Celio Calcagnini

{{Short description|Italian humanist and scientist}}

File:Calcagnini - Opere, 1544 - 1233192.jpg

Celio Calcagnini (Ferrara, 17 September 1479 – Ferrara, 24 April 1541), also known as Caelius Calcagninus, was an Italian humanist and scientist from Ferrara. His learning as displayed in his collected works is very broad.{{cite web|url=http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/celio-calcagnini_(Dizionario-Biografico)/ |title=Calcagnini, Celio |author=Marchetti, V. |work=Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani - Volume 16 |publisher=Treccani.it |year=1973 |language=Italian |accessdate=31 July 2012}}

He had a wide experience: as soldier, academic, diplomat and in the chancery of Ippolito d'Este. He was consulted by Richard Croke on behalf of Henry VIII of England in the question of the latter's divorce.Quirinus Breen, "Celio Calcagnini (1479-1541)", Church History, Vol. 21, No. 3 (September 1952), pp. 225-238. He was a major influence on Rabelais's literary and linguistic ideas and is presumed to have met him in Italy, as well as being a teacher of Clément MarotMichael Andrew Screech, Rabelais. p. 289, p. 378; Stanley G. Eskin, "Physis and Antiphysie: The Idea of Nature in Rabelais and Calcagnini", Comparative Literature, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring, 1962), pp. 167-173. and was praised by Erasmus.Peter G. Bietenholz, Thomas Brian Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation (2003), p. 242.

He had a contemporary reputation as an astronomer, and wrote on the rotation of the Earth. He knew Copernicus in Ferrara at the beginning of the sixteenth century.{{cite web |url=http://hsci.ou.edu/exhibits/exhibit.php?exbgrp=9&exbid=52&exbpg=5 |title=Copernicus, Early life and training: Ferrara |publisher=Hsci.ou.edu |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20100713112341/http://hsci.ou.edu/exhibits/exhibit.php?exbgrp=9 |archivedate=2010-07-13 }} His Quod Caelum Stet, Terra Moveatur is a precursor of the De Revolutionibus of Copernicus, though A. C. Crombie qualifies his rotational theory as "vague",A. C. Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science II (1959 edition), p. 166. and is often dated to about 1525.R. J. Schoeck, The Geography of Erasmus, p. 201, in Fokke Akkerman, Arie Johan Vanderjagt, A. H. Van Der Laan, Northern Humanism in European Context, 1469-1625: From the 'Adwert Academy' to Ubbo Emmius (1999).