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Abstract
Purpose. This article examines the artistic and epistemological dimensions of John Banville's novel Doctor Copernicus the first installment of the “Revolutions Trilogy,” in order to determine how the novel's non-chronological, “kaleidoscopic” presentation of historical cosmological models functions as a vehicle of literary knowledge. Methods. The novel is read through James Harold's theory of “literary cognitivism” and analyzed by means of close textual analysis combined with intertextual verification: every cosmological model attributed in the novel to Copernicus's teachers (Canon Wodka and Domenico Maria da Novara) is checked against “external sources” — the historical and philosophical texts on which Banville draws (Koestler, Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Cusanus, and others). Results. The analysis shows that the ten cosmological models surveyed in the novel — from Egyptian myth to Pythagoras, the Church Fathers, the Gnostics, Ptolemy, Plato, Aristotle, and Nicholas of Cusa — alternate between perspectival, propositional, and phenomenal knowledge in Harold's sense, and that Banville systematically blurs documented historical fact with artistic invention, producing a recurring problem of “evidentiary warrant.” Conclusion. The figure of Copernicus emerges not as the discoverer of a fixed truth but as an epistemological figure formed at the intersection of knowledge, doubt, imagination, and interpretation; the novel represents scientific truth as something constituted through historical, cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic interpretation rather than as an absolute given.