A scholarly imprint producing first English translations of historical Hebrew and Latin works in astronomy, cosmology, and natural philosophy.
These texts span centuries, and most have never appeared in English. One – Gersonides’ 136-chapter mathematical astronomy – was never printed and survives only in manuscript. They cite and answer one another, addressing the same cosmological questions, yet until now no one could read them side by side in a single language.
Translations are produced with an automated, AI-assisted pipeline that runs each text through a multi-stage workflow before final collation. For technical details, see the translator’s translation-pipeline repo.
These translations are prepublication texts – nearly publication-ready, pending the diagrams and illustrations still in progress.
The goal is fluent, readable modern English – a text an educated reader can follow without reaching for the Latin or Hebrew, not one written only for specialists. Rather than reproduce the long periodic sentences and deferred verbs of the originals, the translations carry the author’s meaning, argument, and tone into natural contemporary prose: where Tycho builds a single sentence whose main verb arrives only after four nested clauses, the translation breaks it into the two or three a modern writer would use. Fidelity comes first, though – nothing is dropped, summarized, or invented, and negations, numbers, technical terms, and the author’s own examples and analogies are preserved exactly. Readability never comes at the cost of changing what the source says.
Technical vocabulary stays precise and is anchored to its modern equivalents. A key Latin or Hebrew term of art is glossed on its first occurrence – the original shown alongside the English rendering – and thereafter carried in settled English. Historical names, star names, and specialized vocabulary carry inline identifications: Tycho’s “Lucida Vulturis volantis” is identified as Altair in Aquila; Gersonides’ medieval Hebrew astronomical terminology is mapped to the Ptolemaic system it describes.
Mathematical and astronomical content – sexagesimal values, spherical triangle computations, calendar arithmetic, tabular data – is reproduced with the precision of the originals, cell by cell and degree by degree. Compositor errors in the source are corrected inline with [recte: …] notation rather than silently emended. Uncertain readings due to ink damage, worn type, or ambiguous letterforms are marked with [?], preserving the translator’s best reading while flagging it for editorial review.
The publicly available PDFs are text-only. Geometric figures, instrument schematics, concentric-sphere charts, and other diagrams from the source works are extracted and replaced with structured descriptions identifying every label, arc, point, and geometric relationship visible in the original woodcut or engraving. Tycho’s De Mundi Aetherei, for example, carries 93 such figures, from spherical-astronomy constructions to the two-circle hypothesis of the comet’s eccentric orbit within the solar sphere. For a high-quality illustrated print edition of any of these works, please get in touch using the contact details below.
Upright reason dictates that the recipients of the good, of whatever type and level of beneficence it may be, must show gratitude and blessing to the beneficent person in every way possible, commensurate with the value of the beneficence. And one who has benefited all the people of the world – for example, one who invented a new instrument for the good of the world, or a good book – it is fitting for every discerning person, out of the obligation of love of fellow beings, to at least purchase it, so that the man will profit and his heart will be encouraged thereby to invent yet more good instruments in the world. And similarly, all other wise-hearted people will likewise strive and exert themselves to invent good things and instruments needed for the repair of the world and its perfection.
And therefore, whoever says: “What do I need this new instrument for?” – he does not act well towards the world. For if not for the man who invented it, where would you be? And what would your city do? And more than this, if the man did not exert himself, what would the world do?
R. Pinchas Eliyahu Hurwitz, Sefer HaBrit
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The original works are in the public domain and were obtained from a variety of sources, including digitized library collections and other open archives. No claim of ownership is made over the source texts.
All translations in this collection are © Scott Weisman. All rights reserved, except as granted by the license below.
The translations are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. You are free to share them for non-commercial purposes with attribution; you may not modify them or use them commercially without prior written permission.
Translated with the assistance of Claude. The translator thanks the Anthropic team for making this work possible.
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