SACROBOSCO, Johannes de, & Georg von Peuerbach.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Opusculum de sphaera. A profusely annotated copy of the scarce first and only Viennese edition, featuring a world map based on Waldseemüller's design, where part of America is visible. Compiled by a university student, the marginalia enrich the text with arithmetic, geography, astronomy, literature, and technical knowledge.An online institutional search returns nine institutional locations; we have traced only one other copy in auction records.With over 30 incunable editions and 200 printings in the 16th century, De sphaera was "the most used textbook in astronomy and cosmography from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century" (Thorndike, p. 1). It was written around 1230 and published in 1472 in Ferrara without illustrations; the first illustrated edition followed in 1478 in Milan. Collecting the teachings of Ptolemy and of his Arabic commentators, it describes the structure of the pre-Copernican universe, the celestial spheres, constellations, planets, and Earth. This copy is annotated throughout in a rapid and dense contemporary Germanic hand, linking the astronomical content to other disciplines. Geography and navigation feature prominently, not surprisingly as this was a key textbook in the age of European expansion. Next to Sacrobosco's paragraph discussing the impossibility of living below the equator due to the climate, the reader notes that Pomponio Mela and Vadianus discuss the existence of "Taprobana" (Sri Lanka), "a great island extremely rich in gold and precious

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