REGIOMONTANUS (Johannes Müller) & Georgius Purbachius. Epitoma in Almagestum Ptolemaei. (Edited by Caspar Grosch and Stephan Römer.) Published: Venice: Johannes Hamman for the editors, 31 August 1496. Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Rare Book Specialist at Peter Harrington. Super-chancery folio (307 x 206 mm), ff. 108, including final leaf, blank and genuine; without the bifolium containing Johannes Baptista Abiosus’s letter dated 15 August 1496, inserted in a minority of copies between a1 and a2. Bound to style in full vellum over thin pasteboards, ties and catches. Custom dark red cloth folding case. 48 lines and headline. Types: 4:135G, 2:103G, 8:86G, 5:70(67)G, 80Gk. Xylographic title, full-page woodcut of an armillary sphere with Ptolemy and Regiomontanus studying below, 279 woodcut marginal diagrams (including repeats), white-on-black floriated woodcut initials in several sizes, woodcut printer’s device on p7v (Kristeller 231). Early manuscript foliation, manuscript notation on title page. Title leaf and last text leaf with paper restorations in lower margins; a tall copy but trimmed just a little close in fore margin, shaving one diagram on f2v with loss of two letters; last text leaf with small hole at centre touching a couple of letters either side of the leaf; a few trivial spots or marks internally: a very good copy. First edition in any form of Ptolemy’s Almagest, the foundation of ancient astronomy. Regiomontanus’ Epitome of Ptolemy is an epochal text that both made available the canonical astronomy of the ancient world and heralded the birth of the revolutionary astronomy of the new learning. This is the only appearance in print of the Almagest in the fifteenth century. The first complete edition was not published until 1515. The Epitome was begun by Peurbach, who, when he lay on his deathbed in 1462, made Regiomontanus promise that he would complete it. Regiomontanus had hoped to publish the book at his own press in Nuremberg in the 1470s, but his premature death delayed its appearance for more than twenty years. “At the end of the fifteenth century, Ptolemy’s achievement remained at the pinnacle of astronomical thought; and by providing easier access to Ptolemy’s complex masterpiece, the Peurbach–Regiomontanus epitome contributed to current scientific research rather than to improved understanding of the past” (DSB). Moreover, since the Peurbach–Regiomontanus version was based on a Greek manuscript belonging to Cardinal Bessarion (the Cardinal claimed the manuscript was worth more than a province), rather than the debased Latin translations from the Arabic, the Epitome was more reliable than the complete versions when they did appear. The editio princeps of the Greek text (1538) was based on the same Bessarion manuscript, which is now lost. This edition was almost certainly the text that provided Copernicus with his knowledge of the Ptolemaic system, since he had largely completed writing De revolutionibus before publication of the next edition in 1515 (Gingerich, Eye of Heaven p. 164). One of Peurbach–Regiomontanus’s corrections sparked Copernicus to question the Ptolemaic system, which had formed the basis of astronomy for more than one millennium, and to “lay the foundations of modern astronomy with his revolutionary heliocentric system” (DSB 11, p. 349). REGIOMONTANUS &; Georgius Purbachius. Epitoma in Almagestum Ptolemaei. 1496. Peter Harrington Rare Books.

• published: 07 Feb 2017
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