CLAUDIUS PTOLEMAEUS, Pelusiensis Alexandrini omnia quae extant opera, praeter Geographiam, Henrich Petri, Basel 1551.

In Latin. The rare, magnificent 1551 edition of Ptolemy's 'Complete Works,' including the immortal Almagest, complete with the magnificent maps by Honter of the constellations in the northern and southern hemispheres (in fact, the first geocentric celestial maps), According to Wightman, this is the "only edition, but based on the same printer's edition of 1541 (BM copy imperfect)." With annotations of the first three books of Almagest by Schreckenfuchs and of the remainder by Lucas Gauricus. (The Almagest—an Arabic portmanteau derived from the Greek for 'great astronomer'—is the most celebrated mathematical and astronomical treatise of antiquity. Ptolemy's catalogue of 1,028 stars is the most ancient accurate description of the heavens. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography describes the Almagest as "a masterpiece of clarity and method, superior to any ancient scientific textbook and with few peers from any period" and calls it the "dominant influence in theoretical astronomy end of the sixteenth century." Of the two celestial maps ("noteworthy for both their geocentrism and their novel constellation style"), Warner explains, "Whereas Durer's maps . . . showed the stellar universe as from the outside, Honter's were the first important printed maps showing the stars as seen from the earth."

Claudius Ptolemaeus; (c. AD 100 – c. 170) was a Greco-Egyptian writer, known as a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, and poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He lived in the city of Alexandria in the Roman province of Egypt, wrote in Koine Greek, and held Roman citizenship. Beyond that, few reliable details of his life are known. His birthplace has been given as Ptolemais Hermiou in the Thebaid in an uncorroborated statement by the 14th-century astronomer Theodore Meliteniotes. This is a very late attestation, however, and there is no other reason to suppose that he ever lived anywhere else than Alexandria, where he died around AD 168.

Ptolemy was the author of several scientific treatises, three of which were of continuing importance to later Islamic, Byzantine and European science. The first is the astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest, although it was originally entitled the "Mathematical Treatise" and then known as the "Great Treatise". The second is the Geography, which is a thorough discussion of the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. This manuscript was used by Christopher Columbus as the map for his westward-bound path to Asia, in which he discovered the hitherto unknown lands of the Americas. The third is the astrological treatise in which he attempted to adapt horoscopic astrology to the Aristotelian natural philosophy of his day.