A GEOCENTRIC UNIVERSE
AND A TRIPARTITE WORLD
Fig. 1. The cosmos in Hartmann Schedel’s
Liber Chronicarum (Nuremberg: Anton
Koberger, 1493). God’s realm closes the
medieval universe, with him enthroned
and flanked by the elects and a choir of
angels. Courtesy of the Department of
Special Collections, Memorial Library,
University of Wisconsin–Madison (F S31
Cutter, f. 5v).
The medieval image of the universe was a combination of
movement was propagated to the lower spheres, until it reached
Christianized Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic mathematical
the moon. The universe moved through God’s intelligence or spirit,
astronomy. It was conceived as spherical, finite, and geocentric.
or indirectly through his angels (as in Münster’s mappamundi,
The earth at the center was surrounded by the other three classic
plate 9). In the medieval mindset, therefore, God ruled the cosmos
elements—water, air, and fire—forming the sublunary world;
from the outermost perfect and unchangeable layer, which the
around it, in homocentric spheres or heavens, were the planets
German humanist Petrus Apianus named the “Coelum Empireum
(including the moon and the sun); and beyond lay the fixed
Habitaculum Dei et Omnium Electorum,” that is, “The Empyreal Sky,
stars and the Primum Mobile. This outer sphere in medieval
Residence of God and of all the Elects,” in his Cosmographia, first
Christian cosmology was identified with God (fig. 1), who, as the
published in Landshut in 1524, which went through many editions
Primordial Motor, set in motion the Primum Mobile, and that
and translations (plate 4).
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