Diplomacy, Patronage, and the Preface to De Revolutionibus

Abstract

IntroductionThe Preface to De revolutionibus is an extraordinary document, of which several possible varieties of interpretation have already been explored, without exhausting its potential reasonable interpretations. Some historians have picked out particular passages in the Preface, interpreting them as representing the actual trajectory of discovery or the state of consensus in the scientific community or as exemplifying some modern logic of justification.1 Burtt proposed that a crucial aspect was disagreement among the ancients while the Preface showed the continuity of his thought with the Florentine Neoplatonic-Pythagorean tradition; Duhem used to exemplify methodological points.2 Kuhn did look at the whole Preface, with characteristic emphasis on its presentation of the contemporary internal state of astronomy as monstrous, diffuse and inaccurate.3The principal content of Westman's 1990 paper was a ground-breaking discussion of the Preface's rhetorical methods. Westman noted that these were similar to those used for Reformist tracts and for requests for patronage. Westman's prime comparative example of the latter was the patronage of Gaurico by Pope Paul HI and the methods by which was achieved. However, Westman4 rightly noted both that the Preface followed the idiom of patronage and that there were several ways in which Copernicus and his Preface did not follow the conventional patronage-seeking model. Firstly, he noted that it is revealing of Copernicus ' strategy that he chose not to make predictions about the pope's health, longevity, or political future, nor did he advise him when to make journeys, that is, he did not use some usual methods available to an astronomer for obtaining patronage; and secondly, there was no evidence that Copernicus wrote De revolutionibus with the aim of achieving preferment in the Church hierarchy. Westman retained the word 'patronage', but not used in the strict sense involving an acceptable non-monetary gift by the client being rewarded by the patron with a monetary gift or a court appointment, rather being used in the sense that a patron would afford protection; he suggested that this request was a failure, but that suggestion was relative to the assumed aim of papal suppression of all criticism of the book. The discussion of the Preface in Westman's 201 1 magnum opus5 states clearly that although the Preface was cast in the image of church patronage and reform, is not the language of office-seeking, and proposes that Copernicus was hoping to gain support for his view of the heavens, and, by implication, what the Church ought to teach about it.The paper by Granada and Tessicini6 included some fundamental insights, derived from their highly plausible detailed comparison of Copernicus's Preface with that of Fracastoro's Homocentrica,1 together with the interesting context of politics within the papal Curia. While they continued Westman's theme of the use in the Preface of standard rhetorical devices typical of dedicatory letters of the time, they also continued Westman's theme by noting several more differences between Copernicus's Preface and standard patronage-seeking models. Firstly, the publication of Cardinal Schonberg's 1536 letter prior to the Preface was an act of simulation,8 giving the illusion of a patron-client relation where there was in fact none. Schonberg had not met Copernicus and had died in 1537, well before the composition of the Preface, and no reply by Copernicus had survived.9 Secondly, Copernicus's tone differs markedly from that of a standard dedicatory letter in that he characterises the Pope rather in his function as a servant. Thirdly, whereas was accepted practice for a preliminary approach to be made to the prospective dedicatee's secretariat to check if the dedication would be acceptable, no such approach took place,10 and such an approach would in this case have been highly likely to fail - not least because the reviewing staff would have included clerics concerned with the literal interpretation of Scripture, towards which the Roman Catholic hierarchy had been moving in response to the Protestant challenge. …