Abstract
The Alphonsine Tables were astronomical tables designed to anticipate the positions of planets, lunar phases, setting and rising times of the Sun, eclipses, heavenly conjunctions, and calendrical dates. They come in two different textual traditions, the Castilian Canons (1272 ca.) and the Parisian Tables (1320 ca.). The first printed Latin edition dates 1483. From that moment, Latin Alfonsine Tables rapidly superseded every other competing tabulary system for anticipating the expected planetary positions, so that the entire astronomy of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and the first half of the sixteenth century may be labelled as “Alfonsine Astronomy.” Nonetheless, starting with Regiomontanus’ Tabulae Directionum Profectionumque (1467, first printed in 1485), passing through Erasmus Reinold’s Copernican Tabulae Prutenicae (1551), and ending with Kepler’s Tabulae Rudolphinae (1627), the history of the legacy of the Alfonsine Tables in the Renaissance is largely a story of their slow but progressive dismissal.
References
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Further Reading
Casanovas, Juan. 1987. On the precession problem in the Alfonsine tables. In De Astronomia Alphonsi regis: actas del simposio sobre Astronomia Alfonsi celebrado en Berkeley (Agosto 1985) y otros trabajos sobre el mismo tema, ed. Merce Comes, Roser Puig, and Julio Samso, 79–87. Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona, Istituto “Millas Vallicrosa” de historia de la ciencia arabe.
Chábas, José. 2003a. The diffusion of the Alfonsine tables: The case of “Tabulae Resolutae”. Perspectives on Sciences 10 (2): 168–178.
Chábas, José. 2003b. Were the Alfonsine tables of Toledo first used by their authors? Centaurus 45 (1–4): 142–150.
Chabás, José, and Bernard R. Goldstein. 2003a. John Vimond and the Alfonsine trepidation model. Journal for the History of Astronomy 34 (2): 163–170.
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Cosci, M. (2019). Alfonsine Tables. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_977-1
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