Note 65 — APPENDIX I
Reading edition
Sacro Bosco, here alluded to, is John Holywood or Halifax—in Latin, Johannes de Sacro Bosco or Sacro Busto—an English mathematician, said to have studied at Oxford and to have afterwards become a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Paris about the year 1230. Sacro Bosco was one of the first, in the Middle Ages, to avail himself of the Arabian writings on astronomy and is believed to have condensed pretty much all the science therein contained in his own well-known “Tractatus de Sphæra.” Of the latter, which was the second astronomical work to appear in print and which was first issued at Ferrara in 1472, there were, it is said, as many as twenty-four more editions published before the year 1500. Houzeau says this “Tractatus” was the standard for three centuries, and the writer in “La Grande Encyclopédie,” Vol. XXIX. p. 44, states that there were more than seventy Latin editions of it published between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries.
He is also the author of numerous other works, including “De Astrolabio” and a very meritorious “Tractatus de Arte Numerandi,” which latter is reproduced at pp. 1–26 of the “Rara Mathematica” of Jas. Orchard Halliwell, London, 1839.
The best commentary ever written on the astronomy of Sacro Bosco is the “Commentarius in sphæram ... of Christopher Clavius,” called the Euclid of his country. Clavius was born at Bamberg in 1538, died at Rome in 1612, and, according to Houzeau, was the author of as many as twenty-six different works on mathematics and astronomy. An almost equally valuable Commentary on the Sphere of Sacro Bosco was written by the famous encyclopedist Cecco d’Ascoli (1257–1327) whose real name, as we have already been informed, was Francesco degli Stabili (Libri, “Hist. des Sc. Mathém.,” Vol. II. pp. 191–200, 525–526; Hœfer, “Hist. de l’Astronomie,” Paris, 1873, p. 285; Alex. Chalmers, “Gen. Biog. Dict.,” Vol. IX. pp. 1–3; Rose, “New Gen. Biog. Dict.,” Vol. VI. p. 153; “Encycl. Brit.,” 1876, Vol. V. p. 282; Bertelli, “Pietro Peregrino,” 1868, p. 129).