies and commentaries reflects its importance as a university text.[4] de Sphaera, which was widely read and influential in Europe during the later medieval centuries as an introduction to astronomy. Though principally about the heavens it also contains a clear description of the Earth as a sphere, in the first chapter. “The Sphere” was required reading by students in all Western European universities for the next four centuries.

Goff J421; Klebs, A.C. Incunabula scientifica et medica,; entry 874.30; BMC V 566; HCR 14126; Essling 264; Sander 6668; Pell Ms 6718 (6683); Hillard 1153; Péligry 480; IGI 5353; Hubay(Augsburg) 1247; Pr 5705; GW M14661

United States of America. The Walters Art Museum Library
Library of Congress,New York Public Library,
Huntington Library, Smithsonian Institution, Univ. of Chicago, Williams College,

1. Owen Gingerich, Sacrobosco as a textbook. Journal for the History of Astronomy 19 (4) (1988), 269-273.
2. L Thorndike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and its Commentators (Chicago, 1949).
3. J F Daly, Biography in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York 1970-1990).
4. Olaf Pedersen, “In Quest of Sacrobosco”, Journal for the History of Astronomy, 16 (1985): 175-221. Pedersen identifies 35 printings in Venice, another 35 in Paris, and more in 14 other cities throughout Europe.

Gassendi 1683_1
263J Gassendi, Pierre (1592-1655); Galilei, Galileo (1564-1642); Kepler, Johannes (1571-1630)

Petri Gassendi Institutio Astronomica: Juxta Hypotheseis tam Veterum quàm Recentiorum. Cui accesserunt Galilei Galilei Nuncius Sidereus; et Johannis Kepleri Dioptrice. Tertia editio prioribus Correctior.

London: Jacob Flesher for William Morden, 1653.                                             $22,000

Octavo: 18.3 x 11.8 cm. 3 parts in one volume: [16], 199, [1]; 173, [1] p., 4 leaves of plates. Collation: A-N8, O4; A-L8 (including the final blank leaf)

SECOND EDITION THUS, Fourth edition overall of Gassendi

A nice copy in contemporary, blind-ruled English calfskin, rebacked.    The first title page is printed in red and black. Galileo’s “Sidereus Nuncius” and Kepler’s “Dioptrice” are introduced by separate title pages.  The text is illustrated with astronomical woodcuts including images of the moon, showing its uneven, mountainous surface as discerned by Galileo through the telescope and four full-paged woodcut illustrations of stars (the Pleiades, Orion’s belt, the Praesepe and Orion Nebulas.)

Gassendi’s “Institutio Astronomica,” has been called the first modern astronomy textbook. It is divided into three sections: the first details the so-called theory of the spheres, the second describes astronomical theory, and the third discusses the conflicting ideas of Brahe and Copernicus. The present edition is important for the inclusion of two seminal works of telescopic astronomy: Galileo’s “Sidereus Nuncius” (first ed. Venice, 1610), in which announces his discovery of Jupiter’s moons, and Kepler’s “Dioptrice” (first ed. Augsburg, 1611), Kepler’s brilliant explanation of how the telescope works.Galileo’s Discoveries with the Telescope:”Galileo’s ‘Starry Messenger’ contains some of the most important discoveries in scientific literature. Learning in the summer of 1609 that a device for making distant objects seem close and magnified had been brought to Venice from Holland, Galileo soon constructed a spy-glass of his own which he demonstrated to the notables of the Venetian Republic, thus earning a large increase in his salary as professor of mathematics at Padua. Within a few months he had a good telescope, magnifying to 30 diameters, and was in full flood of astronomical observation.”Through his telescope Galileo saw the moon as a spherical, solid, mountainous body very like the earth- quite different from the crystalline sphere of conventional philosophy. He saw numberless stars hidden from the naked eye in the constellations and the Milky Way.

Above all, he discovered four new ‘planets’, the satellites of Jupiter that he called (in honor of his patrons at Florence) the Medicean stars. Thus Galileo initiated modern observational astronomy and announced himself as a Copernican. (Printing and the Mind of Man)

Kepler’s Explanation of the Telescope:”In order that the enormous possibilities harbored in the telescope could develop, it was necessary to clear up the theoretical laws by which it worked. And this achievement was reserved solely for Kepler. With the energy peculiar to him, inside of a few weeks, in the months of August and September of the same year, 1610, he composed a book tracing basically once and for all the laws governing the passage of light through lenses and systems of lenses. It is called ‘Dioptrice’, a word that Kepler himself coined and introduced into optics. […]”In problem 86 in which he shows ‘how with the help of two convex lenses visible objects can be made larger and distinct but inverted’ he develops the principle on which the astronomical telescope is based, the discovery of which is thus tied up with his name for all time. Further on follows the research into the double concave lens and the Galilean telescope in which a converging lens is used as objective and a diverging lens as eyepiece. By this suitable combination Kepler discovers the principle of today’s telescopic lens. Even this scanty account sows the epoch-making significance of the work. It is not an overstatement to call Kepler the father of modern optics because of it. (Max Caspar, “Kepler”, pp. 198-199) Kepler’s work is also the first to announce Galileo’s discovery that Venus has phases like the moon.

Wing G293; Cinti 155; Sotheran, I p. 75 (1476); cf. PMM 113 and Dibner, Heralds of Science, #7 (the 1610 edition)