I acquired the book under review here back in 2024 shortly after it was first published and having read it was astounded at how bad it actually was. I started to write a review but after much effort and more than 8000 words, I was about half way through and couldn’t take anymore. I put it to one side aiming to take it up again later, I never did. Recently on an Internet forum somebody asked if anybody knew the book and what they thought of it? I replied with my honest opinion that I thought it was crap and was asked if I had written a review of it. I replied with the explanation given above and the enquirer asked if he could read my unfinished review, as did several others. Having dug it out and reread it, I sent it to those who wished to read it. I have now posted it here to warn any other potential readers of those subpar tome. I will only point out that the chapters I haven’t reviewed here are just as bad as the ones I have reviewed.
Back in 2019, I decided to buy the highly praised debut book by Violet Moller, The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found: A History in Seven Cities (Picador, 2019). Typical of the promotion for this volumes was Peter Frankopan’s cover blurb:
A lovely debut from a gifted young author. Violet Moller brings to life the ways in which knowledge reached us from antiquity to the present day in a book that is as delightful as it is readable.
I have a lot of respect for Peter Frankopan so, I took the plunge. When I tried to read this highly praised volume, Frankopan was not alone in his gushing praise, I found it factually inaccurate and shoddy so I gave up. More recently an internet acquaintance asked me my opinion of the book and I said I wouldn’t recommend it. He then asked me why and I said, to be honest I have a negative view of the book but I can’t remember why! One evening I took it down from the shelf and reread parts of it and came to the conclusion that it was even worse than I remembered.
Given these facts, it might seem surprising that, when Violet Moller’s new book was launched, with similar fanfares, although nothing from prominent historians, I bought a copy. Given the title, I simply couldn’t resist, Inside The Stargazers Palace: The Transformation of Science in 16th-Century Northern Europe (One World, 2024). If I claim to have even a modicum of expertise in the history of science it is in The Transformation of Science in 16th-Century Northern Europe a topic to which a substantial percentage of this blog has been devoted over the last sixteen years. I wish I had resisted!
Moller sets out her intentions in a nineteen page Prologue: Before in which she explains, quite correctly, that substantial progress was made in advancing science in Europe in the sixteenth century before the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution. She also correctly notes that these advances were still mixed up with the so-called occult sciences, astrology and alchemy. She writes:
The stars, or rather astronomy, will be our guide. This was the most prestigious of the mathematical disciplines, one that long played a leading role in the development of science in part because it was often the starting point for investigation of the natural world. People have always built places to observe, to enhance their understanding of the night sky.
And then:
In my last book, The Map of Knowledge, I followed three major scientific texts as they were transmitted and transformed in the Middle Ages , following them on a thousand-year journey through seven cities that ended in 1500. This is where we will begin, taking up where we left off and travelling to seven places north of the Alps where people studied the stars and made instruments in their quest to deepen their understanding of the world around them.
If Moller had actually delivered that which she outlines in this prologue in an accurate factual manner then this would have been a good book, unfortunately, she doesn’t. The book is littered with errors inaccuracies and an incredible amount of waffle. A couple of inaccuracies from this prologue to give a taste before we dive into the morass.
A central theme of the book is instruments and she writes:
By the second century CE, Ptolemy had an array of instruments at his fingertips, simple ones for measurement like quadrants but also more complex astrolabes and armillary spheres which could calculate and predict celestial activity.
Ptolemy did not have astrolabes. He uses the name for what we now call armillary spheres. Ptolemy’s armillary sphere was a large observational instrument, which was used to measure the positions of celestial object, as described in Book V of the Almagest, and was not used for calculations.
Throughout her book Moller seems to be obsessed with clocks and it starts in the prologue with the following:
Of all the astronomical instruments developed before the telescope, clocks were the most significant. Being able to accurately measure time had a profound influence on so many aspects of life, and a singular effect on the accuracy and potential use of astronomical observations. There had been clocks of various kinds for centuries; water clocks were popular in the Arab world and famously reached Europe when the caliph Harun al-Rashid sent one to the emperor Charlemagne – a classic example of one-upmanship masquerading as generosity.
Let’s quote Wikipedia:
Water clocks are some of the oldest time-measuring instruments. The simplest form of water clock, with a bowl-shaped outflow, existed in Babylon, Egypt, and Persia around the 16th century BC. Other regions of the world, including Indiaand China, also provide early evidence of water clocks, but the earliest dates are less certain. Water clocks were used inancient Greece and in ancient Rome, as described by technical writers such as Ctesibius (died 222 BC) andVitruvius (died after 15 BC).
[…]
Some water clock designs were developed independently, and some knowledge was transferred through the spread of trade. These early water clocks were calibrated with a sundial. While never reaching a level of accuracy comparable to today’s standards of timekeeping, the water clock was a commonly used timekeeping device for millennia, until it was replaced by more accurate verge escapement mechanical clocks in Europe around 1300.
Put simple medieval Europeans didn’t need to be told by Harun al-Rashid what a water clock was.
We move to the first of Moller’s ‘seven places,’ Nuremberg! If only I knew an expert on the history of science in sixteenth century Nuremberg, who could point out Moller’s errors. Moller doesn’t actually engage with the extensive and varied mathematical and astronomical culture of sixteenth-century Nuremberg but only presents potted biographies of Regiomontanus, who lived and died in the fifteenth century, Albrecht Dürer, Wenzel Jamnitzer and a purple prose section on Augsburg and the Fugger.
