Basel’s city fathers sought to avoid the confessional conflicts that were tearing apart some of the neighboring Swiss cantons—and, indeed, metropolises throughout Europe—and to more energetically cultivate commerce rather than delve too deeply into the finer details of intellectual or cultural polemic. Henricpetri, a staunch Lutheran, found Basel much to his liking, where he was known as much as a printer of controversial religious texts as milestones of natural philosophy, even if that did earn a place for several titles printed by the Officina Henricpetrina in the Roman Catholic Church’s infamous Index of Prohibited Books. Indeed, another of JHU’s two copies of this second edition of De revolutionibus is extensively expurgated in indelible ink by the hand of an ecclesiastical censor, thereby rendering it acceptable to a broader Roman Catholic readership.

A student of classical philosophy first educated in Krakow, Copernicus reevaluated contemporary conceptions of the universe by consulting ancient texts and constructing mathematical models that unearthed technical inconsistencies in the age-old geocentric theory popularized in the ancient world by Ptolemy and others. Copernicus’s revolutionary heliocentric model instead hearkened back to the lesser-known ancient Greek Aristarchus of Samos. Though published posthumously, this book aroused an intellectual furor that had hardly settled down a half-century later when Galileo was similarly condemned for supporting the authority of a heliocentric cosmology, running afoul of scriptural orthodoxy that, since the time of Adam and Eve, had placed mankind and planet Earth firmly at the center of all creation.