Mellon/White Science and Print Culture Workshop

Between 1944 and 1974 no less than nine facsimiles of the autograph of Copernicus' De revolutionibus were published. However, there both is and is not a hole in the manuscript page at the center of Copernicus' emblematic diagram of the heliocentric universe. The stakes of the seemingly trivial empirical question involve an interrogation of the material nature of textual production, the staged physicality of scientific inquiry and the limits of the constitution of literary objects.