Nicholas Copernicus’s Lost Notes Recovered

• In Event: Nicholas Copernicus, the Renaissance Reader

Abstract

In 1897, Ludwik Antoni Birkenmajer visited several Swedish archives with the hope that he could discover books that he suspected Copernicus had owned or used. After his visit in 1897 and return to Kraków, he realized that he had not examined a copy of Johannes Stoeffler’s Calendarium Romanum Magnum (Oppenheym, 1518), which Birkenmajer suspected Copernicus had used for his eclipse observations. After the book was sent to Kraków, Birkenmajer quickly confirmed that Copernicus had annotated it. He reported that the codex had several leaves from a book by Valerius Maximus attached to the inside front and back covers. More importantly, on one of these leaves was an annotation by Copernicus. When examined in 2009, however, I discovered that those leaves were missing from the codex. What follows, the subject of my presentation, is the story of the re-discovery of those leaves as well as other recent discoveries at Uppsala.

Author

• Andre Goddu, Stonehill College