Astronomy

Easily the most famous astronomical manuscript in New College Library’s collections is MS 281, a thirteenth-century manuscript copy of Ptolemy’s Almagest. This work, completed before 147 AD, soon became the authoritative textbook of theoretical astronomy. The thirteen books cover the full range of mathematical astronomy, from arguments on the Earth’s spherical shape to eclipse theory and calculations of the longitudes and latitudes of constellations. In it, Ptolemy also developed a planetary model, known as the Ptolemaic system. A geocentric model, it argued that the planetary bodies and the sun orbited around the Earth, the centre of the known universe.

Ptolemy’s work had an interesting route to the West. It was translated into Arabic around 800 AD, leading to parallel transmission in Arabic and the original Greek. Our fourteenth-century manuscript belongs to the former tradition, featuring Gerard of Cremona’s influential Latin translation from Arabic, completed c. 1175.

The manuscript, as you can see in the image of folio 122v to the right, is particularly beautiful, illuminated on several different pages, with copious use of gold. Note the intricately depicted strawberries in the border decoration, shown in enlarged form below.

Unusually, this lavish decoration is much later than the manuscript itself, added nearly two centuries after it was first made. The standard geometrical diagrams that accompany the text were the only illustrations included in the original, and this is perhaps explained by its provenance. We know that the manuscript was donated to the college by John Farley, a New College alumnus who was university registrar from 1458 until his death in 1464. It seems probable that Farley had this manuscript specially illuminated in preparation for giving it to New College.

Consequently, this very manuscript may have been used by Henry Savile as part of his early astronomical studies. Savile had first applied himself to Ptolemy after pausing his studies of Euclid, which he had found overly taxing. He began reading the Almagest in the original Greek, but the difficulty of the mathematics forced him to revisit Euclid. Bolstered by the geometrical understanding from this further study of Euclid, he returned to Ptolemy. This attempt was far more successful, so much so that he worked on a new translation of Ptolemy into Latin, perhaps referring in the process to this Latin manuscript copy in the Library at New College. His translation was never published, but does survive in manuscript form in the Bodleian (MSS Savile 26–28). Like for many astronomers, Savile’s study of Ptolemy was a foundational part of his education, making this manuscript copy in the Library a key piece of astronomical history.

The Astronomicum Caesareum (Ingoldstadt, 1540) is a gem among rare books: producing it took around eight years and it may be the most spectacular book printed in the sixteenth century. The New College copy bears an inscription on its title page of ‘Stephanus Standish’, probably the Elizabethan student of that name at Magdalen Hall, one of whose other books is in Balliol, but how this book came to New College is not known.

Written by the German mathematician and imperial astronomer Peter Apian (1495–1552), he printed the book at his own cost in order to present it to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, and his brother Ferdinand, the future Emperor. As can be gleamed from the enlarged picture of the title-page above, this book is an expensively produced piece of art in its own right. By far the most impressive feature of the text, though, are its volvelles, which can be seen in the video below:
 

These devices consist of movable circles which serve to ascertain the rising and setting of the sun and the moon, and the movements of the constellations, and to forecast eclipses and comets. The volvelles rely on a geocentric model of the universe, similar to the Ptolemaic system. Despite the false science on which they depended, it was still possible to use them to predict planetary movements, provided the reader had the necessary background knowledge. An ingenious technical feat, they originally had seed pearls threaded onto them to aid the reader, but these were so miniscule that most copies have lost theirs. Unusually, the New College copy still has almost all of its pearls.

This book was immediately popular. Dean of Canterbury and York, Nicholas Wotton (c. 1497–1567) reported in 1544 from the Diet of Speyer that Apian would present King Henry VIII with a copy, which Henry might otherwise not have been able to acquire, as reportedly only sixteen or seventeen copies were made. (In fact, some thirty-five copies of it are known today.) Edmond Halley tried in vain to get hold of the book because it includes Apian’s observations of the 1531 appearance of the comet that now bears Halley’s name.

When first published in 1543, Nicholaus Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus changed astronomy forever. In it, he publicised his heliocentric model of the solar system to a wider audience for the first time. This model was in direct opposition to contemporary thought—and a direct challenge to the established geoecentric model developed by Ptolemy in antiquity, discussed above. Instead of the Earth being the centre of solar system, Copernicus correctly argued that the planets orbit around the Sun, and not the Earth, also proving that the moon revolves around the Earth. The famous diagram of his model within the text is pictured on the left. A widely read text, it was soon published in multiple editions, with the New College copy part of the second edition, first published in 1566. As a result, perhaps, of its popularity, the work faced severe criticism from both the Protestant and Catholic Church. In 1616, the Catholic Church placed it on the Index of Prohibited Books.

Thankfully, we know the exact provenance history of this important text in New College’s collections. Erasmus Williams donated the book to New College Library, along with a remarkable set of other books, including a Latin translation of the Qu’ran and a Hebrew dictionary. He was particularly proud of his Copernicus, though, as in his will he made specific provision for it to come to college—‘Copernicus his resolutions of Astronomie’.

Copernicus is not the only revolutionary astronomer present in the collections of New College Library. Thanks to the generosity of Thomas Tanner in 1656, the Library contains two fascinating works by the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, which are depicted below.