The chapter opens with a general account, which is OK, briefly discusses Hans Sachs’ The Book of Trades noting that it doesn’t contain an instrument maker, not surprising as it wasn’t a recognised trade, which she doesn’t mention. She then indulges her spleen for clocks by introducing Peter Henlein (1485–1542), she delivers a typical Moller nonsense:
In the early years of the sixteenth century Peter Henlein, a local artisan, made a small portable clock designed to be worn around the neck or fastened onto clothing—the first known watch, called a ‘living egg’ because of its shape and the miniscule steel cogs that turned inside it. Henlien’s workshop produced hundreds of these…
Henlein was indeed one of the first craftsmen to make small ornamental portable clocks which were often worn as pendants or attached to clothing and is credited with inventing the watch. He did not produce hundreds of these and he did not produce the egg shaped watches that became popular around 1580 twenty years after his death.
Enter Regiomontanus who also featured in her earlier book and it is interesting to note that her account of his wanderings between leaving Vienna in 1461 and arriving in Nuremberg in 1471 is highly inaccurate in both books but the two accounts also contradict each other! I’ll just stick to the new book.
Moller quotes Regiomontanus’ letter in which he explains his move to Nuremberg in 1471 “on account of the availability of instruments, particularly the astronomical instruments on which the entire science of the heavens is based, but also on account of the very great ease of all sorts of communication with learned men everywhere.”
She complains that Regiomontanus doesn’t receive the attention he deserves, “There is only one biography of him in English (translated from the German) and his presence in Nuremberg today is slight, although there is a small observatory named after him. I don’t quite know what Moller expects, although my friends at the highly active observatory will be pleased to have got a mention. I recently had a discussion on social media with other experts on the history of astronomy about producing a new Regiomontanus biography, which given his very broad pallet of activities would be a horrendous task. There are however numerous scientific papers on the various aspects of his life and work.
We get a brief sketch of his life up to his work with Peuerbach in which Moller calls Regiomontanus a Latinized ‘nickname’–it’s a toponym! She also fails to note that he was never called that, the name was first used by Melanchthon sixty years after his death. We then get the following:
Then in 1461, disaster struck – Peuerbach died suddenly, aged just thirty-eight. Regiomontanus had lost his collaborator and friend, at a time when astronomers were thin on the ground. Fortunately, he had met someone the year before who could help. Cardinal Johannes Bessarion … Regiomontanus must have felt he had entered the very gates of heaven when he entered when he arrived at Bessarion’s elegant house and saw the library.
Firstly, Bessarion’s name was not Johannes, it was Basilios. We get no mention of the fact that Bessarion had sought out Peuerbach to make new translation from the Greek of the Almagest, which he couldn’t do as he didn’t speak Greek but agreed to write an undated Epitome of the Almagest. Bessarion then invited him to return to Italy with him, Peuerbach accepted but only on the condition that Regiomontanus also went. So, Bessarion’s adoption of Regiomontanus into his familia was agreed before Peuerbach’s death. Moller tells us:
Regiomontanus taught Bessarion astronomy and mathematics , receiving tuition in Greek in return…
Bessarion did indeed teach Regiomontanus Greek but I know of no lessons in astronomy and maths for Bessarion. We get told:
He and Bessarion spent the next four years travelling around Italy together … In 1467 Regiomontanus was tempted back over the Alps by an offer from Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, whose recent victory against the Turks had left him in possession of several rare manuscripts. Unable to resist the prospect of new texts, Regiomontanus set off northwards to the Hungarian court in Buda, a rare beacon of humanism outside Italy.
Regiomontanus left Italy in 1465 and it is not known where he was for the next two years, so if he headed northwards when he went to Hungary is not known. He received no offer from Matthias Corvinus but travelled to Esztergom (German Gran) to the court of the Archbishop János Vitéz (c. 1408–1472) as a potential member of staff for the newly established University of Bratislava. Vitéz had earlier been a patron of Peuerbach’s and most probably wanted to engage Regiomontanus for his skills as an astrologer. Regiomontanus later transferred to Matthias Corvinus’ court in Buda. Corvinus did not have ‘several rare manuscripts’ but had established a royal library, the Bibliotheca Corviniana in 1465, one of the most renowned libraries in the Renaissance world, which had grown to about 3,000 codices, which included about four to five thousand various works, many of classical Greek and Latin authors. That is four times as large as the library of Bessarion that Moller waxes lyrical about over several pages.
Moller now tells us:
A few years later still in Matthias’ service, Regiomontanus wrote a letter to a fellow scholar at the University of Erfurt … This letter written in July 1471 is an invaluable source of information on his plans, … One of his priorities was to calculate new planetary tables based on his own improved observations; another was to set up a printing press to publish a selection of scientific works.
Moller then tells how valuable Regiomontanus’ time in Italy was and can’t resist, “Italy was the main beneficiary of manuscripts brought from Constantinople after it was taken by the Ottomans in 1453…” the flood of manuscripts out of Constantinople in 1453 is a myth. She adds, Occasionally he discovered manuscripts for himself…” Regiomontanus’ main occupation was to seek out and make copies of manuscripts for Bessarion.
We return to Matthias, “In 1471, King Matthias sent Regiomontanus to Nuremberg to work on a new set of astronomical tables based on new, improved observations.”
