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”I know that I am mortal by nature and ephemeral, but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia...” -Ptolemy

1528 FIRST EDITION of the first Latin translation from the original Greek text of one of the world’s most influential scientific texts.

”Claudius Ptolemy's great contribution to astronomy was his famous work the Almagest, which presented formally the astronomical theories of the day that had evolved from the great debates within the different Greek philosophical schools... Ptolemy did not claim that his cosmological model described the actual conditions. It simply reproduced geometrically the observed motions of the known heavenly bodies and enabled their positions to be easily predicted for any particular time... Ironically, even when Copernicus’ heliocentric theory had replaced the Ptolemaic system, many astronomers used Ptolemy's model to predict the motion of the planets, since its intricate calculations produced more accurate values” (David H. Clark; Matthew D. H. Clark, Measuring the Cosmos).

The Almagest, written in about 150 AD, "served as the basic guide for Islamic and European astronomers until about the beginning of the 17th century. Its original name was Mathematike Syntaxis (“The Mathematical Arrangement”); Almagest arose as an Arabic corruption of the Greek word for greatest (megiste). It was translated into Arabic about 827 and then from Arabic to Latin in the last half of the 12th century. Subsequently, the Greek text circulated widely in Europe, although the Latin translations from Arabic continued to be more influential.

"The Almagest is divided into 13 books. Book 1 gives arguments for a geocentric, spherical cosmos and introduces the necessary trigonometry, along with a trigonometry table, that allowed Ptolemy in subsequent books to explain and predict the motions of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars. Book 2 uses spherical trigonometry to explain cartography and astronomical phenomena (such as the length of the longest day) characteristic of various localities. Book 3 deals with the motion of the Sun and how to predict its position in the zodiac at any given time, and Books 4 and 5 treat the more difficult problem of the Moon’s motion. Book 5 also describes the construction of instruments to aid in these investigations. The theory developed to this point is applied to solar and lunar eclipses in Book 6.

"Books 7 and 8 mainly concern the fixed stars, giving ecliptic coordinates and magnitudes for 1,022 stars. This star catalog relies heavily on that of Hipparchus (129 BC), and in the majority of cases Ptolemy simply converted Hipparchus’s description of the location of each star to ecliptic coordinates and then shifted these values by a constant to account for precession over the intervening centuries. These two books also discuss the construction of a star globe that adjusts for precession. The remaining five books, the most original, set forth in detail geometric models for the motion of the five planets visible to the naked eye, together with tables for predicting their positions at any given time" (Britannica).

Commissioned by Pope Nicholas V (1446-1455), translated from Greek into Latin by Georgius Trapezuntius (1396-1472), edited by Luca Gaurico (1476-1558). An earlier Latin version had appeared in 1515, but was translated from the Arabic. Norman 1760; See Stillwell 97; Wellcome 5281.



Venice: Lucantonio Giunta, 1528. Tall folio (313 x 218 mm), 18th-century full vellum with ink notation on spine. Collation: A6 a-s8 (s8 blank); 149 leaves (of 150, without a blank). Title printed in red and black. Printed in Roman, Gothic and Greek types with woodcut mathematical diagrams in margins throughout. Occasional light staining, mostly to margins; small hole in q8 (affecting border of table, a likely paper flaw); repairs to hinges. A beautiful wide-margined copy.

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