The correct answer is ...
The sixteenth century.
Copernicus completed De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium in about 1530, but the work wasn't published until the year of his death (1543). Legend has it that a copy of the printer's proof was placed in his hands as he lay in a coma, and he woke long enough to recognize what he was holding before he died, "publishing as he perished."
