Today in 1613 Edward Gresham died. He was an English mathematician, astrologer, and almanac maker, born in Stainford, Yorkshire, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge.
We don’t know very much about his life, but he is recognized as the author of astrological almanacs between the years 1603–1607. In seventeenth-century narrative accounts he is portrayed as a papist traitor (due to his alleged prediction of the Gunpowder Plot). His work, the Discourse of the Falling of the Planet (1603) presents, among other things, the earliest known set of predicted planetary occultations (for 1603–1604) and the use of these phenomena to defend the Copernican cosmology.
It was written at the time of plague in London in 1603, and he apparently wrote it to disprove a rumour that a planet may fall, a piece of gossip that may have been started by Gresham himself, and John Dee. The rumour said that if a planet fell on dry land, the plague would increase, and if to the ocean, the fish and marine animals would suffer the consequences of the disease.
The text supports the Copernican world system, and additionally, in the chapters referring to astrology, he elaborates on the theory of celestial influences, solar heat, and light, which he links to heliocentrism. It’s also the first instance of using the Copernican theory to predict the occultations of stars by planets. Due to his belief in the heliocentric system, Gresham needed to deal with the accusations of heresy, and he disproved them by trying to reconcile the Copernican system with the Bible. He spent a whole chapter in Astrostereon – Chapter 1.9 to the reconciliation of the ‘paradoxes’ of the moving Earth and the immobile Sun with the Bible, saying that:
[the planets] frelie moue in space, without vection, traction or expulsion of any heauens or anythinge els other then the Earth. And that the Scriptures speake nothinge againste the moueinge of the Earth and the Sun’s standing still.
That’s your Tudor Minute for today. Remember you can dive deeper into life in 16th century England through the Renaissance English History Podcast at englandcast.com where there is an episode on Tudor astronomy.
Suggested link:
Episode 84: Elizabethan Astronomy
From the shop:
Andreas Cellarius Copernican Star Chart Puzzle
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, one of the longest running indie history podcasts, going since 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. She writes books, created the original Tudor Planner (a yearly diary filled with Tudor history) and in 2019 created the world's first Tudorcon (you can "attend" online this year!). She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.