Actually, according to legend Regiomontanus was asked in Buda why astrological prognostication were so inaccurate, to which he replied because the astronomical data on which they are based is too inaccurate. He then requested permission from Matthias to leave Buda and travel to Nuremberg to carry out his programme of observations. The letter from July 1471, which Moller had actually quoted earlier in her narrative was actually written from Nuremberg, a fact that she quotes, where he had been living since 2 June at the latest.
Moller now rambles on extensively about Regiomontanus’ workshop, his famous Tradelist (1474), in which he announced the books he intended to publish, and his intention also to manufacture scientific instruments. In the early history of printing Regiomontanus’ Tradelist is a fascinating and interesting document and it is right to draw attention to it but Moller’s comments on his workshop are totally speculative as we know absolutely nothing about it. Although here Moller allows herself another blunder, she writes:
The list contains several works by Ptolemy, including his masterpiece on astronomy the Almagest, and Euclid’s foundational text on mathematics, the Elements (neither had been printed with their diagrams before [my emphasis])…
Neither had even been printed! The first Latin edition of the Almagest printed in 1515 and the first Greek edition in 1538. The first edition of the Elements was that of Ratdolt in 1482.
Moller quotes from the Tradelist, “There shall be made also astronomical instruments for celestial observations,” leaving out the next sentence, “And also other things for common daily use, the names of which it would be tedious to relate.” She then goes on to say:
“In this period, if you wanted an astrolabe, you either had to make on yourself using a manual, or specifically commission one from a goldsmith. There were no dedicated instrument shops, but as scholarship spread in Europe, more and more people became interested in measuring the stars, transmuting metals, and distilling tinctures. As the demand for astrolabes, glass vessels and other specialist equipment rose, people started making them to sell, setting up centres of production to cater for the new market. … Regiomontanus was a pioneer in this field…
Unfortunately for Moller, and her glorification of Regiomontanus the instrument maker, when he moved to Nuremberg there were already many workshop producing astronomical instruments, which is one of the two reasons he moved there, as he wrote in that letter from July 1471, which she quotes six pages earlier:
Quite recently I have made [observations] in the city of Nuremberg…for I have chosen it as my permanent home, not only on account of the availability of instrument, particularly the astronomical instrument on which the entire science of the heavens is based…
Apparently she doesn’t actually read what she writes! Nuremberg would continue to be the major centre for the production of scientific instruments until at least the middle of the sixteenth century.
Moller tries to present the printer publisher, Regiomontanus, as some sort of highly influential role model in the history of scientific publishing but, although he was the first scientific publisher, there is little or no evidence that he influenced anybody apart from Erhard Ratdolt. Moller, of course, tries to push the story that Ratdolt learnt printing working for Regiomontanus in Nuremberg but there is absolutely no factual evidence for this theory. I argue that given the impact of Regiomontanus’ Ephemerides and Calendaria, and his reputation as an astrologer, that if Ratdolt had learnt his trade from him he would have loudly announced the fact, when he set up his own publishing house in Venice.
Moller’s obsession with clocks come out with another quote from the Tradelist, “The Tradelist mentions of a planetarium or astronomical clock being made in the workshop, ‘a work clearly to be gazed upon as a marvel’… The actual quote, “In the workshop of the artisan a planetarium is under continuous development. A work clearly to be gazed upon as a marvel” makes no mention of an astronomical clock and a planetarium is not an astronomical clock.
Following Regiomontanus’ death, Moller gives out another piece of ahistorical garbage, she writes:
Mathematical printing continued, and in the following decades the city became a flourishing centre with Regiomontanus’ own De Triangulis (1533), Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus (1543) and Cardano’s Ars Magna testament to ‘Regiomontanus’ importance, not only as a mathematician and astronomer, but also as a publicist a publicist and architect of the renaissance of mathematics.’ (The quote is from Paul Rose’s The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics p. 109).
All three books were published by Johannes Petreius, who had nothing to do with Regiomontanus’ efforts as a printer/publisher, but who had learnt the printing trade from his uncle Adam Petri in Basel before moving to Nuremberg in 1523 almost certainly to try and fill the gap left by the death of Anton Koberger. Moller never mentions Petreius the most important scientific publisher in Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century or Koberger, who started printing in Nuremberg a year before Regiomontanus and was in the last decades of the fifteenth century and the first decades of the sixteenth, the biggest printer publisher in the whole of Europe.
Moller now moves on to Regiomontanus’s partner in Nuremberg, Bernhard Walther and the house he purchased, when he retired in 1501. When I read what she now wrote I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry:
He had two windows and a balcony built onto the top floor of the southern gable and installed his instruments there, creating a modest, yet ground-breaking observatory – the first identifiable one in northern Europe.
Actually, Walther added the entire third floor to the building. I will show you a picture of his balcony to explain my reaction!
Photo: Nora Reim
Source: Astronomie in Nürnberg
As you can see it is actually a stone window sill on which he supported his instruments when making observations. It is probably less that a metre long and maybe thirty centimetres wide at its widest point. Moller, who obviously not done the necessary research seriously thinks Walther built a balcony because later when discussing the observatory of Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassell, she wonders whether Walther’s balcony served as a role model for Wilhelm’s observing balcony.
She uses Walther’s house to introduce Albrecht Dürer, who bought the house in 1509, because it had been Walther’s house, and it is today a museum dedicated to Dürer. After a couple of introductory lines of biography Moller send Dürer off on his traditional journeyman years of travel and then writes:
When he returned to marry Agnes Frey, the daughter of a wealthy brass maker, he was a master of copperplate engraving, an almost unknown art in Nuremberg.
