Publishing Sacrobosco’s De sphaera in Early Modern Europe

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

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2. Printers, Publishers, and Sellers: Actors in the Process of Consolidation of Epistemic Communities in the Early Modern Academic World

   • Matteo Valleriani, Andrea Ottone

   Pages 1-23Open Access

3. Printerly Ingenuity and Mathematical Books in the Early Estienne Workshop

   • Richard J. Oosterhoff

   Pages 25-59Open Access

4. Erhard Ratdolt’s Edition of Sacrobosco’s Tractatus de sphaera: A New Editorial Model in Venice?

   • Catherine Rideau-Kikuchi

   Pages 61-98Open Access

5. Printers, Booksellers, and Bookbinders in Wittenberg in the Sixteenth Century: Real Estate, Vicinity, Political, and Cultural Activities

   • Insa Christiane Hennen

   Pages 99-146Open Access

6. Scholars, Printers, and the Sphere: New Evidence for the Challenging Production of Academic Books in Wittenberg, 1531–1550

   • Saskia Limbach

   Pages 147-185Open Access

7. Sacrobosco at the Book Fairs, 1576–1624: The Pedagogical Marketplace

   • Ian Maclean

   Pages 187-224Open Access

8. The Iberian and New World Circulation of Sacrobosco’s Sphaera in the Early Modern Period

   • Alejandra Ulla Lorenzo

   Pages 225-254Open Access

9. The Giunta’s Publishing and Distributing Network and Their Supply to the European Academic Market

   • Andrea Ottone

   Pages 255-288Open Access

10. Mathematical Books in Paris (1531–1563): The Development of Publishing Strategies in a Competitive International Market

    • Isabelle Pantin

    Pages 289-335Open Access

11. Paratexts, Printers, and Publishers: Book Production in Social Context

    • Matteo Valleriani, Christoph Sander

    Pages 337-367Open Access

12. The Sphaera in Jesuit Education

    • Paul F. Grendler

    Pages 369-407Open Access

13. Printing Sacrobosco in Leipzig, 1488–ca. 1521: Local Markets and University Publishing

    • Richard L. Kremer

    Pages 409-457Open Access

14. Publishing Mathematical Books of Parisian Calculatores (1508–1515)

    • Alissar Levy

    Pages 459-484Open Access

15. Back Matter

    Pages 485-492

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This open access volume focuses on the cultural background of the pivotal transformations

of scientific knowledge in the early modern period.

It investigates the rich edition history of Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Tractatus de sphaera,

by far the most widely disseminated textbook on geocentric cosmology, from the unique

standpoint of the many printers, publishers, and booksellers who steered this text from

manuscript to print culture, and in doing so transformed it into an established platform

of scientific learning. The corpus, constituted of 359 different editions featuring

Sacrobosco’s treatise on cosmology and astronomy printed between 1472 and 1650,

represents the scientific European shared knowledge concerned with the cosmological

worldview of the early modern period until far after the publication of Copernicus’ De

revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543.

The contributions to this volume show how the academic book trade influenced the

process of homogenization of scientific knowledge. They also describe the material

infrastructure through which such knowledge was disseminated, and thus define the

premises for the foundation of modern scientific communities.

• Johannes de Sacrobosco
• Tractatus de sphaera
• Academic Book Market
• Early Modern Prints
• History of Astronomy
• Open Access

• Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany

  Matteo Valleriani

• Department of Economics, Management, Quantitative, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

  Andrea Ottone

Matteo Valleriani is Research Group Leader in Dept. I, Honorary Professor at the Technische Universität Berlin, Professor for Special Appointments at the Faculty of Humanities at Tel Aviv University, and Principal Investigator of the Project “Images and Configurations in Corpora of University Textbooks” at the Berlin Center for Machine Learning. In his research, he investigates processes of 1) emergence of scientific knowledge in relation to its practical, social, and institutional dimensions, and 2) homogenization of scientific knowledge in the framework of Cultural Heritage Studies. 
Centering on cosmological knowledge, Matteo Valleriani’s current major research project is concerned with the evolution of the scientific knowledge system and with the establishment of a shared scientific identity in Europe in the period between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries. In the frame of this project he also co-develops and implements multi-layered network models (sphaera.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de). A further focus of his research is on the epistemic function of visual material in scientific research and in the framework of processes of knowledge transformation. Within this context he co-develops and applies machine learning technologies. Among his major publications: The Structures of Practical Knowledge, Springer Nature, 2017, Metallurgy, Ballistics and Epistemic Instruments: The “Nova Scientia” of Nicolò Tartaglia. A New Edition, Edition Open Access, 2013, Galileo Engineer, Springer, 2010. 
 
  
Andrea Ottone is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Economics of the University of Milan where he collaborates with Angela Nuovo’s ERC founded project EMoBookTrade. In the frame of this project he studies the economic background of Venice’s book industry in the Renaissance, with particular reference to costs and prices and the methods of market assessment. He is also fellow at Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin where he partakes to Matteo Valleriani’s Sphaera project. In this context he assists the prime investigator in studying the mechanisms of material circulation Sacrobosco’s printed editions in late Renaissance early Baroque Europe. He holds an adjunct position at the Technische Universität Berlin where he offers classes of European history with a focus on the history of communication, history of science in the frame of the Counter Reformation, and Renaissance empiricism in political thinking. Between 2007 and 2015, in the capacity of Graduate Teaching Associate, he taught classes of Western civilization and European history at the Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio). Between 2002 and 2012, in the frame of the RICI program (an Italy based project involving the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” University of Rome “Tre,” University of Milan “Cattolica” and University of Macerata), he extensively explored topics related to Cinquecento book censorship, Counter Reformation institutions, book circulation and the morphology of private and common book collections.