De sphaera mundi (Latin meaning On the Sphere of the World, sometimes rendered The Sphere of the Cosmos; the Latin title is also given as Tractatus de sphaera, or simply De sphaera) is a medieval introduction to the basic elements of astronomy written by Johannes de Sacrobosco c. 1230. Based heavily on Ptolemy’s Almagest, and drawing additional ideas from Islamic astronomy, it was one of the most influential works of pre-Copernican astronomy in Europe. Sacrobosco's De sphaera mundi was the most successful of several competing thirteenth-century textbooks on this topic. It was used in universities for hundreds of years and the manuscript copied many times before the invention of the printing press. The first printed edition appeared in 1472 in Ferrara, and many more editions were printed over the next two hundred years. The work was frequently supplemented with commentaries on the original text.
References
- Pedersen, Olaf. "The Corpus Astronomicum and the Traditions of Medieval Latin Astronomy: A Tentative Interpretation. Pp. 59-76 in Owen Gingerich and Jerzy Dobrzycki, eds., Colloquia Copernicana III. Wroclaw: Ossolineum, 1975.
- Thorndike, Lynn. The Sphere of Sacrobosco and its Commentators. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1949.
