Abstract
Not until 1675 did a few more meagre scraps about William Gascoigne appear in print. These came from Edward Sherburne (1616–1702), a translator, poet and hymn writer, who had lost a fortune supporting the King’s cause in the Civil War. In the mid 1650s, whilst exiled in Paris, Sherburne began a labour of love that married his interest in astronomy and his skills as a poet. It was to take almost 20 years to complete the task: the poetic translation of the five volume, first-century poem Astronomica, written by the Roman poet Marcus Manilius. The finished result appeared as The Sphere of Marcus Manilius made an English Poem.
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Notes
- 1.
Sherburne, Edward, The Sphere of Marcus Manilius made an English poem: with annotations and an astronomical appendix (London, 1675), preface.
- 2.
Ibid, 92, 105.
- 3.
Ibid, 92–93.
- 4.
An account of the lives of William Crabtree and Jeremiah Horrocks is beyond the scope of this book. For more information, see: Chapman, Allan, William Crabtree 1610–1644: Manchester’s first mathematician (Manchester, 1995); Radcliffe, Albert, Brief Dawn: William Crabtree of Broughton and the Transit of Venus 24th November 1639 (Manchester, 2000); Aughton, Peter, The Transit of Venus: the brief, brilliant life of Jeremiah Horrocks (London, 2004).
- 5.
Howse, Derek, Greenwich Time and the Longitude (London, 1997), 35.
- 6.
According to J.L.E.Dreyer (Flamsteed’s letters to Richard Towneley, The Observatory, v.45 (1922), 281), this could be a slip of the pen by Flamsteed, who probably meant Richard Towneley, not Christopher.
- 7.
Baily, Francis, An Account of the Revd John Flamsteed (London, 1835), 29–30.
- 8.
Ibid, 31–32.
- 9.
William Molyneux, Dioptrica nova: A treatise of dioptricks (London, 1692), Admonition to the Reader, 2.
- 10.
Forbes, E.G., Murdin, L., and Willmoth, F. (Eds), The correspondence of John Flamsteed, The First Astronomer Royal, v.1 (1666–1682), Letter to Collins, 1 August 1671, 102–3.
- 11.
Ibid., v.1, Letter to Sir Jonas Moore, April 1674, 294–295.
- 12.
Ibid., v.1, Letter to Richard Towneley, 15 February 1674, 274–275.
- 13.
Ibid., v.2, Letter to William Molyneux, 10 May 1690, 421.
- 14.
Ibid., v.1, Letter to Henry Oldenburg, 16 November 1672, 185.
- 15.
The National Archives, RGO 1/9, ff.3r-6r; 1/40, ff.9v-22r. Some of the content of the Crabtree-Gascoigne letter of 21 June 1642 was published in The Gresham lectures of John Flamsteed, by Eric G.Forbes (London, 1975), 51–2.
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Sellers, D. (2012). A ‘Light of the First Magnitude’. In: In Search of William Gascoigne. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 390. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4097-0_4
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