Euclid: Reception in the Renaissance

Although the Latin Middle Ages received a
number of versions of Euclid’s Elements and
several other Euclidean works, by the fourteenth
century, only the Campanus redaction
from c. 1259 was in circulation. In the fourteenth
and fifteenth century, this redaction was
encountered by students of Arts or Medicine
university faculties, even though we have scant
evidence that Euclid impressed their minds. In
the fifteenth century, other circles discovered
him: Alberti took over the idea of elements,
Regiomontanus used Euclid alongside Archimedes
as an argument for the superiority of
mathematics over philosophy, and one Florentine
abacus school tradition was able to give
correct references to the Elements.
A turn arrived with book printing. In 1482,
the Campanus Elements were printed, and in
1498 and 1501, Giorgio Valla inserted pseudo-
Euclidean and Euclidean material in two bulky
volumes. A new though somewhat problematic
Latin translation from the Greek (including
also some minor works) was published by
Zamberti in 1505, and until 1540 a number of
reprints or reeditions of Campanus’s and
Zamberti’s texts were published – at times in
combination. From the 1540s onward, revisions,
selections, and vernacular translations
began to appear, all based on the same two
texts. In 1572, however, Commandino made a
new Latin translation from Zamberti’s text and
a sounder manuscript, and in 1574 Clavius
produced a didactically oriented redaction.
These two set the scene for the next two
centuries.