The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order is a 704-page book written by Robert S. Westman and published by University of California Press (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London) in 2011 and in 2020 (paperback). The book is a broad historical overview of Europe's astronomical and astrological culture leading to Copernicus’s De revolutionibus and follows the scholarly debates that took place roughly over three generations after Copernicus. Summary In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus publicly defended his hypothesis that the earth is a planet and the sun a body resting near the center of a finite universe. This view challenged a long-held, widespread consensus about the order of the planets. But why did Copernicus make this bold proposal? And why did it matter? The Copernican Question revisits this pivotal moment in the history of science and puts political and cultural developments at the center rather than the periphery of the story. When Copernicus first hit on his theory around 1510, European society at all social levels was consumed with chronic warfare, the syphilis pandemic and recurrence of the bubonic plague, and, soon thereafter, Martin Luther’s break with the Catholic church. Apocalyptic prophecies about the imminent end of the world were rife; the relatively new technology of print was churning out reams of alarming astrological prognostications even as astrology itself came under serious attack in July 1496 from the Renaissance Florentine polymath Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494). Copernicus knew Pico’s work, possibly as early as the year of its publication in Bologna, the city in which he lived with the astrological prognosticator and astronomer, Domenico Maria di Novara (1454-1504). Against Pico’s multi-pronged critique, Copernicus sought to protect the credibility of astrology by reforming the astronomical foundations on which astrology rested. But, his new hypothesis came at the cost of introducing new uncertainties and engendering enormous resistance from traditionalists in the universities. Westman shows that efforts to answer Pico’s critique became a crucial unifying theme over the three generations of the first phase of what he calls the early modern scientific movement—a “long sixteenth century,” from the 1490s to the 1610s—that laid the foundations for the great transformations in natural philosophy in the century that followed. Central Themes, Patterns, Theses 1. To avoid projecting current classifications of knowledge onto the past, Westman argues that categories of knowledge and their meanings should be regarded as bound to time and place. In Copernicus’s lifetime (1473-1543) and well