There's a record of Luther dismissing Copernicus, or at least geocentrism, though it's from four years before On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was published:
"So it goes now. Whoever wants to be clever must agree with nothing that others esteem. He must do something of his own. This is what that fellow does who wishes to turn the whole of astronomy upside down."
But that's pretty mild for Luther. If he wasn't using scatalogical references, his heart wasn't really in it. We only know about it because many of Luther's casual conversations were recorded; he was literally complaining about it at the dinner table.
Re:The great Medieval water myth (2013)
by mcguire on Wednesday February 11, 2015 @12:43PM
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"So it goes now. Whoever wants to be clever must agree with nothing that others esteem. He must do something of his own. This is what that fellow does who wishes to turn the whole of astronomy upside down."
Fortunately, things are completely different in the modern world.
Re:The great Medieval water myth (2013)
by xyzzyz on Wednesday February 11, 2015 @01:56PM
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Well, Copernicus died before the book became widely available, didn't he? Maybe that's why he was not attacked during his life by church establishment.
Re:The great Medieval water myth (2013)
by analog31 on Wednesday February 11, 2015 @07:34PM
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Good eye. But it's still my understanding that the attack from the church fathers didn't occur until much later, around the time of the Galileo affair.
Re:The great Medieval water myth (2013)
by kevinwang on Wednesday February 11, 2015 @08:37AM
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weird tidbit seems true: http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast161/Unit3/resp...
I've also read that Galileo received favorable treatment from the Pope at first, then things went downhill for him later.
A weird tidbit, that I can't confirm, is that Martin Luther denounced Copernicus.