Almanach nova (Ephemerides): the years 1516 to 1531, from the Venice edition of 1504

Key Properties

Format: Quarto

Binding: Recased in seventeenth-century vellum over boards

Extent: 224 leaves, covering the years 1516 to 1531, one double-page opening to each month

Structure: printed one year to a quire; the edition was not issued in parts

Colophon: Woodcut printer's device of Liechtenstein, printed in black and red

Language: Latin

Rarity: about a dozen copies of the Venice 1504 edition recorded in public collections, none digitised

Reference: Houzeau & Lancaster, 14471

Provenance: Ownership inscription of Cornelius Freundt (1535 to 1591), cantor and composer at Zwickau; early annotation on the title page, close to the time of publication

Collation & Technical Description

Quarto, 224 leaves, covering the years 1516 to 1531 out of the edition that begins at 1505, with a title-page and a final blank. Annual tables of the predicted daily positions of the sun, moon and planets, each month occupying a double-page opening. Woodcut colophon of Liechtenstein printed in black and red. The work was printed one year to a quire and was not issued in parts, so a run of years such as this is a portion of the edition rather than a separately published volume. Recased in seventeenth-century vellum over boards.

Condition

A fine copy on strong paper, in original condition apart from one leaf (N2) with a torn-off piece. Recased in seventeenth-century vellum over boards.

References & Bibliography

Houzeau & Lancaster, 14471 (the collective entry for the Stöffler and Pflaum ephemerides, Venice 1504 among them).

Description

A rare Venetian ephemeris by the German mathematician and astronomer Johann Stoffler, with Jacob Pflaum, printed at Venice by Petrus Liechtenstein and dated 4 January 1504. The present volume covers the years 1516 to 1531, giving the predicted daily positions of the sun, moon and planets, with one double-page opening for each month.

A word on how this book was made, because the point is easily misunderstood. The Almanach nova was not issued in parts. It was printed with one year to a quire, so that a copy could be broken up, bound in portions, or simply worn away year by year as the years it served went by. What survives here is the run of years from 1516 to 1531 out of an edition that began at 1505. Copies of this kind are the rule rather than the exception: these were working books, and early owners who did not have them bound had every reason to discard a gathering once its year had passed. There appears to be no scholarship on how the surviving portions are distributed, so it cannot be said whether the later years survive more or less often than the whole.

The scale of the rarity is not in doubt. The bibliographies record about a dozen copies of the Venice 1504 edition in public collections, and not one of them is accessible as a digital reproduction; specialists working on the early printed ephemerides have not been able to see this edition at first hand.

Stoffler and Pflaum set out to continue Regiomontanus, and the debt is exact rather than general. For the years 1499 to 1506 they took over Regiomontanus's quantitative data, raising all lunar latitudes by ten arc minutes because they worked to the meridian of Ulm rather than his Nuremberg, and they followed him for the times of the syzygies and of eclipses. That their edition runs to 1531 is no accident either: that is as far as Regiomontanus's calendars reach. Beyond 1506 they were on their own, and the years from 1507 to 1531 had to be computed from scratch, an enormous labour carried out to a lower precision than Regiomontanus had achieved. The book is therefore a record of the moment when German computational astronomy stopped copying its master and began, imperfectly, to work for itself.

Johann Stoffler (1452 to 1531) held the chair of mathematics and astronomy at the University of Tubingen, where his pupils included Philipp Melanchthon and Sebastian Munster, the very scholar who a few years later edited the Solinus and Mela geographies. Stoffler's almanacs are also remembered for an unintended consequence: their notice of a rare conjunction of all the then known planets in Pisces in February 1524 was seized upon across Europe as the sign of a coming universal flood, setting off widespread panic, with people reportedly building arks on the Rhine. Stoffler himself had made no such prophecy and publicly denied ever having predicted a flood.

We are grateful to Professor Richard L. Kremer of Dartmouth College, who is at work on a study of the large ephemerides in manuscript and print from 1300 to 1600, for the observations on the structure of the Almanach nova and on its relation to Regiomontanus (personal communication, 2026).

Provenance

The volume contains an autograph ownership inscription by the Zwickau cantor and composer Cornelius Freundt (1535 to 1591). The attribution has been established through comparison with authenticated manuscript material from his later years preserved in a German institutional collection. A separate, substantially earlier annotation on the title page appears to date from close to the time of publication and is written in an East Central German dialect associated with the Saale and Elbe region, adding a further layer to the volume's early history and use.

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