“You disparage your teacher”: A Medieval Controversy about the Authorship of the Tabulae Waradienses

This paper explores the possibility that a fifteenth-century work on astronomy, the Tabulae Waradienses, was not written by George of Peuerbach, as was previously thought, but by his disciple John Regiomontanus. The starting point is a note by one of the readers of a manuscript containing this work suggesting that the work was Regiomontanus’s, and the main part of this study considers and compares the attributions and contents of this and several other manuscripts. The findings give us reason to believe that the readers who read the Tabulae Waradienses in manuscript copies believed that Regiomontanus did write this work, but that he did so by appropriating Peuerbach’s older work on eclipses. After establishing this, the paper considers the possibility of this being true, by studying the relations between Peuerbach, Regiomontanus, and the person to whom said work was dedicated, Bishop John Vitez of Oradea. The conclusion is that there was sufficient opportunity for the work to be written by either author, but if the readers who attributed it to Regiomontanus were right, the latter would have probably written it in mid-1461, immediately after his teacher’s death.