Hieronymus Schreiber

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Hieronymus Schreiber (* unknown; † 1547 in Paris, hence Jerôme Schreiber ) was a physician , mathematician and astronomer from Nuremberg .

Schreiber had studied with Philipp Melanchthon in Wittenberg . Because of his good credentials, he was considered a possible successor to the chair of Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514–1574), who, however , received another Nuremberg citizen in Erasmus Flock (1514–1568).

It is thanks to Schreiber that it was discovered that the foreword to the main work by Nicolaus Copernicus did not come from Copernicus himself. In this preface to De revolutionibus orbium coelestium from 1543, the importance of the heliocentric worldview, which Copernicus wanted to prove, is weakened to a mere hypothesis to simplify calculations. Scholars had been amazed at this contradiction.

A few decades later, the puzzle was solved. Georg Joachim Rheticus had prepared the Copernicus plant in Nuremberg for printing, but could not supervise this until the end, as he had to go to Wittenberg. Johannes Petreius , the Nuremberg printer, had sent Schreiber a copy fresh off the press in 1543. After Schreiber died in 1547, the book about Michael Mästlin came into the possession of Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). Through a note from Schreiber found in it, Kepler revealed that it was Andreas Osiander who had written the foreword to De Revolutionibus . The reformer Osiander changed the work of the Catholic canon Copernicus in Protestant Nuremberg so that it was acceptable to Protestant theologians, and was also classified by the Vatican as in need of correction only in 1620.

Schreiber traveled to Italy in 1542 and died in 1547 while studying in Paris. He wrote down weather observations from Saxony in an almanac by Johannes Stöffler (1452–1543) and Jacob Pflaum .

literature

  • Kurt Pilz: 600 years of astronomy in Nuremberg . Nuremberg: Hans Carl 1977, p. 216
  • Georg Andreas Will: Nürnbergisches Gelehrtenlexikon vol. 3. Nürnberg: Lorenz Schüpfel 1757, p. 576

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Edward Rosen: Three Copernican Treatises: The Commentariolus of Copernicus, The Letter Against Werner, The Narratio Prima of Rheticus , Courier Dover Publications, 2004 ISBN 0486436055 , p. 24
  2. ^ Arthur Koestler: The Sleepwalkers, p. 169