Not all the comments were flattering. Luther denounced Copernicus as the fool who will turn the whole science of astronomy upside down. In 1531 a satirical play was produced about him in Elbing, Prussia, by a local schoolmaster. In Rome things went better, for the time being at least. In 1533 John Widmanstad, a papal secretary, lectured on Copernicus s theory before Pope Clement VII and several cardinals. Widmanstad s hand was behind the letter that Cardinal Schonberg sent in 1536 from Rome to Copernicus, urging him to publish his thoughts, or at least to share them with him.
It was a futile request. Probably nobody knew exactly how far Copernicus had progressed with his work until Georg Joachim , a young scholar from Wittenberg, arrived in Frauenburg in the spring of 1539. When he returned to Wittenberg, he had already printed an account, known as the Narratio prima, of Copernicus s almost ready book. Rheticus was also instrumental in securing the printing of Copernicus s book in Nuremberg, although the final supervision remained in the care of Andrew Osiander, a Lutheran clergyman. He might have been the one who gave the work its title, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, which is not found in the manuscript. But Osiander certainly had written the anonymous preface, in which Copernicus s ideas were claimed as mere hypotheses by their author, or convenient mathematical formalism that had nothing to do with the physical reality.
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