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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2023
This article explores the complex process of integrating Tycho Brahe's theories into the Jesuit intellectual framework through focusing on the international community of professors who taught mathematics at the College of Saint Anthony (Colégio de Santo Antão), Lisbon, during the first half of the seventeenth century. Historians have conceived the reception of the Tychonic system as a straightforward process motivated by the developments of early modern astronomy. Nevertheless, this paper argues that the cultural politics of the Counter-Reformation Church curbed the reception of Tycho Brahe within the Jesuit milieu. Despite supporting the Tychonic geo-heliocentric system, which they explicitly conceived of as a ‘compromise’ between the ancient Ptolemy and the modern Copernicus, and making recourse to some of the cosmological ideas produced in Tycho's Protestant milieu, the Jesuits strove to confine the authority of the Lutheran astronomer to the domain of mathematics. Philosophy was expected to remain the realm of Catholic orthodoxy. Thus, while Tycho Brahe entered the pantheon of ‘Jesuit’ authorities, he nonetheless was not granted the absolute status of intellectual authority. This case demonstrates how the impact of confessionalization reached well beyond the formal processes of science censorship.
1 On this controversy see Carolino, Luís Miguel, ‘Disputando Pedro Nunes: Mendo Pacheco de Brito “versus” Manuel Bocarro Francês numa Controvérsia Matemática de inícios do Século XVII’, Anais da Universidade de Évora (2002) 12, pp. 87–108Google Scholar; and Camenietzki, Carlos Ziller, Carolino, Luís Miguel and Leite, Bruno Martins Boto, ‘A Disputa do Cometa: Matemática e Filosofia na controvérsia entre Manuel Bocarro Francês e Mendo Pacheco de Brito acerca do cometa de 1618’, Revista Brasileira de História da Matemática (2004) 4(7), pp. 3–18Google Scholar.
2 Mendo Pacheco de Brito, Discurso em os Dous Phaenominos Aereos do Anno de Mil e Seiscentos e Dezoito, Lisbon: Pedro Craesbeck, 1619, fols. 18v–19r.
3 Production in this field of historical research has been abundant. To quote some of the most influential and recently published works: Ugo Baldini and Leen Spruit (eds.), Catholic Church and Modern Science, vol. 1: Sixteenth-Century Documents, Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2009; Finocchiaro, Maurice A., On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019Google Scholar; Gingras, Yves, Science and Religion: An Impossible Dialogue, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017Google Scholar.
4 PRedondi, ietro, Galileo Heretic, London: Allen Lane and The Penguin Press, 1988, pp. 209–26Google Scholar; Peter Dear, ‘The Church and the new philosophy’, in Stephen Pumfrey, Paolo Rossi and Maurice Slawinski (eds.), Science, Culture and Popular Belief in Renaissance Europe, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991, pp. 119–39, 124
5 Prior to this, the Tychonic system had already been taught in the Jesuit milieu by at least Otto Cattenius in the University of Mainz in 1610/11, and by Cristoforo Borri at the College of Brera (Milan) in 1612. Krayer, Albert, Mathematik im Studienplan der Jesuiten: Die Vorlesung von Otto Cattenius an der Universität Mainz (1610/11), Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991, pp. 135–7Google Scholar; Carolino, Luís Miguel, ‘The making of a Tychonic cosmology: Cristoforo Borry and the development of Tycho Brahe's astronomical system’, Journal for the History of Astronomy (2008) 39, pp. 313–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 On the Jesuit reception of Tycho Brahe's astronomical system see Michel-Pierre Lerner, ‘L'entrée de Tycho Brahe chez les jésuites ou le chant du cygne de Clavius’, in Luce Giard (ed.), Les Jésuites à la Renaissance: Système éducatif et production du savoir, Paris: Presses Unversitaires de France, 1995, pp. 145–85; Christine Jones Schofield, Tychonic and Semi-Tychonic World Systems, New York: Arno Press, 1981, pp. 277–89; Lattis, James M., Between Copernicus and Galileo: Christoph Clavius and the Collapse of Ptolemaic Cosmology, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 205–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Giorgio Strano and Giancarlo Truffa, ‘Tycho Brahe cosmologist: an overview on the genesis, development and fortune of the geo-heliocentric world-system’, in Massimo Bucciantini, Michele Camerota and Sophie Roux (eds.), Mechanics and Cosmology in the Medieval and Early Modern Period, Florence: Leo. S. Olschki, 2007, pp. 73–93, 89–93; Marcacci, Flavia, Cieli in contraddizione: Giovanni Battista Riccioli e il terzo sistema del mondo, Perugia: Aguaplano, 2018Google Scholar; Luís Miguel Carolino, ‘Astronomy, cosmology, and Jesuit discipline, 1540–1758’ in Ines G. Županov (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 670–707, 678–81; Gambaro, Ivana, ‘Geo-heliocentric models and the Society of Jesus: from Clavius's resistance to Dechales's Mathesis Regia’, Annals of Science (2021), 78(3), pp. 265–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Johann Baptista Cysat, Mathemata astronomica de loco, motu, magnitude et causis de cometae qui sub finem anni 1618 et initium anni 1619 in coelo fulsit, Ingolstat: ex Typographeo Ederiano, 1619, p. 57. Schofield, op. cit. (6), pp. 170–1. Schofield also refers the case of the Jesuit theses of the College of Pont-à-Mousson (1622).
