Editions and Sources

Primary Latin Witnesses (1440 / 1514–1913), Archival Scan Collation & Original GEOMETOR Translation

I. Primary Latin Witnesses

All Latin texts in geometor/cusa (staged with SHA-256 checksums in resources/cusa/sources/ and resources/cusa/sources_manifest.json) derive exclusively from public-domain witnesses verified by multimodal archival scan inspection:

  1. Paris Editio Princeps (1514) (cusa:paris:1514): Haec accurata recognitio trium voluminum operum Clariss. P. Nicolai Cusae Cardinalis, edited by Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples (Faber Stapulensis) and printed by Jodocus Badius Ascensius at Paris. Volume I contains De Docta Ignorantia alongside woodcut geometric diagrams; Volume II contains the Opuscula Mathematica.

  2. Basel Edition (1565) (cusa:basel:1565): Nicolai de Cusa Cardinalis, utriusque iuris doctoris, in omnique philosophia incomparabilis viri, Opera, printed by Heinrich Petri (Henricpetri) at Basel—the first printing to include Cusa’s final mathematical treatise, Aurea Propositio in Mathematicis (August 8, 1459, pp. 1145–1146).

  3. Rotta Edition (1913) & Klibansky’s McGill Collation (cusa:rotta:1913, cusa:heidelberg:1932): Paolo Rotta's Nicolai Cusani De docta ignorantia libri tres (Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1913). Direct multimodal inspection of the digitized McGill University Library copy owned and annotated in pencil by Raymond Klibansky (while preparing the 1932 Heidelberg Academy edition, h I) identified and restored two typesetting eye-skip (homeoteleuton) omissions in Rotta’s printed Latin:

    • Book I, Chapter 13 §2 (Rotta p. 28): Restored et ille plus a curvitate recedit quam arcus gh adhuc minoris circuli (confirmed by Rotta’s own marginal woodcut depicting ab, cd, ef, and gh).

    • Book I, Chapter 14 §3 (Rotta p. 31): Restored tanto minus vincunt lineae bd et dc lineam bc between ut bdc and et superficies minor.

II. Original GEOMETOR English Translation & Licensing

Because standard twentieth-century English translations of Nicholas of Cusa (including Germain Heron 1954, Jasper Hopkins 1981/1985, and H. Lawrence Bond 1997) remain under modern copyright, every English sentence across all five Codex units (124 paragraphs across 21 treatise sections) was freshly translated directly from the Latin witnesses specifically for GEOMETOR and is released under the repository’s permissive MIT License.

Our translation adheres to three strict philological principles:

  1. Terminological Consistency: Key Cusan concepts—docta ignorantia (learned ignorance), coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites), transsumptio (transsumption), complicatio / explicatio (enfolding / unfolding), contractio (contraction), prima / secunda linea (first / second line), and proportio sesquiquarta (sesquiquartal ratio \(5:4\))—are rendered uniformly and linked to the critical apparatus.

  2. Geometric Letter Fidelity: All diagram labels (ab, cd, ef, gh, bac, bdc, ikl) match the historic woodcuts and interactive .euclid-graphic SVGs.

  3. 1-to-1 Paragraph Synchronization: Every English paragraph stands in verified 1-to-1 bijection (verify_unit_parity) with its corresponding Latin witness paragraph and .. folio:: milestone.