One of the most enduring intellectual landmarks of the seventeenth century was Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica of 1687. Historical interest in the period's cosmology has naturally been dominated by the Principia – the evolution of Newtonian dynamics, its application in Newton's ‘System of the World’, and its troubled reception in contemporary natural philosophy.

Glimpses of the book's prehistory are found in the text itself. In introducing the mathematical concept of a centripetal force, varying inversely as the square of distance from the attracting centre, Newton mentions that such a force applies in reality in the case of heavenly motions, ‘as Sir Christopher Wren, Dr. Hooke, and Dr. Halley have severally observed’ (Newton, 1947, p. 46). This little remark was the sole concrete result of much passion and ill-feeling, and its genesis is perhaps a useful introduction to that aspect of cosmological theory in the thirty or so years before the Principia in which Wren had a hand.

When, in May 1686, Robert Hooke learnt the basic principles of the cosmology that Newton would announce in his forthcoming book, he became anxious that his part in its development should be properly acknowledged. In a series of letters, written between November 1679 and January 1679/80, he had indeed presented Newton with the basic conceptual ingredients of the Newtonian cosmological programme: that a planetary orbit is the resultant effect of a rectilinear inertial motion and a centripetal attractive force governed by an inverse-square distance law.