Copperplate engraving was an almost unknown art everywhere. Also, when Dürer returned to Nuremberg in 1494 he was anything but a master in the art but a shaky beginner. There are three small copperplate prints from that year that are very obviously the work of a beginner. Also, he didn’t learn the art during his journeyman years of travel. Copper plate engraving was invented by gold smiths and Dürer certainly learnt the art in his father’s workshop. Moller now tackles his first journey to the south, which she following the tradition went to Venice. Modern research doubts that on that first journey Dürer ever left Germany. However, Moller writes:
There were many reasons for him to visit the magical city on the lagoon, but high on the list must have been visiting its printing presses and gathering expertise and contacts for the venture he was about to launch in Nuremberg.
The knowledgeable reader must ask himself at this point, why would Dürer visit Venice to look at printing presses, when by 1595 his godfather Anton Koberger was the biggest printer publisher in Europe. Koberger had printed the Nuremberg Chronicle in 1593, which is full of woodblock prints from the workshop of Michael Wolgemut, Dürer’s master! From Koberger and Wolgemut, Dürer could and did learn everything he needed to know about setting up a print workshop.
We now get a piece of arrant bullshit:
The workshop gave Dürer control, just as it had Regiomontanus. Here he was able to oversee every stage of his cultural output, from initial design to finished painting or print. Dürer’s success in this endeavour, along with the house’s preservation, give us unprecedented access [my emphasis] to one of the most important and innovative workshops, there has ever been. It is a portal into the sixteenth century and the life of Albrecht Dürer.
All leading Renaissance artists set up their own workshops giving them control. Whilst in detail different, Dürer’s workshop was no more innovative that those of Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455), Andrea del Verrocchio (c. 1435–1488), Leonardo’s master, or Dürer’s own master, Michael Wolgemut (1434–1519), who taught Dürer the art of woodblock printing and introduced him to the concept of selling prints individually, which Moller seems to think Dürer invented. He turned the concept into big business but he didn’t invent it.
After a passage of purple prose about the workshop Moller delivers her next metaphorical history of art, pratfall:
Dürer was awestruck by the natural world, obsessed with studying and capturing it. In 1503, he turned his forensic gaze upon a patch of weeds, dug from the surrounding countryside and carried back to the studio where, using pen, ink and watercolour he produced an image of ground-breaking naturalism and beauty. Every plant in the Great Piece of Turf is identifiable, each blade of grass perfectly rendered. This study of nature is scientific in detail and accuracy. Even the roots and soil are shown; it is the first image of its kind.
The Great Piece of Turf is not a parch of weeds, dug from the surrounding countryside and carried back to the studio, it is an artificial construct carefully put together to create an illusion of realism, which is in fact hyper-realistic.
Moller keeps trying to forge a link between Dürer and Regiomontanus that simply didn’t exist. For example, she write:
Inspired by what he had seen in Italy and by Regiomontanus’ enterprise in Nuremberg…
She seems to think that because Regiomontanus set up a printing works in Nuremberg to print books in 1471 that Dürer was copying him when he set up an artist’s workshop in 1495 specialising in woodcut prints. Dürer had served his apprenticeship in the workshop of Michael Wolgemut, who specialised in woodcut prints!
The quote above has a bizarre footnote:
Dürer was a leading member of a circle of intellectuals who saw themselves as Regiomontanus’ successors, men like Walther, Willibald Pirckheimer, Johannes Werner and Johannes Schöner.
Apart from Walther, these men did not see themselves as Regiomontanus’ successors but had varied and complex backgrounds. Although Pirckheimer, Werner, and Schöner were all major scientific figures in Nuremberg during the period Moller covers , she makes no other mention of them or any attempt to describe their significant contributions to Renaissance science. Any non-expert reading her footnote would probably think, “who the fuck are they?”
After a couple of paragraphs of waffle about the importance of patronage, Moller now drifts off to write a five page gloss on the banking family the Fuggers of Augsburg in a chapter about Nuremberg. This ends in Antwerp where we then get the following:
Dürer, visiting in 1520 on his ill-fated mission to find a whale, noted that it was ‘constructed altogether new and at great expense, with a particular tower, wide and large, and with a beautiful garden’.
It would appear that Moller expects her readers to be fully informed about Dürer’s expedition to Zeeland to view a whale beached by a storm, because she gives no further explanation of this statement, except:
Dürer returned home to Nuremberg, weakened from an illness he had caught on his travels and disappointed he had neither secured Charles V’s patronage nor encountered a whale.
Dürer didn’t travel to the Netherlands to see a whale, that was simply an accidental opportunity that occurred whilst he was there. He travelled because the Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian I had died in 1519 and with his death Dürer had lost his Imperial Pension. He travelled to the crowing of Charles V as emperor in Aachen to get his Imperial pension renewed , an endeavour in which he was successful. Apparently that news never reached Moller.
