The Sphere. Knowledge System Evolution and the Shared Scientific Identity of Europe

On the basis of the corpus of all early modern printed editions of commentaries on the Sphere of Sacrobosco, the lecture shows how to reconstruct the transformation process—and its mechanisms—undergone by the treatise, and so to explore the evolutionary path, between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, of the scientific system pivoted around cosmological knowledge: the shared scientific identity of Europe. The sources are analyzed on three levels: text, images, and tables. From a methodological point of view the lecture will also show how data are extracted by means of machine learning and analyzed by means of an approach derived from the physics of the complex systems and network theory.