Nicolaus Copernicus on This Day in History

 

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This day in history: Nicolaus Copernicus's book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was added to the Index of Forbidden Books on this day in 1616, 73 years after it was first published. This book is the seminal work on the heliocentric theory of the earth which argued that the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun at the center of the Universe. The Ptolemaic model that everything revolved around the earth (geocentrism) was the dominant theory before this for centuries.

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books) was a list of publications deemed heretical or contrary to morality by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (a former Dicastery of the Roman Curia), and Catholics were forbidden to read them.

Noteworthy figures on the Index include Simone de Beauvoir, Nicolas Malebranche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, André Gide, Nikos Kazantzakis, Emanuel Swedenborg, Baruch Spinoza, Desiderius Erasmus, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, John Milton, John Locke, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, and Hugo Grotius. The first woman to be placed on the list was Magdalena Haymairus in 1569, who was listed for her children's book Die sontegliche Episteln über das gantze Jar in gesangsweis gestellt (Sunday Epistles on the whole Year, put to the test). Other women include Anne Askew, Olympia Fulvia Morata, Ursula of Munsterberg (1491–1534), Veronica Franco, and Paola Antonia Negri (1508–1555). Contrary to popular opinion, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species was never included.

There have been cases of reversal with respect to works that were on the Index, such as those of Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei. The Inquisition's ban on reprinting Galileo's works was lifted in 1718 when permission was granted to publish an edition of his works (excluding the condemned Dialogue) in Florence. In 1741 Pope Benedict XIV authorized the publication of an edition of Galileo's complete scientific works which included a mildly censored version of the Dialogue. In 1758 the general prohibition against works advocating heliocentrism was removed from the Index of prohibited books, although the specific ban on uncensored versions of the Dialogue and Copernicus's De Revolutionibus remained. All traces of official opposition to heliocentrism by the church disappeared in 1835 when these works were finally dropped from the Index.

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