Regiomontanus on Triangles.

De triangulis omnimodis by Johann Muller; Barnabas Hughes

Review by: S. A. Jayawardene
Isis, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Autumn, 1968), pp. 344-345
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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344 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 59 3- 198 (1968)
ish authority and emphasis on observa-
tion and experiment.
Such recourse points to a fundamental
weakness in the author's approach. He
takes it for granted that nominalism,
emphasis on the individual event or
datum, discontent with the School phi-
losophy, interest in the problem of anal-
ysis, careful observation and experiment
are all fundamentally related both log-
ically and historically, and in fact pro-
vide the essential background to the
scientific revolution (e.g., pp. 147, 192).
Copernicus, for example, was successful
because he applied a new method-care-
ful observation and an open mind-in
place of the presuppositions of the re-
ceived philosophy (p. 275). Now the
work of Burtt and Koyre, among others,
made this naive view untenable some
years ago, and it is most regrettable
that a philosopher writing seriously on
the scientific methodology of the six-
teenth century should think it unneces-
sary to acquaint himself with their con-
clusions. Acquaintance with the recent
historiography of the scientific revolu-
tion could not only have enriched Cres-
cini's method, it might also have kept
him from repeating old errors, like
making Gilbert an ardent Copernican
(p. 282). This book, therefore, though
a convenient compendium of exegeses of
Renaissance writings on "analysis," does
not offer interpretations of much value
to the historian.
JOHN L. HEILBRON
University of California, Berkeley
Regiomontanus on Triangles. De tri-
angulis omnimodis by Johann Miiller,
otherwise known as Regiomontanus,
translated by Barnabas Hughes, O.F.M.,
with an introduction and notes. x +
298 pp., bibl., index. Madison: Univ.
Wisconsin Press, 1967. $10.00.
De triangulis omnimodis was written
by Regiomontanus between the years
1462 and 1464 during his sojourn in
Italy. The work was listed among the
titles of forthcoming books in a notice
issued by his printing press in Nurem-
berg in 1473/1474. But his return to
Rome in 1475 and his death a year later
prevented the work from being pub-
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lished. The manuscript passed through
several hands before it was bought by
Pirkheimer (1470-1530), a leading citi-
zen of Nuremberg; it was edited by
John Schoner and published by John
Petreus in Nuremberg in 1533. An ap-
pendix contained the De quadratura cir-
culi of Nicholas of Cusa together with
Regiomontanus' refutation. Another edi-
tion, De triangulis planis et sphaericis,
edited by Daniel Santbech, was pub-
lished in 1561 by Hans Petri and Peter
Perna in Basel. This edition is basically
the same as the first except that the ap-
pendix has been left out and in its place
there are a letter of Schoner's dated
1541, Peurbach's Tractatus super propo-
sitiones Ptolemaei de sinibus et chordis,
and Regiomontanus' table of sines and
chords.
Regiomontanus was not the first Eu-
ropean to write on the subject treating
it as an independent discipline. But his
was a complete systematic treatise and
the first to be published. As such it
marked a new era in the history of trig-
onometry. Ernst Zinner1 mentions a
Basel edition of 1546, but he does not
give any bibliographical details. Mat-
theus Beger (d. 1661), Mayor of Reut-
lingen, translated the De triangulis into
German; the unpublished manuscript of
the translation is in the city library.
The present volume consists of a
photographic reproduction of the 1533
edition (excluding the appendix) to-
gether with an annotated English trans-
lation. It is to be welcomed not only
because it makes the original work avail-
able to a wider public, but also because
one is no longer obliged to read the work
in the original Latin. The fact that
Father Hughes has successfully retained
the spirit of the original in his transla-
tion will be appreciated by readers who
find fifteenth-century Latin difficult to
read. In his introduction to the book
Father Hughes has given an outline of
the history of trigonometry prior to
De triangulis and a summary of Regio-
montanus' contribution to the subject.
The biographical sketch that follows is
1 Ernst Zinner, Geschichte und Bibliog-
raphie der astronomischen Literatur in
Deutschland zur Zeit der Renaissance (Leip-
zig: Karl W. Hiersemann, 1941), No. 1900.
