The library’s fifth work is its largest: Almagestum Novum, Book IX: On the System of the World by Giovanni Battista Riccioli, S.J. (Bologna, 1651) — about 650,000 words across 76 chapters, in English for the first time.
Book IX is Riccioli’s complete survey of the question that defined his century. Five sections: the substance of the heavens drawn from Genesis and the mind of the Fathers; the movers and motions of the celestial bodies; the world-systems built around an immobile Earth, from Ptolemy and Tycho to Riccioli’s own; the celebrated examination of the system of the Earth in motion, in which the arguments for and against Copernicus are weighed at a length and with a fairness unmatched in the seventeenth century; and the harmonic system of the world.
Each section may be read online chapter by chapter or downloaded as its own PDF — Section IV comes with a detailed index in which every entry is a clickable link — and the whole book is available as a single EPUB for e-readers. The original Latin, in the very copy this translation was made from, is linked from the work’s page.
The next book will be either Serarius on Joshua, or additional books from the Bibliotheca of Sixtus of Siena.