Before leaving Dürer, it is interesting to note that in a book with the subtitle, The Transformation of Science in 16th-Century Northern Europe Moller completely ignores the three maths book Dürer authored, Various Lessons on the Fortification of Cities, Castles, and Localities (Etliche Underricht zu Befestigung der Stett, Schloss und Flecken) (1527), Four Books on Human Proportion (Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion) (1528) and Four Books on Measurement (Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt or Instructions for Measuring with Compass and Ruler) (1525). The latter was the first mathematics book printed in German and was translated into Latin and several major European languages. He also, together with Johann Stabius produced a world map. Most telling in a book which the author says, The stars, or rather astronomy, will be our guide, she completely ignore the fact that Dürer provided the images for the first ever in Europe printed star maps produced by Johann Stabius and Conrad Heinfogel.
We now get a page and a half devoted to the goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer, who moved to Nuremberg in 1534, who as Moller points out was famous for his delicate gold flower but also for his book on the theory of perspective Perspectiva corporum regularium (Perspective of the Regular Solids), which was illustrated by Jost Amman (1539–1591). He was also an instrument maker. Moller tells us:
In 1562, Jamnitzer commissioned a portrait of himself. However, unlike Amman’s goldsmith in the Book of Trades, he is not painted holding the tools of his trade. In his left hand is a silver conversion rule he made himself, designed to compare the weights of different metals; in his right a variable proportional compass – precise mathematical instruments rather than pliers of hammers.
What Jamnitzer is holding in his hands are the tools of his trade! She then goes onto give other examples of Jamnitzer presented with mathematical instruments. Then she writes:
In presenting himself as more than a craftsman, Wenzel was taking the mantle directly from Dürer, continuing his crusade to elevate the status of artists, scholars and artisans. His emphasis on the scientific aspects of his career shows how it was developing during the century, and with it, those who practiced it.
Jamnitzer was possibly the best goldsmith who worked in Nuremberg during the Early Modern Period but he was by no means the only one who designed and made scientific or mathematical instruments and not even the first to do so. Moller is here trying to claim some sort of special status for Jamnitzer that he simply didn’t have.
Moller closes this train wreck of a chapter with a quite frankly ludicrous claim.
Thanks to Regiomontanus, Dürer, and Jamnitzer, Nuremberg was the first place in northern Europe where the combination of commercial success and technological ambition came together to create a new world of knowledge, an inspiring example to others; the city remained a thriving centre of instrument making, but this example too was beginning to spread to other places.
Nuremberg was a major centre for the production of scientific instruments before Regiomontanus moved there; in fact, that’s one of the principle reasons he moved there. It is not known if Regiomontanus actually produced any instruments in Nuremberg. In terms of instrument made in Nuremberg, Jamnitzer was very much a late comer. Whilst Regiomontanus set standards for the quality of his scientific publishing, he general impact as a printer/publisher was minimal compared to the contemporary publishing house of Anton Koberger or in scientific publishing compared to the slightly later Johannes Petreius. Although commercially more successful, Dürer’s workshop was no different to that of his master Michael Wolgemut, from whom he learnt the art of making and marketing woodcut prints. In general Moller completely ignores the people who actually made Nuremberg the centre of a new world of knowledge, Erhard Etzlaub, Willibald Pirckheimer, Johannes Werner and Johannes Schöner, Georg Hartman, Johannes Stabius (not a resident but a frequent visitor), Johannes Neudörffer and, Thomas Venatorius, and many other minor figures.
Having right royally screwed the history of science of sixteenth century Nuremberg, Moller now takes us to the University of Louvain in the Spanish Netherlands. She opens with the arrival of a young John Dee in 1547 and tells us:
It’s hard to believe Dee would not have passed through Antwerp on his way to Louvain, which lies a few hours’ walk through the gently undulating countryside to the south-east.
Antwerp to Louvain is 43.5 kilometres as the crow flies so allowing for normal roads about fifty kilometres by road, it’s not exactly what I would describe as a few hours walk. After a lot of waffle about Antwerp, Louvain and the Spanish Netherlands we arrive at the University of Louvain, and Moller informs us:
When Dee arrived, Louvain University had been educating young men for a little over a century. Known as the ‘Athens of Belgium,’ [Really? Belgium didn’t exist then!] it had grown quickly and was now only second to Paris in reputation.
“…now only second to Paris in reputation?” I known an awful lot of European universities who would seriously dispute that claim. Apart from anything else Louvain only acquired a university library in 1636.
She continues:
Having completed the traditional BA degree, the three main MA subjects on offer were theology, philosophy and medicine.
On the medieval university the MA was a teaching qualification, qualifying the holder to teach undergraduates. The advanced study was for a doctorate and the three subjects were theology, law and medicine.
We get a lot of background detail about the history of the university till we arrive at Andreas Vesalius, who we are told studied in the arts faculty as an undergraduate without a date, it was from 1528 to 1532. “Before long he became he became interested in the family business,” which was medicine. Moller then delivers up the story about Vesalius and Gemma Frisius stealing bits of a skeleton from a gibbet in 1536. Somehow she neglects to mention that Vesalius left Louvain to study medicine in Paris between 1533 and 1536, only returning to Louvain because of armed hostilities.
We now get brief sketches of the life stories of Gemma Frisius and Gerhard Mercator. We are already eight pages into the chapter when finally on page nine we finally get something from the history of science:
In 1529, aged twenty-one and just one year after graduating his BA, he published a new edition of Peter Apian’s astronomical manual of 1524, Cosmographia, ‘carefully corrected and with all errors set to right, by Gemma Frisius’.
