Book Review: In Praise of Rheticus: Rheticus, Wegbereiter der Neuzeit (1514–1574)

Abstract

IN PRAISE OF RHETICUS Rheticus, Wegbereiter der Neuzeit (1514-1574). Edited by Gerhard Wanner and Philipp Schobi-Fink (Rheticus-Gesellschaft, Feldkirch, 2010). Pp. 165. euro30. ISBN 978-3-902-60126-1.A little hero-worship is not a bad thing. Georg Joachim Rheticus, Copernicus's only student and apostle - without whom De revolutionibus may never have been published - deserves some high-quality adulation, and he gets it in this attractive book lucidly written by proud fellow citizens of Rhaetia, the region from which he took his name and in which his birthplace, Feldkirch (now in the Austrian province of Vorarlberg), is located.Beyond liberal doses of local history, however, this book offers much to engage historians of astronomy. It opens with an overview of the life of Rheticus by the mathematician Philipp Schobi-Fink, followed by two sections by Karl Heinz Burmeister, doyen of Rheticus studies, examining some of the many byways of Rheticus's character and career - his religion, his illnesses, his practice of medicine, his Paracelsianism, his travels and intellectual contacts - of these leading back to his accomplishments in mathematics, especially trigonometry, which Rheticus intended to serve Copernican astronomy. It is fascinating here to see Burmeister, after almost a half-century of continuous Rheticus research, supplementing the account first offered in his three-volume Bio-Bibliographie published in the late 1960s.Equally interesting is Helmut Sonderegger's story of the Rheticus-monument commissioned by the city of Feldkirch and completed in 2009: a Betstuhl, a stone kneeling-bench, in the top of whose high back is carved a cruciform aperture through which the light of the Sun, as it makes its 'journey' from solstice to solstice, traces out, at true noon, a meridian line on the pavement in front of Feldkirch Cathedral. Sonderegger transforms what could be mere Heimatkunde into an engaging account of the astronomical significance of gnomons, whose largest form, the obelisk, became Rheticus's trademark, appearing on the title pages of his scientific publications after the death of Copernicus. (By the obelisk alone, Rheticus wrote in 1557, all the laws [of astronomy] may be exactly discovered and described.) Sonderegger rounds out the narrative by returning to Rheticus's initial Copernican encounters in Varmia: to his praise in the Narrano prima of a small gnomon owned by Copernicus's friend Tiedemann Giese, and to Giese's 1543 donation of the same instrument to Duke Albrecht of Prussia. This account is illustrated with a colour photograph (plus transcription) of Giese's cover letter to the Duke, which explicitly mentions Rheticus. …