ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the range of circumstantial connections between the theoretical astronomy of the Islamic world and Renaissance astronomy extends beyond the appearance of the innovations of astronomers of the Islamic world in Nicholas Copernicus’s work. It describes a network of scholars that not only accounts for this wider range of circumstantial connections, but also expands understanding of the specific context for Copernicus’s work. The chapter also describes Moses Galeano within a network of scholars who transmitted texts between Crete, the Ottoman Empire, and Europe. It suggests that Namias’s work on homocentric astronomy meshed perfectly with that of other scholars at the University of Padua and that a copy of The Light of the World was reported to have been at Padua. The possibility of independent discoveries in some of these areas is arguable, but there may be a limit to how much can be attributed to independent discovery in the face of a plausible path of transmission.
