Stolzenberg's "The Holy Office in The Republic of Letters" Revisited: On an Astronomical Diagram and Whether the Papacy Tacitly Permitted the Circulation of an Explicitly Copernican Book in 1660

Abstract

Did the papacy tacitly permit the circulation of an explicitly Copernican book in 1660? One scholar has recently argued that it did. A close analysis of a unique illustration from that book, Andreas Cellarius's atlas Harmonia Macrocosmica, illuminates this argument. This is because the illustration, a diagram showing the relative sizes of the sun, moon, planets, and stars, was among the material reviewed (at the request of the book's publisher) by the Holy Office prior to the book's publication and was pro-Copernican.