The first, whose title-page is depicted on the left, is a valuable first edition of Galileo’s Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti (Rome, 1613; usually known in English as the Letters on Sunspots). In this pamphlet, Galileo outlined his research on sunspots—observations that were only possible thanks to the recent invention of more powerful telescopes. His research was significant in undermining the traditional view that the Sun was both unflawed and unmoving. The second book us a very handy London 1653 reprint of three of the greatest texts of astronomy of the seventeenth century, Pierre Gassendi’s Institutio astronomica, Johannes Kepler’s Dioptrice, and Galileo’s Nuntius sidereus, the work that had first presented, among many other things, Galileo’s telescopic observations of the moon. One of these observations can be seen above right.

Thomas Tanner had an unusual route to acquiring all these books, and an unusual entrance into the New College fellowship. He was, in fact ‘intruded’ as a fellow of New College by the Parliamentary Visitors in 1651, the same body responsible for ejecting four-fifths of the fellowship in this period. He had most probably collected these books by Galileo on a long continental academic peregrination he had undertaken from 1654. Thanks to the generosity of a Fellow, New College once again received the latest scientific research for its Library.

The various competing theories of the solar system are perfectly demonstrated in the book pictured below. A copy of the Almagestum Novum by Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598–1671), an Italian Jesuit and astronomer, it was an attempt, as its title indicates, to replace Ptolemy’s Almagest as the supreme astronomy textbook. Amongst other fineries, it contains detailed maps of the moon, but it is best remembered today for advocating a modified version of the 'Tychonic’ model, a compromise between Ptolemy and Copernicus, in which the inferior planets orbit the sun, but the sun and superior planets orbit the Earth.

The spectacular frontispiece you can see above right displays this system in allegorical form: Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, balances the Copernican (left) and Tychonic (right) systems, finding the latter of more weight. The Ptolemaic system lies rejected on the ground. The various astronomical details from the top right hand down depict the annulae or rings of Saturn, the moons and belts of Jupiter, the Moon as observed by Galileo, and a comet. The Almagestum Novum was in use for over a century.

The New College copy of this influential text is of especial interest because pasted into the front is a very rare engraving (pictured above right) by the geometer and astronomer Richard Rawlinson of Queen's College of an eclipse he observed in Oxford in 1654, alongside the Savilian Professor of Geometry John Wallis, and the young Christopher Wren, who would become the Savilian Professor of Astronomy in 1661. Rawlinson gave a few of these engravings to friends and an earlier owner must have acquired this one and mounted it in an appropriate book.

Principal among eighteenth-century science and mathematics books penned by the self-taught—things quite beyond the halls of academe and the world of the Savilian Chairs—was James Ferguson’s Astronomy Explained upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, And Made Easy to Those Who Have Not Studied Mathematics. First published in 1756, it proved a runaway success; it went through ten editions before the close of the century, and it had considerable influence. New College Library’s copy is of the ninth edition, printed in London in 1794, and extending to over 500 pages. It is in a full leather binding with raised bands titled in gilt, in very good condition. The book itself is well illustrated with a fine set of eighteen folding plates, one of which can be seen below.

James Ferguson (1710–1776) was to the popularization of astronomy, in the second half of the eighteenth century, what Sir Patrick Moore, long-standing presenter of the BBC’s The Sky at Night, was to it in the second half of the twentieth. Like Moore, Ferguson became a fellow of the Royal Society; unlike Moore, not an honorary one, but rather a fellow. Exceptionally, he was excused from paying both the Society’s admission fee and its annual contribution. Astronomer, horologist, philosopher, and inventor of scientific instruments, Ferguson had the most humble of backgrounds as the son of a Banffshire farmworker, and he received only three months’ formal education in his life (at Keith Grammar School in north-east Scotland). He initially worked as a shepherd, before moving to London in 1743, where he stayed for the remainder of his life. In London, he became a successful and popular lecturer in philosophy. King George III would grant him an annual pension of £50 in 1761. Ferguson’s style and approach in Astronomy Explained are easy and engaging: ‘Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful’.

Charles Pritchard (fellow of New College from 1883) published An Introduction to Arithmetic when he was only seventeen, and as a young man became a headmaster, controversial for his passionate advocacy of the sciences. Sympathetic parents founded a school for him at Clapham, where he made sure his pupils studied experimental science, astronomy, and even swimming. In his sixties, Pritchard was appointed out of retirement on the Isle of Wight as the Savilian Professor of Astronomy. As hoped, he proved extraordinarily energetic, as shown in the previous tab on the history of the professorship. He presided over the construction of the new observatory in the University Parks, and he even travelled to Egypt for better observational conditions. Pritchard was ordained, and wrote tirelessly to defend his belief in the compatibility of science and revelation; he presented one of his many sermons of the topic to the College in 1889.

But Pritchard’s significance lies in his enthusiastic development of the use of photography in astronomy, and he championed the use of the wedge photometer for establishing stellar magnitudes objectively. His most celebrated achievement was the photographic measurement of stellar parallax, for which he received the Royal Society’s royal medal in 1892. Pictured above is the New College copy of his Researches in Stellar Parallax (1889–92).