In Padua both , his uncle, the Prince-Bishop and Copernicus had enrolled as student from the ...German Nation (Full name was at that time Holy Roman Empire of German Nation).
Poland had parts of Prussia occupied, tried to annex and wanted to have Polish coins in Prussia. The cities of Elbing, Danzig and Thorn did not want to give up their individual sovereign rights and continued coining money. In 1519, 1522, and 1529 Copernicus published Money Reform Memoranda. His 1529 writings stated in part :
" Woe to you, unfortunate Prussiland, that you should have to suffer for such a bad money management!.. If we do not have relief here soon, then Prussia is soon going to have only coins left, which contain nothing but copper. Then all trade with foreign countries would stop. Which foreign tradesman would want to sell his merchandise for mere copper?... Such a break-up of Prussiland is silently observed by the big powers; they let our beloved fatherland, to which we owe everything, to which we owe life itself, from day to day collaps miserably.." (excerpt from Hermann Kesten[?], Copernicus, describing Prussia during the civil wars leading to the Reformation, transl by H. Jonat).
I'm really sorry, but this is just another attempt to throw in the Poland-Prussia debate in another guise. The manner in which the quote is presented, as well as the translation (there really is no such thing as Prussiland in English, and fatherland is doubtful at best), are simply unacceptable. Moreover, if this is a translation of someone's Latin-German translation, than I think that fatherland is simply the Latin patria -- VERY different than the context Helga would like us to accept. Again, there has been so much time spent on this, that it's bordering on the ridiculous. Still, as a professional historian, I cannot sit by and allow this blatant misrepresentation. People in Copernicus' time really didn't understand ethnicity and nationality in the same way that you want to believe, Fr. Jonat. And, contrary to what you may believe, i don't care if Copernicus is Polish, German, or even Thornisch! Gianfranco is correct about placing the man's accomplishments first. What I do care about is that the debate and the entire issue of nationality are framed within the proper context: that context is one of people with an ideological interest allowing that interest to shape a view of history that is in fact inaccurate. JHK, Tuesday, May 21, 2002
PS: Hermann Kesten's undoubted brilliance as a dramatist and author aside, he was doubtless a man of his time. He was educated at a period when ethnic nationalism permeated the teaching of history, and when it was not only acceptable, but normal, to write history with underlying motives. Today, historians are expected to take the biases and background of the author into consideration. Moreover, we are expected to be more critical of historians who do seem allow their viewpoints to shape their presentation of history. I'm sorry, but all authors are not equal, and some scholarship is better than others. We should try to keep this in mind.
Given that immanentism is the logical foundation of subjectivism, that finds inside the Man the principles that rule thought, history and reality, some find that Copernicanism demolished the foundations of medieval science and metaphysics, therefore giving a start to a general movement that would have brought modern thought to rebel against the objectivism and the authoritarism of traditional thought.
Correctly, his innovation has been quite unanimously defined as a real revolution (despite the unwanted calembour).
Immanuel Kant, for instance, caught the symbolic character of Copernicus' revolution (of which he put in evidence the trascendental rationalism) underlining that, in his vision, human rationality was the real legislator of the phenomenical reality; Copernicanism was in a winning opposition against the scientific and philosophical Aristotelism[?], a quite subjective position (in a Kantist sense) meant to fight against the ruling dogmatism.
More recent philosophers too have found in Copernicus a still valid and valuable philosophical meaning, properly used to describe the position of the modern man in front of cultural traditions. A so-called Homo Copernicanus was then by some described like that modern man whose central themes are to be found in ordinary human problems, as a general cultural reference.
Why you ,JHK, an recent American professor, want to suppress important information. This (and many other attempts to suppress information) is as much a puzzle to me, as your constant insistence on using Polish place names (used since 1945 Soviet take-overs) for German places, when on the other hand you keep writing that original names are supposed to be translated into English language here at wikipedia.
Do you do this on your own or is this a American University System -described action ?
In 1491 Copernicus entered Krakow university, and here he met astronomy for the first time, thanks to his teacher Albert Brudzewski. This science soon fascinated him, as his books (now in Uppsala's library) show. After four years and a brief stay in Thorn, he moved to Italy, where he studied law at Bologna's university. His uncle financed his education and wished for him to become a bishop as well.
"In Bologna's "Annales of the German Nation of 1496" on page 141 Is recorded:Nicolaus Kopperlingk de Thorn and a registration fee of 9 Grosseten (Groschen). This identifies his field of studies. The Natio Germanorum only educated lawstudents at that time, and only those, whose native language was German. Copernicus also studied as Padua. A doctor diplom of 1503 was found in Ferrara, which documents Nicolaus Copernicus from Prussia, who studied at Bologna and Padua... While studying canon and civil law, he met Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara, a famous astronomer. He followed his lessons and became a disciple and assistant." H. Jonat
Maybe you could just try to make sense. It's enough to say that he studied law at Bologna. If you add the bit about Bologna's "Annales of the German Nation", you are referring to something that must be explained. Since the title isn't even sensible English (Annales isn't English, but annals is) one has to question the source. What exactly is the Natio Germanorum? this is unclear from what you've written. Where is the proof that it only accepted students whose native language was German -- could it have been German speakers? Was this part of the university of Bologna?