8 Christoph Scheiner, Disquisitiones mathematicae de controversiis et novitatibus astronomicis, Ingolstadt: ex Typographeo Ederiano apud Elisabetham Angermariam, 1614, pp. 52–3.
9 On the question of establishing and making sense of truth among early modern Catholics see Andreea Badea, Bruno Boute, Marco Cavarzere and Steven Vanden Broecke (eds.), Making Truth in Early Modern Catholicism, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021.
10 Michel-Pierre Lerner, ‘Tycho Brahe censured’, in John R. Christianson, Alena Hadravová, Petr Hadrava and Martin Šolc (eds.), Tycho Brahe and Prague: Crossroads of European Science, Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Harri Deutsch, 2002, pp. 95–101, 95.
11 Giambattista Riccioli, Almagestum novum astronomiam veterem novamque complectens, Bologna: ex Typographia Haeredis Victorij Benatij, 1651, Pars prior, p. xlvi, col. b. Cf. Pars posterior, p. 74, col. b.
12 See, among many others, Paula Findlen, ‘How information travels: Jesuit networks, scientific knowledge, and the early modern Republic of Letters, 1540–1640’, in Findlen (ed.), Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World, London and New York: Routledge, 2019, pp. 57–105; Antonella Romano, Impressions de Chine: L'Europe et l'englobement du monde (XVIe–XVIIe siècle), Paris: Fayard, 2016; Steven J. Harris, ‘Mapping Jesuit science: the role of travel in the geography of knowledge’, in John W. O'Malley, Gauvin A. Bailey, Steven J. Harris and T. Frank Kennedy (eds.), The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and Arts, 1540–1773, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999, pp. 212–40.
13 The Class on the Sphere (Aula da Esfera) provided a public course in mathematics devoted mainly to nautical science. It covered topics such as cosmography, navigation, construction and the applications of nautical and astronomical instruments. This class was established in around 1590, most likely following an order from by King Sebastião. As the course addressed nautical personnel not familiar with Latin, it was taught in Portuguese. Analysis of the context in which mathematics was taught in early modern Portugal can be found in Henrique Leitão, ‘Jesuit mathematical practice in Portugal, 1540–1759’, in Mordechai Feingold (ed.), The New Science and Jesuit Science: Seventeenth Century Perspectives, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003, pp. 229–47.
14 Biography details of these Jesuits can be found in Ugo Baldini, ‘L'insegnamento della matematica nel collegio di S. Antão a Lisbona (1590–1640)’, in Baldini, Saggi sulla cultura della Compagnia di Gesù (secoli XVI–XVIII), Padua: CLEUP Editrice, 2000, pp. 129–67, 142–4; and Baldini, ‘The teaching of mathematics in the Jesuit Colleges of Portugal, from 1640 to Pombal’, in Luís Saraiva and Henrique Leitão (eds.), The Practice of Mathematics in Portugal, Coimbra: por ordem da Universidade, 2004, pp. 293–465, 386–7. To this list we should add the English Jesuit Thomas Barton (c.1615–?), who taught mathematics at the College of Saint Anthony in 1648–9. However, I was unable to examine his lecture notes (Tractado da Sphera), in the possession of a private owner. On Barton and his lecture notes see Luís Miguel Bernardo, ‘O Tractado da Sphera de Thomas Bretono’, Mare Liberum (2000) 18–19, pp. 179–91.
