Textbooks
Outline
The aim of this part of the website is to provide an exemplary overview over English astronomy textbooks from the early modern period that contain traces of Neoplatonic thought. We hope to show how Neoplatonic ideas and astronomical knowledge influenced each other and how this reciprocal influence changed in view of new astronomical discoveries and theories.
There are several online databases that provide a plethora of digitalised texts from this time, the most extensive of which include Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. However, due to their comprehensive, wide-ranging approach, they cannot provide the in-depth analysis that is necessary to indentify Neoplatonic traces in the texts they make available. This website hopes to close that – admittedly small – gap in order to provide any future researcher concerned with the topic with a starting point and quick overview over sources that might be of interest to them.
A Note on the Definition of the Term "Textbook"
Just like ‘Neoplatonism’, the term ‘textbook’ is not unproblematic in the early modern context. The genre as we know and understand it today, i.e., as books written by experts of the field specifically for educational purposes, following certain standards, and often tightly connected to educational institutions, had not emerged fully. We use the term 'textbooks' in a broader sense to mean books expressly written to provide a more or less systematic overview of a field or a well-defined part of a discipline (in this case: astronomy).
List of Texts
The publications we are interested in belong, broadly, to one of three phases concerning astronomical knowledge in early modern England.
Phase I: The Ptolemaic-Aristotelian Universe
- Salysbury, Wyllyam. The Description of the Sphere or the frame of the worlde (1550)
- Hill, Thomas. The Schoole of Skil (1599)
Phase II: The Copernican Universe
- Recorde, Robert. The Castle of Knowledge (1556)
- Digges, Thomas. A Perfit Description of the Celestiall Orbes (1576)
- Peter Borell. A New Treatise, proving A Multiplicity of Worlds (1658)
Phase III: The Keplerian Universe