Anthony Ascham's Sphere is historically significant since it appeared a generation earlier than William Thomas's 1553 work, which historians had considered the earliest English-language rendering of De Sphaera. Ascham completed his folio-sized manuscript in 1527 at St. John's College, Cambridge. Suffused with color, diagrams, maps, and volvelles, The Sphere prompts the modern scholar to wonder which printed Latin edition of Sacrobosco's De Sphaera Ascham utilized for translation, and about the intended audience and the work's purpose. This paper demonstrates that Ascham's principal source was Jacques Lefèvre's remarkable Latin commentary on De Sphaera, which he chose to simplify, yet enhance. Ascham abridged Lefèvre's cosmography by removing most of the commentary and simplified it by deleting the advanced mathematics. But he enhanced it by adding more diagrams and tables, an atlas of constellations and their myths, a worldwide geography of maps, and stunning planetary motion volvelles. As the major attraction, he wrote it in English, perhaps as an aristocratic presentation copy, perhaps for the majority of English readers (those without a strong grasp of Latin and mathematics), or perhaps for other reasons outlined in this article. By its ease of comprehension, I suggest that one purpose of The Sphere was to serve as an enticing introduction—a visual primer—to Lefèvre's edition and the entire De Sphaera genre. Yet the single extant manuscript, with no evidence for a print edition, implies that Ascham never achieved this goal. After providing context, this paper discusses how Ascham utilized Lefèvre's volume, and other print sources such as Peter Apian's 1524 Cosmographicus Liber and Hyginus's De Astronomia, to produce The Sphere. The paper concludes by situating Ascham's Sphere within England's 16th-century engagement with the genre of De Sphaera.

中文翻译：

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Anthony Ascham 的球体：基于 Sacrobosco 的 De Sphaera 的已知最早的英语宇宙学的来源

Anthony Ascham 的Sphere具有历史意义，因为它比 William Thomas 1553 年的作品早一代出现，历史学家认为这是De Sphaera最早的英语渲染。Ascham 于 1527 年在剑桥圣约翰学院完成了对开本大小的手稿。充满色彩、图表、地图和卷轴的The Sphere促使现代学者想知道 Sacrobosco 的De Sphaera Ascham 的哪个印刷拉丁版用于翻译，以及预期的受众和作品的目的。这篇论文表明，阿沙姆的主要来源是雅克·勒费弗尔对德·斯帕埃拉的非凡拉丁评论，他选择简化但增强。Ascham 通过删除大部分评论删去了 Lefèvre 的宇宙学，并通过删除高级数学对其进行了简化。但他通过添加更多图表和表格、星座及其神话的地图集、全球地图地理以及令人惊叹的行星运动卷轴来增强它。作为主要的吸引力，他用英语写了它，也许是作为贵族演示文稿的副本，也许是为大多数英语读者（那些没有很好地掌握拉丁语和数学的人），或者也许是出于本文中概述的其他原因。通过易于理解，我认为The Sphere 的一个目的是作为 Lefèvre 版本和整个De Sphaera的引人入胜的介绍——视觉入门类型。然而，这份现存的单一手稿，没有印刷版的证据，暗示 Ascham 从未实现过这个目标。在提供上下文之后，本文讨论了 Ascham 如何利用 Lefèvre 的卷以及其他印刷资源（例如 Peter Apian 的 1524 年Cosmographicus Liber和 Hyginus 的De Astronomia）来制作The Sphere。这篇论文最后将阿斯卡姆的球体置于英格兰 16 世纪与De Sphaera流派的接触中。