15 As the course addressed nautical personnel, not familiar with Latin, it was taught in Portuguese. Cfr. Luís de Albuquerque, A ‘aula da esfera’ do Colégio de Santo Anthony no século XVII, Coimbra: Agrupamento de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga, 1972; Baldini, op. cit. (14); Henrique Leitão, A Ciência na «Aula da Esfera» no Colégio de Santo Antão, 1590-1759, Lisbon: Comissariado Geral das Comemorações do V Centenário do Nascimento de S. Francisco Xavier, 2007.
16 Analysis of the context in which mathematics was taught in early modern Portugal can be found in Henrique Leitão, ‘Jesuit mathematical practice in Portugal, 1540–1759’, in Feingold, op. cit. (13), pp. 229–47.
17 Cf. Cristoforo Borri, Al molto Reu: Pre. Generale. Christoforo Borri sopra il libro che ho composto per stampare delli tre Cieli, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, Armário dos Jesuítas, vol. 19, fol. 315r.
18 On the 1616 ban on Copernicus see particularly Vittorio Frajese, ‘Il decreto anticopernicano del 5 marzo 1616’, in Massimo Bucciantini, Michele Camerota and Franco Giudice (eds.), Il Caso Galileo: Una rilettura storica, filosofica, teologica, Florence: Leo. S. Olschki, 2011, pp. 75–89; Natacha Fabbri and Federica Favino (eds.), Copernicus Banned: The Entangled Matter of the Anti-Copernican Decree of 1616, Florence: Leo. S. Olschki, 2018. For a seminal insight into the complex reception of and reaction against Copernicus in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Copernicus in the Cultural Debates of the Renaissance: Reception, Legacy, Transformation, Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2014.
19 This subtitle is drawn from a seminal article on the Jesuit censorship of Tycho Brahe by Lerner, op. cit. (10). This copy of Tycho Brahe's Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata is preserved at the Biblioteca da Ajuda, Lisbon (35-XI-7) (henceforth BA, copy 35-XI-7). The front page of the book includes an explicit reference to its former owner: ‘da livraria da Mathematica de Santo Antão’ (‘from the mathematical library of the [College of] Saint Anthony’). Along with the expurgation of sentences, the BA copy is provided with some mathematical annotations in the same ink as that of the erasures. The style of handwriting is typical of the seventeenth century.
20 On this book's composition process see Victor E. Thoren, The Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography of Tycho Brahe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, particularly pp. 283–5, 262, 282.
21 Brahe, Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata, Frankfurt: apud Godefridum Tampachium, 1610, BA, copy 35-XI-7, p. 711; Cf. Brahe, Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata, in T. Brahe, Opera Omnia (ed. J.L.E. Dreyer), vol. 3, Libraria Gyldendaliana, 1916, p. 225. For example, while referring to Theodorus Graminaeus's interpretation of the Abbott Joachim Lichtenberg's vaticinia, which Tycho Brahe considered to be odiously (odiose) pitched against Luther, the Jesuit censor erased the word odiose. A negative statement was thus turned positive. Tycho Brahe, Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata, BA, copy 35-XI-7, p. 776; cf. Brahe, Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata in Opera Omnia, op. cit., p. 290.
22 On Theodorus Graminaeus see particularly Rienk Vermij, ‘Theodorus Graminaeus: Een wiskundige in dienst van de contrareformatie’, Studium (2010) 1, pp. 1–17.
23 Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata, BA, copy 35-XI-7, op. cit. (21), p. 777; Cfr. Brahe, Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata in Opera Omnia, op. cit. (21), p. 291.
24 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910, vol. 3, pp. 839–40; Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History, New York: Viking, 2004, pp. 236, 244, 298, 303, 599–600.
25 Brahe, Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata in Opera Omnia, op. cit. (21), vol. 2, 1915, p. 325.
26 Brahe, Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata, BA, copy 35-XI-7, op. cit. (21), p. 327.
27 Brahe, Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata, BA, copy 35-XI-7, op. cit. (21), p. 542; Brahe, Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata in Opera Omnia, op. cit. (21), vol. 3, p. 56.
28 Lerner, op. cit. (10), p. 96. See, for example the celebrated Index auctorum damnatae memoriae, Lisbon: Pedro Craesbeeck, 1624.
