The Sphere of A nthony A scham: Sources for the earliest‐known E nglish‐language cosmography based on S acrobosco's De Sphaera

Abstract

Anthony Ascham's Sphere is historically significant since it appeared a generation earlier than William Thomas's 1553 work, which historians had considered the earliest English-language rendering of De Sphaera. Ascham completed his folio-sized manuscript in 1527 at St. John's College, Cambridge. Suffused with color, diagrams, maps, and volvelles, The Sphere prompts the modern scholar to wonder which printed Latin edition of Sacrobosco's De Sphaera Ascham utilized for translation, and about the intended audience and the work's purpose. This paper demonstrates that Ascham's principal source was Jacques Lefèvre's remarkable Latin commentary on De Sphaera, which he chose to simplify, yet enhance. Ascham abridged Lefèvre's cosmography by removing most of the commentary and simplified it by deleting the advanced mathematics. But he enhanced it by adding more diagrams and tables, an atlas of constellations and their myths, a worldwide geography of maps, and stunning planetary motion volvelles. As the major attraction, he wrote it in English, perhaps as an aristocratic presentation copy, perhaps for the majority of English readers (those without a strong grasp of Latin and mathematics), or perhaps for other reasons outlined in this article. By its ease of comprehension, I suggest that one purpose of The Sphere was to serve as an enticing introduction—a visual primer—to Lefèvre's edition and the entire De Sphaera genre. Yet the single extant manuscript, with no evidence for a print edition, implies that Ascham never achieved this goal. After providing context, this paper discusses how Ascham utilized Lefèvre's volume, and other print sources such as Peter Apian's 1524 Cosmographicus Liber and Hyginus's De Astronomia, to produce The Sphere. The paper concludes by situating Ascham's Sphere within England's 16th-century engagement with the genre of De Sphaera.