Kosmologisches Wissen, das Konzept des Universums und die Kugelgestalt der Erde bei Ramon Llull (1232-1316)

Abstract

The starting point of the paper is the fact - marginalized in the early modern period - that knowledge of the spherical shape of the earth was known throughout the Middle Ages, so that this model in Llull's work became "such an ordinary matter" "that he occasionally no longer describes it explicitly". In fact, traces of the cosmological model can be found already in the early Libre de la contemplació de Déus (1372) and four years later in the Liber Chaos, which "almost inevitably necessitates the notion of the spherical earth in the midst of the universe." The spherical shape is also the starting point for the theoretical situating of the Christian idea of hell and heaven in the Doctrina Pueril, written in the 80s, while in the later writings of Félix. Libre de les meravelles del mon and Arbre de ciència, as well as in the Liber Proverbiorum, the sphere model can only be inferred implicitly. Finally, in the Tractatus novus de Astronomia, written in Paris in 1297, the term "clod of earth" ("complexio terrae") applied to Saturn indicates a conception of celestial bodies that is closer to the shape of a sphere than to the conception of a disk.