EPICYCLES AND ECCENTRICS IN THE MIDDLE AGES

摘要

This volume assembles the substantial publications of the historian of astronomy and optics Jose Luis Mancha. As the author explains in the preface, each article in the volume is connected, often via the work of al-Bitruji (fl. 1200) and Gersonides (d. 1344), to medieval astronomers' rejection of epicycles and eccentrics (p. vii). According to quotations from Aristotle's Metaphysics and Simplicius's commentary on Aristotle's De caelo, the first astronomer to devise models of homocentric orbs, without epicycles and eccentrics, to account for available celestial observations was Eudoxus (fl. c. 370 B.C.).