HJ, no one is trying to cover anything up. Unfortunately, what you want to put in just doesn't make a lot of sense and opens up more questions than it answers. Those questions might fit in a book on Copernicus (maybe), but not a brief encyclopedia article. And again, the way you have written it (that is, in a way that implies that Copernicus was German in the modern sense of the word) is meant to mislead readers into making assumptions that just aren't accurate. To do this in public is to encourage a kind of dishonesty. Copernicus may well have spoken German as his first language. That doesn't mean that his allegiance was to a non-existent Germany or to a germanic Prussia. It's just wrong to imply something when there are lots of other factors that make that implication suspect.
Oh -- and the Polish names are used when they are used because that's what the cities are called in English today. It doesn't matter what my grandfather learned to call them (for example, Danzig) -- it's what they are now called that counts. That said, an article on St. Petersburg, would include the name changes to Petrograd and Leningrad within the article -- and if I were talking about the city in 1950, I'd call it Leningrad, because that's what the city was officially called at that time. With Danzig, I'm not positive that the Polish-speaking inhabitants didn't call it Gdansk or one of the Latin names in, say 1400 -- are you? There probably wasn't agreement then, because educated people often used Latin. But if you read the Gdansk article, it's clear that English speakers called it Danzig till 1945, and that the German name was more commonly used for the city. But we don't call it that any more, and that's what counts here. JHK
HJ, maybe this will help, since it's not touchy for you. THere are some islands off the coast of Argentina that a huge number of the locals and especially the neighbors call the Malvinas. But the official name of the islands is the Falklands. That's the name that all English-speaking countries recognize as the official name. If I were to continuously refer to those islands as the Malvinas on the wikipedia, it could be taken as a statement that the wikipedia believed that the UK had no claim to those islands. By the same token, people on either side of the political fence have different names for the country whose official name is Northern Ireland. By using the official name, we stay as neutral as possible -- although in this case, staunch Republicans would certainly object to that choice. JHK
There was no written Polish language until the 16th century. Therefore whatever was written down by who knows what in 1400 was not Polish language. Perhaps something that looks like Gdansk was written by a Danish or in Danish language: Dansk person. Beside the Hanseatic League cities all had Hansa Seals and the Hansa Seals had/have Latinized names.
Lets stay with the subject and lets not jump from the Baltic Sea to South America.
Please note: most websites today tell you about todays Poland, which includes a large part of German lands. For example one source says, that the first book in Poland was printed in 1475 in Wroclaw. Well, that was not in Poland, but in the Holy Roman Empire in Breslau, Silesia in Germany. H. Jonat
I believe I am heavily biased on this topic: I am for sure not interested in where Copernicus was from or in what his birthplace was or represented. At all.
I just want to read a correct, serious, mature, not-childish, not-ideological article on one of the main topics of an Encyclopedia. And I have seen that I'm not the only one.
After all the previous talk, especially the one in my talk page, I find deeply disturbing to read again such sillyness; please don't follow in this useless direction or I'll be voting for protecting this page. I could even find it offensive to ignore all what has been written before, as if it was dry air and nothing more. The previous discussions, indeed, had been written with attention to people's different positions, with care of interlocutors, and were meant to find a positive point of common sense. These chats are now consequently quite unrespectful toward us.
We created a separate page, time ago, all reserved to this marvellous sub-topic so, in case of unrestrainable need, please go there to develop nationalistic themes.
This article was conceived with great effort by many of us. These points were already discussed and nothing new is brought us today, so we still have the right to read the Wikipedian article as it was finally released in Wiki style. Of course, anything can be improved, but - believe me - we will need a really serious and scientific reason to change even one word in it, by now onwards. --Gianfranco
i'm glad you're still around, especially since you were so instrumental in constructing what I thought was an article acceptable to all of us. As you can no doubt tell I have added little to the article (except a condensed mention of Copernicus' work on monetary reform) and tried to keep the article's integrity. Strangely enough, I also really don't care what Copernicus' nationality (a concept that really is anachronistic in the sense normally used here)was. I only care that incorrect interpretations and assumptions don't become the norm, because I want the wikipedia to be a credible body of information. JHK
I changed
I removed the following about Aristarchus:
None of these statements is based on fact, they are speculations -- we don't have Aristarchus' main work about heliocentrism, and we can only speculate that his conclusions about the mass of the sun may have led him to put it at the center, but such speculations are weak at best -- for all we know, Aristarchus' may have developed the entire Copernican theory. See Aristarchus for what we know and what we don't know.
Oh, and whether Aristarchus ever was in Alexandria is disputed, so I removed that, too. --Eloquence
Search Encyclopedia
|
Featured Article
|