In separate reviews of The Copernican Question published in the Summer 2012 issue of this journal, Noel Swerdlow and John Heilbron find little that meets their approval while failing to provide readers with a full and accurate summary of the book’s major claims and arguments.* The reviewers engage in an exercise in deconstructive surgery, essentially breaking down and reconstituting the work into separate studies. Swerdlow, who devotes most of his twenty-five page treatment to chapter 3 (with brief side-glances at the (...) introduction, chapters 1, 8, and 11), leaves the impression that my book is almost entirely about Copernicus. Heilbron, who confines himself mostly to what I have to say about Galileo, identifies a .. (shrink)

This article situates Edward Gresham'sAstrostereon, or A Discourse of the Falling of the Planet(1603), a little-known English astronomical treatise, in the context of the cosmo-theological debate on the reconciliation of heliocentrism with the Bible, triggered by the publication of Nicholas Copernicus'sDe revolutionibus orbium coelestiumin 1543. Covering the period from the appearance of the ‘First Account’ of Copernican views presented in Georg Joachim Rheticus'sNarratio Prima(1540) to the composition ofAstrostereonin 1603, this paper places Edward Gresham's commentary and exegesis against the background of (...) the views expressed by his countrymen and the thinkers associated with the Wittenberg University – such as Philipp Melanchthon, Caspar Peucer, and Christoph Rothmann. Comparing the ways in which they employed certain biblical passages – either in favour of or against the Earth's mobility – the paper emphasizes Gresham's ingenious reading of the Hebrew version of the problematic excerpts, and his expansion of the accommodation principle. (shrink)