The place of Edward Gresham's (1603) in the discussion on cosmology and the Bible in the early modern period.

This article situates Edward Gresham's Astrostereon, or A Discourse of the Falling of the Planet (1603), a little-known English astronomical treatise, in the context of the cosmo-theological debate on the reconciliation of heliocentrism with the Bible, triggered by the publication of Nicholas Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543. Covering the period from the appearance of the 'First Account' of Copernican views presented in Georg Joachim Rheticus's Narratio Prima (1540) to the composition of Astrostereon in 1603, this paper places Edward Gresham's commentary and exegesis against the background of the views expressed by his countrymen and the thinkers associated with the Wittenberg University - such as Philipp Melanchthon, Caspar Peucer, and Christoph Rothmann. Comparing the ways in which they employed certain biblical passages - either in favour of or against the Earth's mobility - the paper emphasizes Gresham's ingenious reading of the Hebrew version of the problematic excerpts, and his expansion of the accommodation principle.

Edward Gresham's Astrostereon, or A Discourse of the Falling of the Planet (1603), the Copernican paradox, and the construction of early modern proto-scientific discourse.

This paper investigates the functioning of the 'Copernican paradox' (stating that the Sun stands still and the Earth revolves around the Sun) in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, with particular attention to Edward Gresham's (1565-1613) little-known and hitherto understudied astronomical treatise - Astrostereon, or A Discourse of the Falling of the Planet (1603). The text, which is fully appreciative of the heliocentric system, is analysed within a broader context of the ongoing struggles with the Copernican theory at the turn of the seventeenth century. The article finds that apart from having a purely rhetorical function, the 'Copernican paradox' featured in the epistemological debates on how early modern scientific knowledge should be constructed and popularised.