Translating the Mundus Iovialis into German
Knowledge of the Latin language can open new horizons for the patient student; in our case it can also provide some understanding of the dramatic reorientation of the modern worldview toward the heliocentric system. Thereby, it may convey to young people
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Translating the Mundus Iovialis into German Joachim Schlör
Knowledge of the Latin language can open new horizons for the patient student; in our case it can also provide some understanding of the dramatic reorientation of the modern worldview toward the heliocentric system. Thereby, it may convey to young people an exciting impression of a researcher’s indefatigable activity striving for highest precision on the threshold of the modern period, to be finally rewarded with the gratification of discovery1 (Figs. 13.1 and 13.2). To the modern student, getting a grip on Marius’s Latin is not very hard, so that it can be well understood on an intermediate level of study. Scholars [or researchers; scientist is anachronistic] of the early modern period intending to spread their cutting-edge findings, as widely as possible, among the scientific community, made use of this most universally known means of communication. What is more, Marius does not use the Latin of the Middle Ages but follows the example set by the classical authors Caesar and Cicero, as did all humanists and as we do teaching Latin today. So reading the Mundus does not pose too great a problem to our students. Of course, it goes without saying that it cannot hold a candle to the refinement of classical literary style (Fig. 13.3; see also Schlör 2012a). In more recent times, Ernst Zinner, the German astronomer from Bamberg, portrayed Simon Marius’s work favorably. At the end of an essay entitled “Retrieving Simon Marius’s Honor” (Zur Ehrenrettung des Simon Marius) of 1942, he demands that “in honor of its citizen Simon Marius, an outstanding astronomer, the city of Ansbach should save his main work Mundus Iovialis from oblivion, as it did with the more important writings of his contemporaries, and distribute it among the world’s great libraries.”2
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For more details, see Bemmer (2015). Zinner (1942); for more details, see Wolfschmidt (2012).
J. Schlör (*) Simon Marius Society, Weißenburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 H. Gaab, P. Leich (eds.), Simon Marius and His Research, Historical & Cultural Astronomy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92621-6_13
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Fig. 13.1 The Gunzenhausen original of Simon Marius, Mundus Iovialis (1614), since 1995 in the city archive; the Prognosticon auf 1622 gives the same image with an alternative text praising Marius as a conscientious craftsman, a true astrologer, and pious “magician”—redefining the terms of astrologer and magus in favor of Marius in a word play with the famous sorcerer Simon Magus of classical antiquity
Since, apart from Prickard’s English translation of 1916 (Marius 1614/1916), there had been no modern version of this work so far, the Simon Marius Gymnasium (SMG) met Zinner’s demand in 1987–1988 publishing a Latin and German edition which gives the Mundus in a facsimile of the Ansbach original as well as a German translation on the opposing pages of the book. The beautiful original page was included not only for decorative or aesthetic reasons; i
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