29 On this process see particularly Lerner, op. cit. (10). See also Massimo Bucciantini, Galileo e Keplero: Filosofia, cosmologia e teologia nell'Età della Controriforma, Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 2003, pp. 91–2; Stefania Tutino, Empire of Soul: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 279–80.
30 I am grateful to Ivana Gambaro for drawing my attention to Roberto Bellarmine's role in the Brahe censorship process.
31 In Peter Godman, The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index, Leiden, London and Cologne: Brill, 2000, p. 307, also 221–2.
32 Lerner, op. cit. (10), p. 97. With the exception of Spain, where Brahe's Progymnasmata was extensively examined and included in the Spanish indexes of prohibited books. Lerner, op. cit. (10), pp. 97–8. On the Spanish Inquisitorial censorship of scientific books see José Pardo Tomás, Ciencia y Censura: La Inquisición Española y los libros científicos en los siglos XVI y XVII, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1991. After submitting this paper, I came across Luís Tirapicos, ‘On the censorship of Tycho Brahe's books in Iberia’, Annals of Science (2020), 77, pp. 96–107.
33 Prior to that, the Jesuit censor of Biancani's Aristotelis loca mathematica (Bologna, 1615) had already raised the question of Brahe's religious beliefs. In his report elaborated in the Collegio Romano, Giovanni Camerota complained that Biancani praised Tycho Brahe and other astronomers who were either ‘heretic’ or ‘strongly suspected’. Camerota's censorship is included in Ugo Baldini, Legem impone subactis: Studi su filosofia e scienza dei Gesuiti in Italia, 1540–1632, Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1992, pp. 229–31, 230-1: ‘… Constat enim aut hos omnes, aut ex his plerosque, atque adeo ipsum Tichonem, quem tanti facit, aut haereticos fuisse, aut valde suspectos.’
34 Lerner, op. cit. (10), p. 100. Godman, op. cit. (31), p. 221, also pointed to this ‘coincidence’.
35 The Lisbon Jesuit copy of Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata was censored according to the Roman guidelines, a fact that proves – as Lerner has suggested – that Tycho's censorship spread informally along the Jesuit information network.
36 Commentarii Collegii Conimbricensis Societatis Iesu in quatuor libros De Coelo Aristotelis Stagiritae, Lisbon: ex officina Simonis Lopesij, 1593, p. 62.
37 Commentarii Collegii Conimbricensis Societatis Iesu In libros Meteororum Aristotelis Stagiritae, Lisbon: ex officina Simonis Lopesij, 1593, p. 28.
38 Lattis, op. cit. (6), pp. 181–95; Eileen Reeves and Albert van Helden, ‘Verifying Galileo's discoveries: telescope-making at the Collegio Romano’, in Jürgen Hamel and Inge Keil (eds.), Der Meister und die Fernrohre: Das Wechselspiel zwischen Astronomie und Optik in der Geschichte, Frankfurt am Main: H. Deutsch, 2007, 127–41; Massimo Bucciantini, Michele Camerota and Franco Giudice, Galileo's Telescope: A European Story (trans. Catherine Bolton), Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2015, 205-11.
39 Galileo Galilei, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, vol. 11, Florence: Tipografia di G. Barbèra, 1901, pp. 92–3.
40 Giovanni Paolo Lembo, Tratado da Esfera, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, Manuscrito da Livraria 1770, fol. 33v.
41 Lembo, op. cit. (40), fol. 33v.
42 Johann Chrysostomus Gall, In Sphaeram Ioanis De Sacrobosco Commentarius … Ulisipone, ano Domini 1621, Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra, Ms. 192, fols. 17–18v, 36r–36v, 43r, 49v; Gall, Tratado sobre a e[s]phera material, celeste e natural … em Lisboa no anno de 1625, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, COD. 1869, fols. 81r–86r.
43 Gall, In Sphaeram, op. cit. (42), fol. 17v.
44 Cristoforo Borri, who followed Gall as professor of mathematics at Saint Anthony, for example, informed his Lisbon students that he observed the comet of 1618 ‘in the kingdom of Amam, which the Portuguese call Cochinchina’. Cristoforo Borri, Nova Astronomia, 1628, Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra, Ms. 44, fol. 94v. Among all the professors of the Lisbon Jesuit college, Borri was the one who discussed the celestial novelties at greater length.
