Calendarium and Ephemerides

A major figure in fifteenth-century German astronomy, Regiomontanus achieved such wide renown that he appears in Schedel’s 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle holding an astrolabe. He was a friend and collaborator of Georg von Peuerbach, completing Peuerbach’s abridgment of the Almagest in addition to publishing his own works on arithmetic, trigonometry, and astronomy. This lavish manuscript was produced after the first edition of the Calendarium and Ephemerides in 1476, and may reflect a patron’s desire for a more deluxe object. The Calendarium includes information on lunar and solar eclipses, variations in day length, and the zodiac and planets for 1475-1530. The Ephemerides provides positions for the sun, moon, and planets for each day of the year from 1480 to 1506, with a pink finding tab at the beginning of each year. A liturgical calendar at the beginning of the manuscript includes customized additions to the printed text that suggest a patron monastery in southern Germany or Austria, most likely the Benedictine abbey in Lambach due to the inclusion of its patron saint, Kilian (feast and translation, 7 and 14 July). On display are some of this manuscript’s eclipse diagrams, which appear at the beginning of the Calendarium (fols. 12r-16v) and on the first page of most years in the Ephemerides.