Si esset centrum solaris circuli in centro celi is a previously unstudied Latin astronomical treatise extant in five manuscripts dating from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. Part of its main thesis is that astrolabes fail to reflect the eccentricity of the Sun's circle, causing them to display incorrect solar altitudes. This argument rests on a curious conflation of the solar apogee with the Sun's maximum altitude at the summer solstice. It was apparently developed in reaction to the author's realization that the equinoxes do not coincide with the Sun's entry into the corresponding sidereal signs of Aries and Libra. A critical edition and English translation of the text is included in this article. An analysis of its content and later interpolations suggests an origin between 1176 and 1188 and a close connection with the astronomical and astrological activities of Roger of Hereford.
The Boxer Codex is a lavishly illustrated Spanish-language manuscript produced in 1590s Manila, long regarded as a key source on the early modern Western Pacific Rim. Existing scholarship has interpreted it primarily as a product of Spanish imperial ambition, or, more recently, as a site of Sino-Spanish collaboration. This essay proposes a different framework: that the Codex is better understood as an instance of cross-cultural entanglement, shaped by competing rather than complementary epistemologies. Drawing on close analysis of the manuscript's sections on Chinese deities, "monsters," and other creatures, I argue that the Codex brings together two distinct and not easily reconcilable knowledge cultures: a Spanish colonial-religious vision, and the distinctively southern Chinese and maritime worldview of its migrant contributors. By tracing the selection, translation, and reclassification of Chinese source materials, this essay shows that cross-cultural knowledge-making was not frictionless exchanges but involved significant and systematic distortion and loss.
This article explores the fifteenth-century transmission of astrological works by Pierre d'Ailly (1350-1420). An examination of three incunables, as well as manuscripts of d'Ailly's writings, illuminates not simply the business calculations of printers in Louvain, Rouen, and Augsburg, but also readers' various understandings of these texts. Some saw these treatises within a reforming context - one that could include attacks on superstition as well as the correction of the calendar as part of the larger project of Church reform. Others looked to d'Ailly as a source for eschatology, and especially for methods of calculating when the End would come.
Ancient sources in both Greek and Latin describe vomiting as a routine health measure (here called "habitual vomiting"). This paper reviews evidence from writings on health and pharmacology, the Sacred Tales of Aelius Aristides, and some other sources, beginning with the Hippocratic Corpus and extending through the second century CE. People resorted to vomiting to rid themselves of excess food or of the excess accumulation of humors; they vomited both after meals and during fasts. While some sources criticize as decadent the practice of vomiting during or after extravagant meals, most references to habitual vomiting are morally neutral. For Aelius Aristides, vomiting was a part of an ascetic regimen.
Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials from Berlin and Halle, this article reconstructs why Friedrich Hoffmann fell from royal favour at the Prussian court in 1712 and was replaced by Georg Ernst Stahl. At the centre of the analysis stands a hitherto marginal figure: Andreas von Gundelsheimer, court physician to Frederick I, whose authority rested on cosmopolitan experience, sovereign intimacy, and silence. What emerges is a structural condition the article terms a `conspiracy of silence': not a coordinated pact, but a regime in which decorum medicum functioned as a technology of political governance, recasting epistemic disagreement as disciplinary insubordination. Hoffmann's affair is less an anomaly than a telling sign of the broader subordination of medical knowledge to state authority then underway in Prussia, in which therapeutic dissent was reframed as behavioural deviance and the physician's conscience was made answerable to administrative hierarchy. His trajectory exemplifies `imperfect assimilation' - the incomplete internalisation of professional norms that simultaneously exposed practitioners to institutional sanction and allowed them to exploit its ambiguities.
