Learning the Renaissance cosmos: The circulation of Sacrobosco's De sphaera mundi in sixteenth-century Italy*

This article investigates the late Renaissance dissemination of Joannes de Sacrobosco's Tractatus de sphaera mundi in the Italian book market. The Tractatus was a widely circulated textbook of geocentric astronomy that served as the foundation of astronomical knowledge and applied mathematics from the thirteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries. Its influence remained strong throughout the establishment of Copernicanism, and gradually faded as Newtonianism provided the permanent paradigm for the Enlightenment science soon to come. Using quantitative methods, digital tools, and social network analysis, this article traces a social geography of the Sphaera's owners and aims to profile the a cultural morphology of the private collections of graduate and post-graduate individuals at the end of the sixteenth century.