GELLIBRAND, Henry.

by Henry Gellibrand

£5,950 · Offered by Sokol Books

First edition of this important and influential work on trigonometry, with most interesting contemporary provenance. Gellibrand had been a student at Trinity College, Oxford, when he was introduced to mathematics and became acquainted with Henry Briggs. After graduation he was ordained and took a job as curate in a small town in Kent. When Edmund Gunter died in 1626, Gellibrand applied for his post as professor of astronomy at Gresham College and was elected in early 1627. One of his sponsors was Henry Briggs, and Gellibrand repaid the debt by completing the second volume of Briggs Trigonometria Britannica and seeing it through the press after Briggs died in 1630. He .. became a friend of Henry Briggs, on whose recommendation he was chosen professor of astronomy at Gresham College, 2 Jan. 1626 7. Briggs dying in 1630 he left his unfinished Trigonometria Britannica to Gellibrand. Gellibrand held puritan meetings in his rooms, and encouraged his servant, William Beale, to publish an almanack for 1631, in which the popish saints were superseded by those in Foxe s Book of Martyrs. Laud, then bishop of London, cited them both into the high commission court. They were acquitted on the ground that similar almanacks had been printed before, Laud alone dissenting, and this prosecution formed afterwards one of the articles exhibited against him at his own trial. In 1632 Gellibrand completed Briggs s manuscript, and published it in 1633 as Trigonometria Britannica According to Ward, an

• Binding: Hardcover

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