45 Christoph Clavius, Commentarius in sphaeram Ioannis de Sacro Bosco, in Clavius, Opera mathematica, Mainz, Sumptibus Antonii Hierat excudebat Reinhardus Eltz, 1611, vol. 3, p. 75: ‘Quae cum ita sint, videant Astronomi, quo pacto orbes coelestes constituendi sint, ut haec phaenomena possint salvari’.
46 On the Clavius critique of Copernicus see particularly Lattis, op. cit. (6), pp. 106–44. See also Volker R. Remmert, who has argued that the rebuttal of Copernicanism within the Society of Jesus was due not only to the theologians but also to the mathematicians, and particularly to Clavius, who played a key role in building up a consensus to reject Copernicanism in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. V.R. Remmert, ‘“Our mathematicians have learned and verified this”: Jesuits, biblical exegesis, and the mathematical sciences in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’, in Jitse M. van der Meer and Scott Mandelbrote (eds.), Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions, vol. 2: Scripture and the Rise of Modern Science (1200–1700), Leiden: Brill, 2008, pp. 665–90.
47 Renée J. Raphael has convincingly argued that the need to refute Copernicanism led the Jesuits to teach it rather than simply suppress it. Renée J. Raphael, ‘Copernicanism in the classroom: Jesuit natural philosophy and mathematics after 1633’, Journal for the History of Astronomy (2015) 46, pp. 419–40.
48 On the Jesuit teaching of Copernicanism see particularly Raphael, op. cit. (47).
49 Lembo, op. cit. (40), fol. 24v, included a drawing of the heliocentric system.
50 The Portuguese public libraries and archives preserved two copies of Gall's lecture notes, respectively at the Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra and Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (47). Copernicanism is discussed in Gall, In Sphaeram, op. cit. (42), fols. 14r–14v, 56r–58v; Gall, Tratado, op. cit. (42), fols. 43r–45v, 64v–65.
51 Gall, Tratado, op. cit. (42), fols. 43v–44v.
52 Gall, In Sphaeram, op. cit. (42), fols. 56v–57v, Gall, Tratado, op. cit. (42), fols. 44v–45r.
53 Gall, Tratado, op. cit. (42), fol. 43v.
54 Gall, In Sphaeram, op. cit. (42), fol. 58r.
55 Gall, In Sphaeram, op. cit. (42), fol 14v: ‘ainda que seos defensores, sem necesidade, pretendam auerse de tomar estes lugares no sentido menos proprio’.
56 Simon Fallon, Compendio Spiculativo das Spheras Arteficial, Soblunar e Celeste … 1639, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, COD. 2258, fol. 97v.
57 On the Jesuit bond to biblical literalism see in particular Irving A. Kelter, ‘The refusal to accommodate: Jesuit exegetes and the Copernican system’, in Ernan McMullin (ed.), The Church and Galileo, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005, pp. 38–53. See also Richard J. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible, Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991.
58 Therefore Gall was willing to affirm that ‘if its author [Copernicus] lived today, he would not support those things because he was a good Christian and dedicated [the book] to the Pope Paul III’. Gall, Tratado, op. cit. (42), fol. 64v.
59 Gall, In Sphaeram, op. cit. (42), fol. 14r: ‘Assi o nosso Clauio no qual asás mostra que o seu sistema não he bastante’. As far as Clavius's plea is concerned see note 46 above.
60 Lembo, op. cit. (40), fol. 36v. On Lembo's cosmology and the way it accounts for both Clavius's cosmological tenets and the Galilean astronomical observations see Luís Miguel Carolino, ‘Between Galileo's celestial novelties and Clavius's astronomical legacy: the cosmology of the Jesuit Giovanni Paolo Lembo (1615)’, Galilaeana: Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Science (2020) 17, pp. 193–217. Other astronomers, who were working on the transformation of the Copernican system into geostatic models, came out with a similar solution. Paul Wittich is a case in point. See Owen Gingerich and Robert S. Westman, The Wittich Connection: Conflict and Priority in Late Sixteenth-Century Cosmology, Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1988.
61 Kenneth J. Howell, ‘The role of biblical interpretation in the cosmology of Tycho Brahe’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (1998) 19, pp. 515–37, 516.
62 Carolino, op. cit. (5).
63 This point was already made by, among others, Schofield, op. cit. (6), p. 227.
64 Gall, In Sphaeram, op. cit. (42), fol. 17r.
65 Gall, In Sphaeram, op. cit. (42), fol. 17r–18r. Gall mentioned Venus's phases, the four satellites of Jupiter, the apparent three-bodied Saturn, comets and sunspots.
