c. 1355 or 1365

1436

Giraumont (Ardennes)

late 14th/early 15th century

Fusoris was born in either 1355 or 1365 (1) at Giraumont in the Ardennes region of France. After obtaining his basic grounding in grammar and logic at the school of Mézières sur Meuse, he followed the arts course at Paris University and earned his master's degree in arts and in medicine (1398). At the same period he interested himself in astrology and its instruments, acquiring metal-working skills from his father, a pewterer by trade, and establishing an instrument-making workshop at an, as yet, unknown date in Paris. He served as a Regent Master in Paris until 1400, and held a canonry in the Cathedral of Rheims from at least 1402. He was ordained in 1411, became a canon of Notre-Dame, Paris in 1411, Provost of Larchant (Seine et Marne), 1414, and curé of Jouharren Canon of Nancy. He died in 1436. In the summer of 1414, Fusoris sold a planetary instrument to Robert Courtenay, Bishop of Norwich on special embassy to the court of France. Having received only half the payment due, the following year Fusoris had himself included in the return embassy of Guillaume de Boiratier, archbishop of Bourges to England. With its failure hostilities were resumed between France and England, and Henry V laid siege to Harfleur. Fusoris was implicated in a suspected plot, tried, and exiled first to Mezières-sur-Meuse secondly to Reims. After a period of time however, he was able to accept and fill commissions for instruments while in exile, the most notable of them being construction of an astronomical clock for Bourges cathedral in 1428. This is the oldest complete clock still surviving in France.2 In 1432 he received a commission from the Canons of Metz to write a treatise of cosmology, and by Charles VII to prepare trigonometric and astronomical tables to replace the Alphonsine tables. Neither work had been completed before his death. No astrolabe by Fusoris is signed. That some twenty instruments may be attributed to him is the result of the careful work of Emmanuel Poulle who noted the close correspondence of several unsigned late medieval astrolabes with the construction described by Fusoris in the treatise on the uses of the astrolabe that he wrote between 1407 and 1412 for Pierre de Navarre, Comte de Mortain. The most probant similarity is that the star cornu arietis is given a southern, rather than its correct northern, declination in both the star table included in Fusoris’ text and on the known astrolabes.3

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1 In the deposition of his trial in 1415 Fusoris’ age is given contradictorily as ‘cinquante ans ou environ’ and ‘est etatis sexaginta annorum vel circa’, Mirot 173 and 230. Poulle 2, suggests that 1365 is to be preferred over 1355.

2 Poulle (n21, ch II ; Bernard Capo, L’Horloge astronomique de Bourges, histoire d’une réhabilitation, Bourges 1994 ; Francis Maddison, ‘The Restoration of the astronomical Clock of Jean Fusoris in Bourges Cathedral and the clock’s history in strip-cartoon’, Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society, 44 1995, 18-20.
3 For Fusoris' astrolabes see Poulle, chapter II; Casi, passim.

'Usages de l'astrolabe', written between 1407 and 1412. Incipit (prologue) 'honorable chose est et moult a prisier…; Incipit (text), 'En l'astrolabe sont diverses choses…'. For a discussion of this text see Poulle 7ff.
For a list of other writings by Fusoris mainly non-extant, see Poulle, 5.

3235

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