So far so good but the title is Cosmographicus liber not Cosmographia and it is not an astronomical manual, it’s a cosmography manual as the title says, which means it covers astronomy, astrology, geography, cartography, navigation, surveying, instrument making etc. Moller continues:
Gemma Frisius had arrived, and from that moment on, the eyes of Europe looked to the Low Countries for progress in geography, cartography, and astronomy.
Correct would be, with the publication of the second edition of Apian’s Cosmographicus liber by Gemma Frisius, Louvain became a new additional centre for progress in geography, cartography, and astronomy, in northern Europe alongside Nuremberg, Ingolstadt, Vienna, Tübingen, Basel and Paris. Moller sinks deeper in the mire:
Apian’s text is a layman’s introduction to astronomy, geography and mathematical instruments, which Frisius adapted to make it more even more [sic] accessible.
Written in Latin and highly technical, the Cosmographicus liber is hardly a layman’s introduction but a serious textbook for cosmography. Also, although Frisius expanded it, and would continue to do so over many new editions, he didn’t, in any real sense make it mor accessible.
Moller continues:
In a canny commercial move, he also began making instruments to sell alongside the text. There were very few workshops producing items like astrolabes and astronomer’s rings, while books like Cosmographia were introducing them to a wider audience, creating a new market.
Nuremberg had a large number of workshops producing mathematical and astronomical instruments, which Moller simply chose to ignore in her highly inadequate account of the city. Georg Hartmann (1489–1564) for example produced sundials, astrolabes, armillary spheres and globes. He was probably the most prolific astrolabe maker in Europe, as he was the first to introduce the serial production of the instrument. We return to Moller:
His next move was to design ‘a geographical globe with the most important stars of the celestial sphere’ – a combined terrestrial and celestial globe. He worked in collaboration with his friend Gaspar van der Heyden, a local goldsmith who did the engraving work.
[…]
He [Gaspar van der Heyden] had already made a globe in 1527 with the monk from Mechelen, Franciscus Monachus. The ‘gores’ (the petal-shaped segments on which the maps were printed before being pasted onto the globes) would have been printed at the publishers in Antwerp, but pasted and finished in the workshop where the spheres were made and inscribed, ‘Gaspar van der Heyden, from whom this work which cost much money and no less labour, may be acquire’.
Gemma published On the Principles of Astronomy and Cosmography, with Instructions for the Use of Globes, and information on the world and on Islands and Other Places Recently Discovered (like his first book printed in Antwerp) to go with the globe.
[…]
In the early sixteenth century, only a small number of workshops produced these marvellous objects [globes], usually engraved sphere of wood or metal made in commission for wealthy clients. The printing press made a new kind of globe possible, one that was made of two hollow hemispheres, usually of wood but sometimes papier mâché and plaster, glued together with the maps printed on gores and then pasted onto the surface. This type of globe was cheaper and easier to produce, enabling workshops to make theme in larger numbers for general sale rather than on commission, reducing the price and increasing their availability. Gemma saw the potential of this and ran with it. His combined globe, which was being produced in Louvain workshops by 1530, was the first of several that he designed, each one with improved geographical information which was constantly being updated by sailors and merchant returning to Antwerp from voyages.
There is an awful lot to unpack here. As far as we know the first cartographer to produce printed gores for a globe was Martin Waldseemüller (c.1470–1520), who made a very small globe, 12cm, of his famous world wall map, the first to use the name America, both in 1507. None of the globes have survived but four sets of gores are still extant.
Unlike his map, Waldseemüller’s globe had little impact and it was Johannes Schöner (1477–1547), one of those mathematical practitioners from Nuremberg, who Moller ignored, who is credited with the first serial production of printed globes. Schöner produced a 27 cm terrestrial printed globe in 1515. This was followed by a matching celestial globe in 1517. He established the concept of matching pairs of terrestrial and celestial globes and the way that they were mounted that remained a standard down to the end of the nineteenth century. Standards also adopted by Gemma Frisius and his pupil Mercator. The cartography of the terrestrial globe was clearly based on the Waldseemüller wall map and the only surviving copy of the wall map, now in the Library of Congress, was that owned by Schöner. In 1533, Schöner produced a new pair of terrestrial and celestial globes with updated cartography.
Although very few of Schöner’s globes have survived, they were made of papier mâché and plaster, we now from correspondence that they were very much in demand and that he sold comparatively many of them, throughout Europe. The celestial globe in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, painted in London in 1533, is one of Schöner’s and the small terrestrial globe is at least based on Schöner’s work. Schöner also printed books on how to use his globes, Luculentissima quaedam terrae tortius descriptio (A Very Clear Description of the Whole Earth) for his terrestrial globe and Solidi et sphaerici corporis sive globi astronomici canones usum (Manual for the Use of the Solid Spherical body and Astronomical Globe) for his celestial globe.
The demand for Schöner’s globes was very high and he could not fulfil it. In the 1520’s the Antwerp printer publisher, Roeland Bollaert had Schöner’s books but couldn’t get any of his globes. It was he who commissioned Franciscus Monachus (c. 1490–1565) together with Gaspar van der Heyden (c. 1496–c. 1549) to produce a terrestrial globe together with a descriptive book De Orbis Situ ac descriptione ad Reverendiss. D. archiepiscopum Panormitanum, Francisci, Monachi ordinis Franciscani, epistola sane qua luculenta. (A very exquisite letter from Francis, a monk of the Franciscan order, to the most reverend Archbishop of Palermo, touching the site and description of the globe), which he printed in Antwerp, in 1524. None of the Monachus globes have survived.
