Celio Calcagnini

Opere, 1544

Celio Calcagnini (Ferrara, 17 September 1479 – Ferrara, 24 April 1541), also known as Caelius Calcagninus, was an Italian humanist and scientist from Ferrara. His learning as displayed in his collected works is very broad.^[1]

He had a wide experience: as soldier, academic, diplomat and in the chancery of Ippolito d'Este. He was consulted by Richard Croke on behalf of Henry VIII of England in the question of the latter's divorce.^[2] He was a major influence on Rabelais's literary and linguistic ideas and is presumed to have met him in Italy, as well as being a teacher of Clément Marot^[3] and was praised by Erasmus.^[4]

Giovanni Battista Giraldi was a student of his, and succeeded him at the University of Ferrara.

He had a contemporary reputation as an astronomer, and wrote on the rotation of the earth. He knew Copernicus in Ferrara at the beginning of the sixteenth century.^[5] His Quod Caelum Stet, Terra Moveatur is a precursor of the De Revolutionibus of Copernicus, though A. C. Crombie qualifies his rotational theory as "vague",^[6] and is often dated to about 1525.^[7]

Works

• Opera aliquot (1544)

Notes

1. Marchetti, V. (1973). "Calcagnini, Celio". Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani - Volume 16 (in Italian). Treccani.it. Retrieved 31 July 2012.
2. Quirinus Breen, "Celio Calcagnini (1479-1541)", Church History, Vol. 21, No. 3 (September 1952), pp. 225-238.
3. Michael Andrew Screech, Rabelais. p. 289, p. 378; Stanley G. Eskin, "Physis and Antiphysie: The Idea of Nature in Rabelais and Calcagnini", Comparative Literature, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring, 1962), pp. 167-173.
4. Peter G. Bietenholz, Thomas Brian Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation (2003), p. 242.
5. "Copernicus, Early life and training: Ferrara". Hsci.ou.edu.
6. A. C. Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science II (1959 edition), p. 166.
7. R. J. Schoeck, The Geography of Erasmus, p. 201, in Fokke Akkerman, Arie Johan Vanderjagt, A. H. Van Der Laan, Northern Humanism in European Context, 1469-1625: From the 'Adwert Academy' to Ubbo Emmius (1999).

External links

• Online Galleries, History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries High resolution images of works by and/or portraits of Celio Calcagnini in .jpg and .tiff format.