One of the most attractive illustrated sixteenth-century editions of De sphaera, illustrated throughout with numerous fine woodcut diagrams and figures, including the famous zonal map of the world. Johannes de Sacrobosco's De sphaera mundi was the most influential elementary treatise on astronomy of the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, remaining the standard university textbook for more than three centuries. Written in Paris during the thirteenth century, it presented the accepted Ptolemaic conception of a spherical Earth centred within a finite universe, explaining the celestial spheres, the motions of the heavens, eclipses, climates and the basic principles of mathematical astronomy. It became one of the earliest scientific texts to enter print, appearing in well over two hundred editions before 1650 and forming the foundation of astronomical instruction throughout Europe.

One of the most attractive illustrated sixteenth-century editions of De sphaera, illustrated throughout with numerous fine woodcut diagrams and figures, including the famous zonal map of the world. Johannes de Sacrobosco's De sphaera mundi was the most influential elementary treatise on astronomy of the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, remaining the standard university textbook for more than three centuries. Written in Paris during the thirteenth century, it presented the accepted Ptolemaic conception of a spherical Earth centred within a finite universe, explaining the celestial spheres, the motions of the heavens, eclipses, climates and the basic principles of mathematical astronomy. It became one of the earliest scientific texts to enter print, appearing in well over two hundred editions before 1650 and forming the foundation of astronomical instruction throughout Europe.

The beautiful series of diagrammatic woodcuts includes a version of the famous ("Macrobian") woodcut zonal map of the Earth, dividing the globe into the five climatic regions of classical and medieval cosmography, one of the defining visual expressions of the pre-discovery conception of the inhabited world. By the time of this edition, however, Portuguese and Spanish voyages had already penetrated the southern hemisphere, so that the traditional theory had become increasingly an academic convention rather than a reflection of observed geography.

This edition includes Philipp Melanchthon's celebrated prefatory epistle, first published in 1531 and subsequently reprinted in various sixteenth-century editions: this is one of a series of Venetian printings of the 1530s and 1540s. Melanchthon argued that astronomy was not merely a practical science but an indispensable means of understanding the orderly structure of God's creation, an interpretation that helped establish De sphaera as one of the principal educational texts of the Lutheran humanist curriculum.

In the present copy the words "Philippi Melanchthonis ad" have been carefully expurgated from the title-page, most likely during an early period of Catholic ownership. Rather than suppress an authoritative scientific text, Catholic owners commonly erased the names of leading Protestant reformers. The present copy is an instructive witness to this practice, preserving the work while censoring Melanchthon's authorship.

Although firmly grounded in the traditional geocentric cosmos, editions of De sphaera such as this formed the intellectual point of departure for the astronomical revolution of the sixteenth century. They educated the generation of scholars who would encounter the new cosmology of Copernicus, while preserving the classical framework that had shaped European conceptions of the universe since antiquity.