66 Gall, Tratado, op. cit. (42), fol. 86v.
67 Gall, Tratado, op. cit. (42), fol. 65v.
68 Cysat, op. cit. (7), p. 57, presents a detailed discussion of the 1618 comet that he located in the celestial region and which ran counter to a Tychonic world system; nevertheless, he did not discuss either the Tychonic system or Brahe's cosmological ideas. On Cysat's contribution to the Tychonic technical astronomy see H. Siebert, Die große kosmologische Kontroverse: Rekonstruktionsversuche anhand des Itinerarium exstaticum von Athanasius Kircher SJ (1602–1680), Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006, pp. 316–25.
69 For example, Gall, In Sphaeram, op. cit. (42), fols. 17v, 38v; Gall, Tratado, op. cit. (42), fols. 70r–70v, 86v.
70 Gall, Tratado, op. cit. (42), fol. 92r.
71 Gall, In Sphaeram, op. cit. (42), fol. 7v: ‘A mim me não esta bem meterme em desedir estas opinioins’.
72 Gall, Tratado, op. cit. (42), fol. 69.
73 Cristoforo Borri, Collecta Astronomica ex Doctrina, Lisbon: Matias Rodrigues, 1631, p. 44.
74 The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (trans. Reverend H.J. Schroeder), Charlotte, NC: TAN Books, 2011, pp. 18–19. On the impact that the Church's principle of authority and tradition in interpreting the Bible had on science see particularly Blackwell, op. cit. (57).
75 Borri, op. cit. (73), pp. 233–5.
76 Borri, op. cit. (73), p. 263. Borri refers to the following excerpt of Beda Venerabilis's In Pentateuchum Comentarii, Patrologia Latina 91, col. 192B: ‘Coelum hic proprie dicuntur, quia multi sunt, ut, Scinditur auricolor coeli septemplicis aether, quorum haec sunt nomina, aer, aether, olympus, spatium igneum, firmamentum, coelum angelorum, et coelum Trinitatis’.
77 Borri, op. cit. (73), pp. 263–71.
78 Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 267.
79 On the importance of the Church Father's Hexameron literature in the early modern cosmological debates see W.G.L. Randles, The Unmaking of the Medieval Christian Cosmos, 1500–1760: From Solid Heavens to Boundless Aether, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999, particularly pp. 1–57. See also Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis, 1527–1633, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948, 40–65.
80 See Luis de Molina, Commentaria in primam Divi Thomae partem, Venice: apud Minimam Societatem, 1594 (1st edn Cuenca, 1592), p. 705; and R. Bellarmine, The Louvain Lectures (‘Lectiones Lovaniensis’) of Bellarmine and the Autograph Copy of his 1616 Declaration to Galileo (ed. U. Baldini and G.V. Coyne), Studi Galileiani (Vatican Observatory Publications), 1:2, 1984, pp. 1–48, 17.
81 On the influence of Pena's ideas see, among others, Peter Barker, ‘Stoic alternatives to Aristotelian cosmology: Pena, Rothmann and Brahe’, Revue d'histoire des sciences (2008) 61–2, pp. 165–86; and Miguel A. Granada, Sfere solide e cielo fluido: Momenti del dibatitto cosmologico nella seconda metà del Cinquecento, Naples: Edizioni Angelo Guerini e Associati, 2002, pp. 3–46.
82 Epistolarum astronomicarum libri was later reprinted in 1601 (Nuremberg) and in 1610 (Frankfurt am Main). On the correspondence between Brahe and Rothmann on the nature of celestial matter see Randles, op. cit. (79), pp. 63–77. See also Adam Mosley, Bearing the Heavens: Tycho Brahe and the Astronomical Community of the Late Sixteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 70–80, 89–96.
83 Borri, op. cit. (73), p. 161.
84 Borri, op. cit. (73), p. 324.
85 Rothmann to Brahe, 2 October 1587, Brahe, Epistolae Astronomicae in Opera Omnia, op. cit. (21), vol. 6, p. 112. Rothmann did not use the term aura aetherea, a term that was coined by Kepler in his Mysterium cosmographicum (1596). Rothmann usually refer the celestial air as aether. Randles, op. cit. (79), p. 177, has suggested that Borri took the term aura aetherea from Kepler but did not acknowledge it because Kepler was a Protestant.
