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C HANGING CULTURALT RADITIONS 119 The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 1516 Thomas Mor e’s Utopia published 1517 Martin Luther writes the Ninety-Five Theses 1522 Luther translates the Bible into German 1525 Peasant uprising in Germany 1543 Andreas Vesalius writes On Anatomy 1559 Anglican Church established in England, with the king/queen as its head 1569 Gerhardus Mercator prepares cylindrical map of the earth 1582 Gregorian calendar introduced by Pope Gregory XIII 1628 William Harvey links the heart with blood circulation 1673 Academy of Sciences set up in Paris 1687 Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica published The Copernican Revolution The Christian notion of man as a sinner was questioned from an entirely different angle – by scientists. The turning point in European Celestial means divine or heavenly, science came with the work of Copernicus (1473-1543), a while terrestrial contemporary of Martin Luther. Christians had believed that the implies having a earth was a sinful place and the heavy burden of sin made it worldly quality. immobile. The earth stood at the centre of the universe around which moved the celestial planets. Copernicus asserted that the planets, including the earth, rotate around the sun. A devout Christian, Copernicus was afraid of the possible reaction to his theory by traditionalist clergymen. For this reason, he did not want his manuscript, De revolutionibus (The Rotation) to be printed. On his deathbed, he gave it to his follower, Joachim Rheticus. It took time for people to accept this idea. It was much later – more than half a century later, in fact – that the difference between ‘heaven’ and earth was bridged through the writings of astronomers like Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). The theory of the earth as part of a sun-centred system was made popular by Kepler’s Cosmographical Mystery, which demonstrated that the planets move around the sun not in circles but in ellipses. Galileo confirmed the notion of the dynamic world in his work The Motion. This revolution in science Self-portrait by reached its climax with Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation. Copernicus. Reprint 2026-27