Few people today have heard of Johannes de Sacrobosco, yet his textbook was the most widely read astronomy book ever written. For 500 years, from when it was first written in the Middle Ages to the dawn of the modern world, the Sphere introduced Europeans to the cosmos.
“The Book Everyone Read” traces the unpredictable twists and turns of scientific knowledge and discovery through the stories of Sacrobosco’s readers—and in doing so, tells a new story of the emergence of modern science.
Kathleen Crowther shows how the secret to the Sphere’s longevity lay with its readers themselves, who chose which aspects of Sacrobosco’s original 13th-century text to accept, which to modify, and which to reject.
Far from unchanging, editions of the book were accompanied by commentary, corrections, and details that challenged and revised the book’s original worldview of a finite, Earth-centered cosmos.