86 Borri constitutes an interesting case as he had acknowledged, in the past, the paternity of his ideas on celestial fluidity in Tycho Brahe. It took place when he was a professor of mathematics at Brera College in 1612. However, Borri paid a high price for having defended Tycho Brahe's system and the notion of celestial fluidity in the period before the official acceptance of Tycho by the Jesuit authorities. He was expelled from the mathematics chair at Brera. In the Collecta Astronomica, published about two decades later, Borri was more cautious, omitting Brahe's name in the cosmological discussion. On the analysis of Borri's concept of celestial matter at Brera see Carolino, op. cit. (5), pp. 320–2.
87 It was profusely referenced by the professors who followed Borri in Saint Anthony college's mathematics chair. See, for example, Fallon, op. cit. (56), fol. 105v; and John Rishton, Curso de Mathematica, 1652, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, PBA 54, fol. 9r.
88 Ignace Stafford, Tractado das Theoricas das Estrellas Fixas e Errantes, 1633, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, COD. 4323, fols. 79v–80r.
89 Stafford, op. cit. (88), fol. 79v: ‘o Padre Christouão Clauio se reduzio à doctrina do ceo fluido depois que obseruo o Cometa de 1572’.
90 On Clavius's astronomy and cosmology see Lattis, op. cit. (6).
91 On Borri's making of a Tychonic cosmology see Carolino, op. cit. (5).
92 Randles, op. cit. (79), p. 133. On the notion of Empyrean heaven see Maurach, Gregor, Coelum Empyreum: Versuch einer Begriffsgeschichte, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1968Google Scholar; Michel-Pierre Lerner, Le monde des sphères, 1: Genèse et triomphe d'une représentation cosmique, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1996, pp. 215–21; Randles, op. cit. (79), pp. 133–50.
93 Fallon, op. cit. (56), fol. 107r. Stafford did not discuss this topic in his course on planetary theory.
94 Fallon, op. cit. (56), fol. 109r; Fallon, Tratado sobre a Theorica dos Planetas, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, COD. 2127, fol. 219r; Stafford, op. cit. (88), fol. 91r, 92r.
95 Stafford, op. cit. (88), fol. 81v, 90v, 96r ff., Fallon, Compendio, op. cit. (56), fol. 108v; Fallon, op. cit. (94), fol. 219v–220r. Borri argued that being thought of as purely intellectual entities, and therefore superior to other beings in ontological terms, angels were responsible for moving the celestial bodies. This view was consistent with the Thomist conception of providence endorsed by several Scholastic scholars. According to this view, God governed the created world through the mediation of secondary causes. A good example was precisely the angelical action of moving the planets according to divine intention. Angels moved the planets, perpetually maintaining the constancy of the celestial order and indirectly bringing about planetary influence over the terrestrial region, upon which life on Earth was thought to depend. On Borri see Carolino, op. cit. (5), pp. 329–30. On the Scholastic discussion of celestial dynamics see Grant, op. cit. (78), pp. 514–68.
96 Nevertheless, Saint Anthony's Jesuits maintained that the Ptolemaic planetary system should serve as an instrument for planetary computations. Gall, Tratado, op. cit. (42), fol. 65v; Stafford, op. cit. (88), fol. 100v.
97 Fallon, op. cit. (56), fol. 105v.
98 Gambaro, op. cit. (6).
99 Rishton, op. cit. (87), fol. 140v.
100 Rishton, op. cit. (87), fols. 142r–143v.
101 Rishton, op. cit. (87), fol. 141r. It is interesting to note that Clavius had already applied the same sort of argument in his dispute with the advocates of homocentric cosmologies. Clavius, op. cit. (45), p. 29.
102 Rishton, op. cit. (87), fols. 141r–141v.
103 Rishton, op. cit. (87), fol. 134v.
104 Rishton, op. cit. (87), fol. 140v.
105 Rishton, op. cit. (87), fols. 143v–144v.
106 Rishton, op. cit. (87), fol. 146v.
107 Rishton, op. cit. (87), fol. 147r.
108 It is important to note that, despite Rishton seeming to be well informed about recently published books (for example quoting from the influential Cursus Philosophicus by the Portuguese Jesuit philosopher Francisco Soares, published in 1651, fol. 147r), he made no reference to Riccioli's Almagestum novum (Bologna, 1651).
109 Rishton, op. cit. (87), fol. 133r.