De la Sfera del Mondo and De le Stelle Fisse: An Edition and English Translation

There is no definitive edition of Piccolomini’s two astronomical treatises. Although first published in 1540, both texts underwent major transformations during the periods of their greatest popularity. As has been discussed in Chap. 2 , the contents of De la Sfera were enlarged by over a third in 1561, and the whole text was completely rewritten in 1566. Elly Dekker’s analysis of the tables and maps of De le Stelle Fisse has shown that they were also subject to repeated minor alterations. Beyond this, however, even though a modern bibliographer can argue that there were at least 22 independent editions of one or both of Piccolomini’s treatises published between 1540 and 1600 (see Appendix 1), there is ample evidence to suggest that some publishers reorganised the content of these volumes and others inserted new pages with corrections and emendations on a seemingly ad hoc basis, such that what one would normally consider to be a single ‘edition’ turns out to be an evolving compilation of intermittently updated quires. In this regard, the two treatises seem to exist more like living entities—one might argue: more similar to a hand-crafted manuscript than to the modern notion of a hide-bound, static ‘book’.