The Earliest Astronomical Tables in French (c. 1271)

Abstract

In memory of Emmanuel Poulie1. Introduction: Content and History of MS Bernkastel-Kues 215Among the astronomical codices that once belonged to the famous scholar Nicholas of Cues (1401-64), MS Bernkastel-Kues, Hospitalsbibliothek 215, has drawn little attention until now. The old catalogue published in 1905 by Jakob Marx, and Alois Krchnak's paper on Nicholas's astronomical manuscripts and instruments, are still useful but rather imprecise.' David King briefly described the last part of this codex in an appendix of his book The ciphers of the monks: MS Bernkastel-Kues CusanusStift 215,8 (ff. 103r-123v), he said, in a fourteenth century monastic hand, contains a set of solar, lunar and planetary tables and canons in the Picard or Walloon (?) dialect of medieval French, with Paris mentioned in some of the planetary tables (and a latitude of 48° used in the tables of oblique ascensions) and Ghent specifically mentioned in the canons (f. 128r).2 But no one seems to have previously noticed, in the second chapter of these French canons devoted to the calculation of the longitude of the Sun, the last sentence:Adone ares le vrai liu dou Soleil sans l'octave spere, ki est 9 degreis et 13 menus l'an del Incarnacion 1271, et cascun an monte le moitiet d'un menut?Therefore you'll get the true place of the Sun without the eighth sphere, which is 9 degrees and 1 3 minutes the year of Incarnation 1 27 1 , and each year it increases half a minute.The position of the eighth sphere is here mentioned in present indicative and is roughly coherent with the localization of this sphere at 9; 13,14,30,1° on 8 August 1271, i.e. the first day of a.h. 670, as Fritz S. Pedersen has deduced from a table of the motion of the eighth sphere for A.D. 1271-82 conserved in an Italian astronomical manuscript of the second half of the thirteenth century.4 The year 1271 could have been considered as a radix, but if these anonymous French canons and tables correspond to each other, we can reasonably infer that both were originally composed c. 1271.MS Bernkastel-Kues 215 is a codex of 132 folios, 252 ? 197 mm, in parchment. It was copied during the first half of the fourteenth century by one main hand, with some annotations of the fifteenth century (c. 1422-40) that may have done by Nicholas of Cues himself. The whole manuscript is thematically coherent since it contains seven Latin texts on optics and astronomy: John Peckham's Perspectiva (ff. lra-24ra); the Almanack planetarum of William of Saint-Cloud (ff. 24va-84v); the canons of Prophatius Judeus's Almanack perpetuimi and an extract of the tabular part of this perpetual almanac based on the radix of 1300 (ff. 85ra-94v); four treatises composed by or ascribed to Thebit (Thabit ibn Qurra), namely the De quantitatibus stellarum, De motu octave sphere, Uber de his que indigent expositione antequam legaturAlmagesti, and De imaginatione sphere (ff. 95ra-102vb). The French section is located at the end of manuscript: ff. 103r-127r for the tables and ff. 127va-132vb for the canons. Apart from Thebit's treatises, this codex contains scientific material put in circulation in the second half or at the very end of the thirteenth century, with an astronomical part still up-to-date before 1320 and the development of the Latin Alfonsine tables in Paris.The geographical discrepancy between the tables (adapted for Paris) and the canons (which mention only one place, Ghent) is of course a limit for their accuracy. But this discrepancy is partially offset by their linguistic consistency, with features more or less shared between Picard and Walloon, which is nicely consistent with the city of Ghent.5 This invites a mixed hypothesis on their possible origin: the adaptation of the tables to the meridian and latitude of Paris and the reference to Ghent in the canons direct us to the Picard Nation of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Paris, for we know that the students of Ghent belonged to this Nation. …