Everything about Commentariolus totally explained
In the
Commentariolus (
Little Commentary),
Nicolaus Copernicus outlined his revolutionary
Copernican heliocentrism theory of the solar system, about three decades before he finally published his major six volume work
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543.
Copernicus didn't publish the
Commentariolus, and handed it only to few friends. It is unknown who received the
Commentariolus, and when. He had written the preliminary manuscript description of his early version of the theory sometime before 1515. Some scholars believe it was as late as 1533 due to the maturity of the theory. It was never printed or otherwise published during Copernicus's lifetime, and its existence was only known indirectly until copies were published in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The only other astronomical work written by Copernicus, besides the
Commentariolus and
De Revolutionibus, was a letter written in 1524 to one of his former fellow students at the
Cracow Academy, Bernard Wapowski (
The Letter against Werner). This letter, which, like the
Commentariolus, circulated in manuscript but wasn't published during Copernicus's own lifetime, criticized
De motu octauæ Sphæræ tractatus primus, a work published in 1522 by
Johannes Werner, which outlined a method of trepidations to account for purported variations in the rate of precession of the equinoxes.
The Commentariolus was known among scholars. In 1533,
Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter delivered in Rome a series of lectures outlining Copernicus' theory. The lectures were heard with interest by
Pope Clement VII and several Catholic cardinals. On 1 November 1536,
Nikolaus Cardinal von Schönberg, Archbishop of Capua, wrote a letter to Copernicus from Rome, urging him to publish.
Georg Joachim Rheticus and
Tiedemann Giese then compiled an introduction to Copernicus' theory, the
Narratio Prima, to be published by
Franz Rhode in 1540. This was instrumental for Copernicus' approval to publish
De revolutionibus.
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