The first collected works of Melanchthon's head mathematician, colleague of Copernicus and teacher of Rheticus: banned by Rome, studied by a Premonstratensian monk

Schöner, Johann. Opera mathematica.

€ 35.000,00

A rare and important astronomical work, this copy closely studied and annotated at a Bohemian monastery in spite of the fact that the author had been banned by Rome.

This is the first edition of the collected works by Johann Schöner (1477-1547), mathematician, astronomer, cartographer, and scientific instrument maker from Karlstadt, in Bavaria. Schöner was a correspondent of Nicolaus Copernicus and in 1526 became the first professor of mathematics at the Nuremberg Aegidianum, the school run by Philipp Melanchthon. His most illustrious pupil was Georg Joachim Rheticus, who in the "Narratio prima" (1540, dedicated to Schöner) announced Copernicus's discoveries. Like Regiomontanus, Schöner set up a press in his own home and from there published works of mathematical and astronomical interest, as well as the first printed terrestrial globe to name the recently discovered continent of America.

The "Opera mathematica" was published posthumously by Schöner's son Andreas and contains a representative sample of Schöner's wide and diverse interests, and a digest of some of his separately published works, most of which are extremely rare. The whole volume is introduced by a preface by Melanchthon himself, who had already, in 1536, contributed the foreword to the "Tabulae astronomicae" (here forming part II): tables based on those computed initially by Regiomontanus, with a selection of other material originally written by Regiomontanus. The section entitled "Coelestis globi compositio" contains an important catalogue of stars taken from Copernicus's "De revolutionibus", but for which Schöner calculated the positions for the year 1550. Part III possibly contains the most important section, which describes and illustrates eleven instruments, under the title "Aequatorium Astronomicum", a revised and enlarged version of a work which first appeared in 1521. It contains the earliest collection of printed equatoria diagrams, as well further Copernican material adapted by Schöner, and probably inspired Peter Apian's "Astronomicum Caesareum".