Article ID: CBB482285654

Edward Gresham’s Astrostereon, or A Discourse of the Falling of the Planet (1603), the Copernican paradox, and the construction of early modern proto-scientific discourse (2020)

unapi

This paper investigates the functioning of the ‘Copernican paradox’ (stating that the Sun stands still and the Earth revolves around the Sun) in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, with particular attention to Edward Gresham's (1565–1613) little-known and hitherto understudied astronomical treatise – Astrostereon, or A Discourse of the Falling of the Planet (1603). The text, which is fully appreciative of the heliocentric system, is analysed within a broader context of the ongoing struggles with the Copernican theory at the turn of the seventeenth century. The article finds that apart from having a purely rhetorical function, the ‘Copernican paradox’ featured in the epistemological debates on how early modern scientific knowledge should be constructed and popularised. The introduction of new scientific claims to sceptical audiences had to be done both through mathematical demonstrations and by referring to the familiar concepts and tools drawn from the inventory of humanist education. As this article shows, Gresham's rhetorical techniques used for the rejection of paradoxicality of heliocentrism are similar to some of the practices which Thomas Digges and William Gilbert employed in order to defend their own findings and assertions.

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Authors & Contributors
Lerner, Michel-Pierre
De Pace, Anna
Bienias, Barbara
Hughes, Howard C.
Godley, Douglas
Wlodarczyk, Jaroslaw
Concepts
Copernicanism
Heliocentrism
Astronomy
Cosmology
Natural philosophy
Mathematics
Time Periods
16th century
17th century
Renaissance
Medieval
Ancient
15th century
Places
Italy
Europe
England
Poland
Germany
Great Britain
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