In 1529, as Moller correctly pointed out Roeland Bollaert printed the second edition of Peter Apian’s Cosmographia as edited by the young Gemma Frisius. A year later he commissioned Frisius together with Gaspar van der Heyden to produce a new terrestrial globe and this is the globe that Moller describes as a combined terrestrial and celestial globe. For this Frisius wrote his De principiis astronomiae et cosmograpiae deque usu globi (Principles of Astronomy and Cosmography and the Use of the Globe), which was published by the Antwerp publisher Johannes Graheus. It is probably that Roeland Bollaert had died in the meantime. Monarchus had also acknowledged his debt to both Schöner and Peter Apian in his De Orbis Situ. None of these globes have survived.
This globe “the first of several that he designed”! In 1536, Frisius produced, in imitation of Schöner, a matched pair of terrestrial and celestial globes. One of each has survived but the terrestrial globe has lost its stand. Interestingly, Frisius’ celestial globe uses for the constellations the images created by Dürer for the Stabius/Dürer/Heinfogel printed star maps that Moller didn’t think worth mentioning. The globe from 1530 and the globe pair from 1536 were the only globes that Gemma Frisius produced. Moller claims the 1536 globe pair was commissioned by the Emperor Charles V, it wasn’t. Charles V granted him a patent which is something else altogether.
Gerard Mercator, who was a pupil of Gemma Frisius, provided the italic inscriptions on the globe pair from 1536, Moller informs us:
Mercator had already made several maps by this point and had begun to use an Italian cursive script called cancellerescato mark up place names.
Mercator’s earliest map, a wall map of the Holy land was produced in 1537 after he had finished work on Frisius’ globes.
Having dealt with the history of Frisius’ globe production I’ll go back to Moller’s description of his publication in 1533 of the appendix to the third edition of the Cosmographia explaining triangulation. This she manages reasonably well although her explanation of triangulation is a bit terse. She then ruins it with the following:
Triangulation made it possible, for the first time, to correctly locate places on a map, to capture the vast tracts of the planet and plot them onto the page to scale. The whimsical maps of the Middle Ages like the Mappa Mundi in Hereford cathedral, which its absence of geographical knowledge, presented a vision of the cosmos based on imagination and faith, were gradually replaced by accurate charts and surveys.
I politely suggest that Moller takes a course of study in the histories of surveying and cartography. Whilst triangulation, as described by Frisius, improved the accuracy of surveying, map makers had been producing reasonably accurate maps long before Frisius was born, using other methods of surveying. Some of those methods were actually described in Peter Apian’s Cosmographia that Frisius took over. The Mappa Mundi in Hereford cathedral is one is termed a philosophical map and serves a different function, namely that of presenting a philosophical, in this case Christian, world view. She then goes off the rails with:
Maps enabled geography (the description of the world based on observation and measurement) to gradually eclipse cosmography (the conception of the universe based on philosophy and conjecture), changing the way humanity saw the world and how to approach it as an area of study.
I really don’t know where to begin in dismantling this wonderfully wrong pair of definitions. Perhaps we could start with the book that Ptolemy wrote in the second century CE, his Geōgraphikḕ Hyphḗgēsis, lit. Geographical Guidance, which was titled in Latin in different edition both Geographia and Cosmographia. This was a collection of maps based as far as possible on observation and measurement, although it presupposed the philosophical assumption that the oecumene, i.e. Europe, Asia, Africa, constituted the entire world. Later the two words became distinguished, geography referring to what we now understand under the term, and cosmography referring to a description of the entire cosmos, which included geography as one of its constituents along with astronomy etc. Exactly that which Apian’s Cosmographia delivered.
There are lots and lots of examples of maps based on observation and measurement, as far as it went, between Ptolemy’s Geographia and the invention of triangulation.
We now get a lot of filler about how the workshops in Louvain might have appeared, we don’t actually know, then Moller makes the following categorical claim:
By the mid-1540s the workshops of Louvain were famous for producing the most accurate and most beautiful tools for studying astronomy that money could buy, eclipsing even the masters of Nuremberg.
This is hyperbolic hogwash. The instruments coming out of Louvain were indeed excellent quality but they did not eclipse the masters of Nuremberg.
We get nothing almost nothing from Moller about Mercator’s cartographical work, although he is without doubt the most significant cartographer of the sixteenth century. We do get a longish account of his imprisonment on religious ground and then on his friendship with John Dee. Moller tells us that they spent their time discussing astrology. In this context she also claims:
“Astrology had been under attack for several decades; Mercator and Dee were keen to ground it on a more scientific basis and place it within Copernicus’ new cosmographical framework.”
Astrology was always under attack from somebody or other but I know of no special state of attack in the first half of the sixteenth century: Steven Vanden Broecke has this to say about those discussions as related by John Dee:
Except for the present disc, Mercator has left no explicit record of his attitude towards astrology prior to his departure from Louvain to Duisburg in 1552. An important indirect source, however, is John Dee’s Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558), which is dedicated to Mercator. After graduating from the University of Cambridge, the English polymath, John Dee (1527±1608) made two study tours to Louvain, one in the summer of 1547 and a second from June 1548 until at least July 1550. Apparently Dee spent much of his second stay at Louvain `learning and philosophizing ’ with Mercator. The precise content of these discussions is clarified in the preface: `Your next to last letter, in which you seemed to wish to refresh my memory of that noble debate formerly carried on between us, has given me an occasion to choose, in preference to all others, that subject which I am now to treat.’
