Nicolaus Copernicus of his life. At the instance of Roger Boscovich, the Catholic Church's 1758 "Index of Prohibited Books" omitted the general prohibition of works defending heliocentrism, but retained the specific prohibitions of the original uncensored versions of "De revolutionibus" and Galileo's "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems". Those prohibitions were finally dropped from the 1835 "Index". There has been discussion of Copernicus' nationality and of whether it is meaningful to ascribe to him a nationality in the modern sense. Nicolaus Copernicus was born and raised in Royal Prussia, a semiautonomous and polyglot region of the Kingdom of Poland. He was
History of science in the Renaissance trained with the "Theoricae novae" and the "Epitome". Shortly before 1514 he began to revive Aristarchus's idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun. He spent the rest of his life attempting a mathematical proof of heliocentrism. When "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" was finally published in 1543, Copernicus was on his deathbed. A comparison of his work with the "Almagest" shows that Copernicus was in many ways a Renaissance scientist rather than a revolutionary, because he followed Ptolemy's methods and even his order of presentation. In astronomy, the Renaissance of science can be said to have ended with the works