Friday Micro-Latin Translation #16. 🖋️

As we continue with Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera Mundi this week, we glimpse the foundations of the Ptolemaic cosmology that underpinned much of astronomical thinking in the Latin Middle Ages after the twelfth century. Part of this cosmology included the idea that the universe was composed of several spheres enclosing a static earth, one of which contained the planets, another the fixed stars, another the waters above the firmament, and so on. Think of it like a series of concentric circles where the earth remains fixed while everything around it moves according to their own specific courses.

One of the important concepts that this week’s micro-Latin translation introduces is the outermost sphere: the primum mobile, variously translated as the “prime mover,” the “first mover,” or the “unmoved mover”. This invisible sphere follows the sphere of the fixed stars and is responsible for maintaining universal order through its governing motion.

I’ve done a lighter gloss this week as much of the vocabulary has already appeared in our earlier constellation and cometary micro-translations. This freed up a little space to add two small pensa to the mix to help keep our parsing chops sharp.