A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos

  • Dava Sobel
Walker/Bloomsbury: 2011. 288 pp. $25/£14.99 9780802717931 | ISBN: 978-0-8027-1793-1

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) was a quintessential unifier. He gathered the planets around a central Sun, thereby inventing the Solar System. The grand challenge facing biographers of Copernicus is that few personal details survive. Was he gregarious? Did he have a girlfriend in his youth? When did he become interested in the stars? Because the historical record answers none of these questions, some authors have resorted to fiction. In A More Perfect Heaven, science historian Dava Sobel has it both ways.

The first third of the book is strictly historical. It traces Copernicus's life from his birth in Polish Toruń, to his undergraduate studies in Kraków and graduate work in Italy, and to his career as a legal, medical and administrative officer in the northernmost Catholic diocese of Poland. Sobel makes particularly effective use of the records surviving from when Canon Copernicus was the rent collector for the Frauenburg cathedral chapter's vast land holdings. To fill the narrative, she occasionally quotes from John Banville's novel Doctor Copernicus (W. W. Norton, 1976), but always makes clear that those reconstructions are not taken from archival sources. What Sobel achieves is a brilliant chronological account — the best in the literature — laying out the stages of Copernicus's administrative career.

The spark that ignited Nicolaus Copernicus' interest in the positions of heavenly spheres remains a mystery. Credit: J.-L. HUENS/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC STOCK

Having reached Copernicus's final years, when publication of his still unfinished manuscript seemed to have stalled, Sobel takes a new tack. She inserts a play in 2 acts and 17 scenes, with 6 characters. Besides Copernicus, there is the ailing and rabidly anti-Lutheran bishop, Johannes Dantiscus. And there is Tiedemann Giese, a more liberal bishop of the adjacent diocese, who is Copernicus's confidant. The play opens with a young mathematics teacher from Lutheran Wittenberg, Georg Joachim Rheticus, literally stumbling in to seek an audience with Copernicus. True to the historical record, Rheticus finally persuades the ageing canon to allow a copy of his manuscript to be taken to Nuremberg for printing. The penultimate scene brings the printed pages of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) to the astronomer's deathbed. In contrast to this reasonably well documented event, the final fictional scene shows Rheticus turning up at Copernicus's funeral, and receiving as a gift the original manuscript.

The grand challenge facing biographers of Copernicus is that few personal details survive.

The invented scenes paint vividly the peril that faced a young Lutheran clandestinely at work with Copernicus in Catholic territory. The introduction of Anna, Copernicus's housekeeper — whom Bishop Dantiscus believed to be a harlot — as a fifth character provides another point of tension partially documented in the surviving correspondence. The sixth and entirely fictitious character, the young acolyte Franz, serves as a focus for Rheticus's only partly concealed homosexuality. Sobel's literary handling of these issues gives a dramatic punch to an otherwise colourless encounter between Copernicus and Rheticus, his only student — an encounter that was crucial to placing the heliocentric cosmology on the world stage.

The final third of the book returns to documented history, tracing the aftermath of the 1543 publication of De Revolutionibus, which led to the insights of Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei, and the eventual acceptance of the Copernican system. The wonderful detail and eloquent writing that Sobel demonstrated in her best-selling Longitude and Galileo's Daughter carry the reader along here too. Given what she has chosen to include, the book is first rate.

What A More Perfect Heaven does not include are questions that have puzzled historians of science for many decades. What triggered Copernicus's interest in the radical heliocentric arrangement? “With a wave of his hand, he had made the Earth a planet and set it spinning,” she writes elegantly. There is, however, barely a clue as to what De Revolutionibus contains, or how one might use it to calculate positions of the Sun and the planets. Nor is there much about Copernicus as an observer. His manuscript contained only 30 or so new observations, but they are crucial points for establishing the parameters of the planets' orbits, and Copernicus had to wait for years before some of the desired astronomical configurations took place.

A More Perfect Heaven is a charming and accurate book, although it omits much of the technical background in which earlier accounts revelled. Still, this carefully constructed biography leaves space for those of us probing the origins of heliocentrism to defend our speculations.