ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Translation as Changing Perspective in Scholarly Mediation: The Four Anglophone Renditions of Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera

• In Event: The Language of Science

English Abstract

This presentation examines translation as a mode of scholarly mediation that changes its perspective throughout the four known Anglophone renditions of Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera: Anthony Ascham’s The Spere (1527), William Thomas’s The Booke of John de Sacro Busco, that treateth of the Sphere (1550), Thomas Van Cleve’s A Study of the Sources of the De Sphaera Mundi of Joannes De Sacrobosco (1921), and Lynn Thorndike’s The Sphere of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators (1949). Spanning more than four centuries, these translations illuminate how mediation – interpretation, explanation, adaptation – shaped and shifted the transmission of medieval cosmology into differing epistemic perspectives – from Tudor humanism to twentieth-century historiography. Translation in this lineage operates on two temporal axes: forward mediation, in which Renaissance translators domesticated scholastic astronomy for vernacular readers, and backward mediation, in which modern scholars sought to recover the historical perspective of the Latinate medieval text via “Englishing” the Sphere. Ascham and Thomas employ the vernacular to cultivate and popularize the Sphere, transforming a scholastic manual into a vehicle for civic and linguistic reform. Van Cleve and Thorndike, by contrast, translate in the service of philology and historical reconstruction, turning the Sphere into a document of intellectual archaeology. Through this comparison, translation emerges as both an interpretive and historiographical act—a means of negotiating between languages, disciplines, and epochs. By tracing the shifting purposes of these four translators, I argue that De Sphaera endures not as a static cosmological treatise but as a continuous site of mediation, inquiry, and variable perspective. In this sense, translation itself becomes a method of writing the history of science.

Author

• James Brannon, Independent Scholar