Copernicus in the Cultural Debates of the Renaissance is a worthy contribution to the recent body of scholarship on early modern astronomy and cosmology. Following an introductory chapter which surveys the dissemination and discussion of Copernicus's work between 1514 and 1616, successive parts of the book summarize, synthesize and dissect key topics in the reception of his theories: competing notions of the relationship between, and epistemologies of, mathematical astronomy and natural philosophy; the understanding of Copernican hypotheses by those who used them to compile tables and ephemerides; debates about the dimensions and the finiteness or infiniteness of the universe; the articulation of non-Aristotelian accounts of terrestrial motion; the difference between the approaches of Kepler and Galileo to championing Copernicanism; and the role of theology and scriptural exegesis in shaping the response to heliocentrism. Firmly rooted in a mastery of the polyglot secondary literature and the close reading of a wide array of sources, these chapters may serve specialists and non-specialists alike as a convenient summation of the state of the field.

Omodeo's account is rich in places where the historiography has often been impoverished: in treating the work of the ephemerists as contributions to the debate over world systems, for example, and in paying attention to the terrestrial physics of figures such as Giovanni Battista Benedetti. But Omodeo's most original and interesting contribution occurs in the final chapter of the book, which draws on his areas of particular expertise, Giordano Bruno and Bruno's experiences and interlocutors at the University of Helmstedt, including Duncan Liddel. In the absence of any conclusion to the volume as a whole, the reader is encouraged to see this chapter as very much the capstone of the piece. Omodeo's concern here is with the implications of Copernican cosmology for Renaissance understandings of the human condition, on which the historiography is divided. Thomas Kuhn supposed (but did not show) that the displacement of the Earth from the centre of the universe would have been disturbing to sixteenth-century folk; while Arthur Lovejoy and Ernst Cassirer, amongst others, suggested that setting the Earth in motion amongst the stars was actually seen in the period as exalting humanity. Focusing on Bruno and a handful of others, Omodeo demonstrates that Copernicans were inclined to celebrate humankind's new place in the universe, and connects this positive view with Bruno's ethics and an emphasis on individual liberty. He thus goes beyond Dennis R. Danielson, who has handily demolished the Kuhnian view and pointed to the Copernican exaltation of mankind in, amongst other places, his contribution to the useful volume edited by Ronald L. Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (2009). But the particularity and the novelty of the evidence presented in the chapter may leave readers wishing that more space had been devoted to this unfamiliar territory, and less covering the better-trodden ground of Kepler's interactions with Galileo and the condemnations of 1616. As things stand, both the necessity of the connection between Bruno's form of Copernicanism and his ethics, and the broader significance of the examples Omodeo adduces for the ‘ethical expectations aroused by a new positioning of humankind in the world or, in many cases, in an infinite universe’ (p. 383), remain somewhat unclear.

It is only in the final chapter that Omodeo strays far beyond the usual sites and sources for understanding the reception of Copernicus, and only here, perhaps, where he draws on images and verses as well as letters and texts and is concerned with the anthropological significance of Copernicanism, that it seems especially pertinent to refer to Copernicus's place in ‘cultural debates of the Renaissance’ rather than ‘debates’ alone. Wisely, Omodeo has not sought to find ‘a unifying principle accounting for the genesis, the circulation and the influence of De revolutionibus’ (p. 9); instead, his stated aim is to capture the plurality of responses to Copernicus at a wide range of moments and contexts. This he has undoubtedly achieved.