In other words, the topic of the Propaedeumata Aphoristica is the same as that of parts of Dee and Mercator’s debates at Louvain. Nicholas Clulee’s studies have established the Propaedeumata as Dee’s attempt to provide astrology with a firm physical and epistemological basis. In the common vein of Aristotelian natural philosophy, Dee explains that natural change is ultimately caused by celestial influence, adding the no less unexceptional conviction that such change is subject to a natural and predictable causality[1].
Traditionally Aristotelian, no mention of Copernicus!
Towards the end of the chapter Moller tells us:
Gemma died in 1555, and Mercator had left Louvain for the peace of Protestant Duisburg over the German border three years earlier, but the workshop continued to thrive under Gemma’s son Cornelius and his colleague Walter Arsenius. The number of instruments that survive suggest impressive production levels, and makers across the continent were influenced by the design and quality the city stood for, just as astronomers were enabled to make better, more accurate observations than ever before.
So much hogwash in one brief paragraph. Cornelius Gemma didn’t make instruments and in terms of the earlier comments on astrology in Louvain it is interesting to note that he shared in his father’s efforts to restore ancient Ptolemaic practice to astrology, drawing on the Tetrabiblos. What was that about Copernicus? Gualterus Arsenius, Gemma Frisius’ nephew, was the head of the family that actually produced the largest number of astronomical instruments in the Louvain workshop. The workshop was productive but no more or less so than other major European instrument workshops. The instruments from Louvain were no more accurate than those from earlier European workshops.
Moller ramps up the stupidity a couple of lines further on:
The expertise in designing evermore accurate instruments enhanced the quality of observational data, its usefulness and status. This strengthened the role of instruments in the scientific enterprise; today, technology is so integral it is no longer possible to draw a line between the two. Modern astronomy is cutting-edge technology, and the complex telescopes that empower us to see into the darkest corners of the universe have their roots in the workshops of Louvain, and the standards and ideals that were generated there.
This is in the favourite expression of my friend the HISTSCI_HULK pure hyperbolics. The instruments makers in Louvain did not create any new or novel instruments and although their quality was high, their accuracy was not greater than other astronomical instrument makers in the sixteenth century. Lastly astronomy had been the cutting-edge technology for its time since at the latest Ptolemy. To suggest that modern astronomy has its roots in the workshops of Louvain any more than in the workshops of Nuremberg, of medieval Baghdad, ancient Alexandria or first millennium BCE Mesopotamia is quite simply bullshit.
Having entered Louvain with the young John Dee, Moller now takes us back with him to his house in Mortlake, in those days a small parish on the Thames about ten miles to the west of the City of London. Moller wishes to present Dee’s house and its library as one of her “Stargazer’s Palaces”. As with so many people who write about Dee she emphasises his occult activities whilst almost totally ignoring his scientific activities. She mentions, quoting Dee, that when he returned from Louvain he brought globes and scientific instruments with him, pointing out their scarcity in England at the time. Then she tells us:
Globes were not produced domestically until the 1590s, so the only way to get one, or two (from 1551 onwards the publication of Mercator’s celestial globe to go with the terrestrial one of 1541 set the fashion for them almost always being sold in pairs [my emphasis]), was to import them from abroad.
Both Gemma Frisius and Mercator made matching pairs of terrestrial and celestial globes in imitation of Johannes Schöner, who “set the fashion for them almost always being sold in pairs.”
She mentions several times his financial problems and his difficulties in finding patrons/employment, whilst hardly mentioning his extensive, and historically very important, employment as an advisor and teacher of navigation, cartography etc. for the Muscovy Company amongst others. This is made even more bizarre, as she explains that Dee owned instruments designed by Richard Chancellor (c. 1521–1556). She writes:
Chancellor was a navigator who had been introduced to Dee by their mutual patron Sir Henry Sidney. He led voyages for the Muscovy Company which failed to find the Northeast Passage, but opened trade with Russia and took Chancellor to Ivan the Terrible’s court in Moscow.
She fails to mention that Dee, who worked as an advisor, teacher, and supplier of charts and instruments for ships masters and pilots of the Muscovy Company, was actually Chancellor teacher. He also wrote his The Astronomicall and Logisticall Rules and Canons to calculate the Ephemerides to be used on the first Northeast Passage voyage, by Willoughby and Chancellor.
We now get a classic, Moller writes:
Sailors needed instruments, especially astrolabes to help them navigate…
To quote David King, leading historian of scientific instruments and one of the greatest living experts on astrolabes, “astrolabes were never used for navigation.” In case you think she was referring to mariner’s astrolabe, she continues:
…and one of these, now in a museum in Belgium, is engraved with Edward VI the Duke of Northumberland’s coats of arms. It was made in 1552 by Thomas Gemini, a founder of the instrument making trade in England, who was affected by the same religious persecution that pushed Mercator to flee Louvain and settle in the Protestant backwater of Duisburg.
We then get the “life stories” of Thomas Gemini, Leonard Digges, and Thomas Digges all in one page of the book. …
At this point, as noted above I broke off in frustration!
[1] Steven Vanden Broecke, Dee, Mercator, and Louvain Instrument Making: An Undescribed Astrological Disc by Gerard Mercator (1551), Annals of Science, 58, 2001, 219-240 p. 226
The Renaissance Mathematicus 