 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS,
based on the biography of Regiomon-
tanus written by Gassendi in 1651,
while a few footnotes contain additional
information taken from later studies. It
is unfortunate that Father Hughes has
not chosen to adopt Ernst Zinner's mon-
ograph on Regiomontanus as the basis
for the biographical sketch. Zinner's
work, Leben und Wirken des Johannes
Muller von Konigsberg genannt Regio-
montanus (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1938),
was the result of extensive researches
carried out by him over several years;
it included a comprehensive bibliography
of the writings of Regiomontanus and of
the relevant literature.
So far no one has collated the manu-
script of De triangulis with the pub-
lished versions. Father Hughes does not
tell his readers what happened to the
manuscript after it had passed out of the
hands of Pirkheimer. It was one of the
three autograph manuscripts of Regio-
montanus acquired by C. G. von Murr
(1733-1811), the Nuremberg anti-
quary, who gave a short description of
them in Notitia trium codicum auto-
graphorum Joh. Regiomontani in biblio-
tece Christophori Theophili de Murr
(Nuremberg, 1801). In 1806 he sold
the manuscripts to Tsar Alexander I,
who gave them to the University of
Moscow. By 1858 they had been passed
on to the Pulkovo Observatory, where
they suffered damage during the Second
World War. Zinner had made several
unsuccessful attempts to see these manu-
scripts or least have copies of them. He
eventually saw them during a visit to
the Soviet Union in 1958, by which time
they had been transferred to the archives
of the Academy of Sciences in Lenin-
grad.2
It may be worth noting here that
studies of Regiomontanus have so far
not taken into account his work on
geometry, Problemata geometrica omni-
2 Zinner, "Astronomiegeschichtliche, For-
schungen in Moskau und Leningrad," For-
schungen und Fortschritte, 1959, 33:105. Zin-
ner has published another paper (which the
reviewer has not seen) : "Einige Handschriften
des Johann Regiomontan," Bericht des His-
torischen Vereins fiir die Pflege der Ge-
schichte des ehemaligen Fiirstbistums zu Bam-
berg, 1964, 100:315-323.
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59 - 3 * 198 (1968) 345
moda, or Commensurator. The original
manuscript is considered lost, but the
existence of a sixteenth-century copy in
the city library of Schweinfurt was
noted by Zinner. An annotated German
translation of this work was published
by Blaschke and Schoppe in 1956.3
In the bibliography at the end of the
book Father Hughes has listed the
works used in writing the introduction
and the notes to the text. This seems
hardly necessary, as most of these works
have been cited in the footnotes. It would
have been very useful if he had, instead,
supplemented Zinner's bibliography by
listing the literature relating to Regio-
montanus published since 1938.
These remarks, however, should in
no way diminish our appreciation of the
service that Father Hughes has ren-
dered in providing us with a modern
edition of Regiomontanus' treatise on
trigonometry.
S. A. JAYAWARDENE
The Science Museum, London
3 Wilhelm Blaschke and Ginther Schoppe,
"Regiomontanus: Commensurator,"Abhand-
lungen der Mathematisch-naturzvissenschaft-
lichen Klasse, Akaderie der Wissenschaften
und der Literatur in Mainz, 1956, pp. 445-529.
SEVENTEENTH & EIGHTEENTH
CENTURIES
Hansruedi Isler. Thomas Willis, 1621-
1675. Doctor and Scientist. xiii + 235
pp. + 11 illus., bibl., index. New York/
London: Hafner, 1968. $6.00.
Usually seventeenth-century chemis-
try is identified as iatromedical chem-
istry and this in turn is often described
as a misguided, premature effort to ex-
plain and treat disease on the basis of
chemical principles. The rapidity with
which the general historian of science
dismisses seventeenth-century medical
chemical theories remains within the
order of magnitude of a millisecond. To
these historians the faults and errors of
the past, especially when attributed to
professionals "who should have known
better," cannot be tolerated, much less