SACRO BOSCO, Joannes de

Sphaera Mundi.

      1482 - Venice: Erhardt Ratdolt, 6 juillet 1482. Small 4to. The first Ratdolt edition, following the princeps 1472. a-g8 h6, 60 leaves (a1v armillary sphere and title, 31 lines. Typography: 92G (titles), 91G (text), 57 (diagrams). 4 large initials of 11 lines, 11 small initials of 5 lignes, 40 woodcuts and diagrams in the text, the title and eight others with the publisher's original colouring. Vellum of the 16th C., (spotting, spine broken with loss). Provenance: indecipherable contemporary inscription, then formerly in the collection of Count Paul Durrieu (1855-1925), one of the first and most eminent historians of late Medieval French illuminated manuscripts and Keeper of Manuscripts at the Bibliotheque Nationale. His personal collection of miniatures and of Flemish medieval illustration was well celebrated, as was his considerable corpus of printed work. The book is divided in four chapters, on the terrestrial globe, on circles great and small, on the rising and setting of the stars, and on the orbits and movements of the planets. "Sacrobosco's fame rests firmly on his De sphaera, a small work based on Ptolemy and his Arabic commentators, published about 1220 and antedating the De sphaera of Grosseteste. It was quite generally adopted as the fundamental astronomy text, for often it was so clear that it needed little or no explanation. It was first used at the University of Paris" (DSB). There were some 25 incunable editions after the first, and many more in the next century and a half, even after the critical work of Barozzi, 1570, had explicated the errors in the text and after being criticized severely by Galileo in the Dialogues. In fact, it continued to be required reading by students in the West for some four centuries. Sacrobosco's text is here found for the first time accompanied by treatises by Regiomontanus (1436-1476), ll. 18b-33a, correcting the planetary tables of Gerard of Sabbioneta. and his teacher Georg Peurbach (1423-1461), ll. 33a-60b the Theorica novae planetarum, composed c. 1454 and published in Nuremberg in 1473). Goff S-405; BMC V, 286; Sander 6661.