On the Revolutions (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium), dedicatory preface to Pope Paul III

Nicolaus Copernicus's On the Revolutions, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, in Edward Rosen's translation, part of the Complete Works of Copernicus project published in cooperation between Polish Scientific Publishers and Johns Hopkins University Press, presents Copernicus's own 1543 treatise and its dedicatory preface to Pope Paul III in Rosen's authoritative English rendering, produced for the five hundredth anniversary of Copernicus's birth. Its strength is that it is the primary text itself in a translation prepared by a leading Copernicus scholar with full critical apparatus, letting a reader check Copernicus's own words, including his own framing of the work to the Pope, rather than a secondhand paraphrase. Its limit is that reading the primary text answers what Copernicus wrote and how he presented it, not how it was received, contested and gradually accepted by astronomers over the following century, a separate history a claim about the Copernican revolution's reception needs its own source for.