Title page of Copernicus' On the Revolutions (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium). The book was published in 1543 in Nuremberg as Copernicus lay on his deathbed, and was dedicated to Pope Paul III. The second edition was printed in Basel in 1566, and the third in Amsterdam in 1617.
Copernicus's book did not create controversy in the years following its publication. Its main idea has been in circulation among astronomers for over 30 years, and a preview of the book's content, the Narratio Prima of Georg Joachim Rheticus, had been published in 1540. The Copernican planetary model was absorbed and commented upon in the contemporary technical astronomical literature, notably by Michael Maestlin and the leading Jesuit astronomer, Christoph Clavius. In 1551 Erasmus Rheinhold (1511-1553) published the Prutenic Tables of planetary positions, which were based on the Copernican model and enjoyed quite a bit of success.
Religious authorities at first did not react to book's publication. This was likely due, at least in part, to the addition of an anonymous preface, written by the publication's overseer Andreas Osiander (1498-1552), to the effect that Copernicus' planetary model should be treated as an hypothesis to facilitate the computation of planetary positions. This situation was to change once Galileo began his so-called Copernican Crusade. De Revolutionibus was suspended pending minor corrections following the 1616 Roman decree against Copernicanism. Following the controversy over the world systems, culminating with the publication of Galileo's Dialogues and his subsequent trial by the Roman Inquisition, the book was banned, and remained on the Index of prohibited books until 1835.
Copernicus, N., On the Revolutions, edited and translated by E. Rosen, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.Kuhn, T.S. 1957, The Copernican Revolution, Harvard University Press.
Gingerich, O. 1993, The Eye of Heaven, American Institute of Physics.
-Written and last revised 29 December 1997 by paulchar@ucar.edu.
