John Donne's Verdict on Tycho Brahe' No Astronomer is an Island

8/12/2019 'John Donne's Verdict on Tycho Brahe' No Astronomer is an Island

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Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. , Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 583600, 2001Pergamon 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Essay Review

John Donnes Verdict on Tycho Brahe:No Astronomer is an Island?

Adam Mosley*

John Christianson, On Tychos Island: Tycho Brahe and His Assistants, 15701601(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), xii + 451 pp., ISBN 0-521-65081.Hardback 30.00.

1. Setting the Scene: No Man is an Island, Entire of It Self?

Given the central place of astronomy in that currently unfashionable episode inthe grand narrative of the history of science, the Scientic Revolution, and giventhe role which that episode has long played in university curricula, it is hardlysurprising that the name Tycho Brahe is familiar even to scholars whose usualconcerns lie far away from the study of the heavens and from the early-modernperiod. Widely remembered as the astronomer whose large observing instrumentssupplied the data from which Kepler was to derive the ellipticity of planetary orbits,Tycho is also known as the scholar who promulgated an alternative to the world-systems of both Copernicus and Ptolemy. In some quarters, it is true, he is better

known as the Danish noble who was possessed of both a false nose and a prescientdwarf, and as the man whose table-manners were such that he could almost besaid to have died of embarrassment. But the more colourful aspects of Tychos lifeand demise would have remained entirely unknown were it not for the astronomicalaccomplishments which originally brought him to the attention of historians. Andthat attention has, over the years, proved not inconsiderable: it could hardly be saidthat he has been overlooked, or neglected. However, the total number of articles andmonographs devoted to Tycho is but a fraction of those which treat one or more

* Trinity College, Cambridge CB2 1TQ, U.K.

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584 Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

of that triumvirate of early-modern cosmology constituted by Copernicus, Keplerand (most especially) Galileo Galilei. In this sense, therefore, it could legitimatelybe said that Tycho was the least well known of the most famous of astronomers.

That would be reason enough to welcome a new study of Tycho which was

accessible, well illustrated and researched with diligence and competence. OnTycho s Island is all these things and more. As we learn from its preface, it hasbeen in the making for a quarter of a century; and for longer than those twenty-ve years its author has been one of those few individuals who could genuinelybe called a scholar of Tycho, a historian who has made signi cant contributions tothe slowly rising edi ce that is our best picture of the sixteenth century s foremostobservational astronomer. This study, Professor Christianson s rst full-lengthwork on the topic, adds more than a few architectural features to that building.And if some of the new pieces of masonry are ones that, having found them lying

readily to hand, he has merely lifted into place, others have been quarried by himpersonally from the primary sources and the archives. On Tycho s Island is there-fore an important and engaging addition to the literature on Tycho. It will provevaluable to specialist scholars as well as to pedagogues.

Although the rst part of the work is essentially a biography, Professor Christian-son has wisely not attempted to supplant the existing English-language accountsof Tycho and his studies. Christianson s treatment is more selective than either thetext by John Dreyer, still useful and readable despite its great age and its errors, 1

or the more exhaustive work of Victor Thoren, to which Christianson contributed. 2

He manages, neverthless to repair the life erected by Dreyer and Thoren in morethan a few places, repointing the odd fact, and patching the interpretative plaster-work where the cracks of age have now become visible. More importantly, hisfocused approach allows him to begin work on a whole new wing of the building,one for which Dreyer and Thoren did no more than lay a foundation. For Christian-son is principally concerned with providing an account of Tycho s island of Hven,and its observatory Uraniborg, as the site of an extraordinary collaborativeenterprise. Describing Uraniborg as a large-scale, multifaceted scienti c researchinstitute (p. 5), he speaks of Tycho as an innovative organiser of resources andpeople; indeed, one of the most innovative in any period of history (p. 3). OnTycho s Island may thus be read as the analysis of an early episode in the historyof science s management; an episode, moreover, that Christianson claims had far-reaching consequences.

Christianson s description of Tycho s project in terms that are so uncompromis-ingly modern may not endear his work to all readers; particularly since the connec-tion between Hven and the subsequent institutionalisation of the scienti centerprise at which he seems to be hinting is something whose existence is never

1 Dreyer (1890).2 Thoren (1990).


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585 John Donne s Verdict on Tycho Brahe

unambiguously established. But his readiness to detect a familial resemblance toUraniborg in later sites of research does not in any way diminish Christianson ssensitivity to the historical speci cities that properly explain the character and suc-cess of the astronomer s operation. Patronage, and an almost ritualised concept of

friendship closely akin to it in respect of the dynamics of the relationships thatresulted, are portrayed by him as the cultural institutions that allowed Tycho togarner the support required to construct and staff his observatory. And hence,applying to Tycho s case all that scholars have recently learnt about the princelysponsorship of early-modern science, he not only notes the importance to theastronomer of his funding by King Frederick II, but also exposes the reciprocalbene ts to the monarch which made that funding possible. He makes clear thatwhat Dreyer dismissed, indexically, as Tycho s poetic effusions 3 the verses thatthe astronomer composed in honour of various of his noble and learned acquaint-

ances, were in their own way as much a part of his project of astronomical reformas Uraniborg s precision instrument technology. And he discusses the portraits andemblems produced by Tycho, both those which were incorporated in the fabric of Uraniborg, and those distributed through friends and correspondents, in termswhich make evident their importance as self-conscious statements of the nobleDane s scholarly ambition and status. None of these individual insights are parti-cularly surprising, it is true; but the value of them being articulated, well and inone place, should not be underestimated.

Christianson s appreciation of the real signi cance of what, in the Anglo-Amer-

ican literature, has often been considered as being of only peripheral interest, ispartly due to his familiarity with Scandinavian scholarship. For, as he has elsewherenoted, Scandinavian historians have often pursued Tycho through broader avenuesof inquiry than have their anglophone colleagues. 4 Similarly well placed to com-ment on Tycho s overlordship of Hven as an aspect of the Danish feudal system,Christianson provides a description of the astronomer s relations with the peasantfamilies of the island covering, for example, the disaffection which attended thenew demands on their time and their labour that improves greatly on the scantymaterial others had assembled. And his account of the events that led Tycho toabandon Uraniborg, and eventually Denmark, is richer even than that which VictorThoren supplied, nicely relating the de bacle of the betrothal of the astronomer sdaughter to his former student Gellius Sascerides, the ascendency at court of afaction opposed to Tycho s, and the resentment of certain individuals at Copenhag-ens university. If Christianson is right to suggest that the latter was due to jealousyof Uraniborg s lavish funding and attractiveness to students, then his characteris-ation of Tycho s island as an early-modern research institute would seem to hold

3 Dreyer (1890), p. 403.4 Christianson (1998).


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true even with respect to the inter-institutional academic rivalry to which its exist-ence gave rise.

Christianson is at his best and most original, however, when he looks at Urani-borg as essentially a domestic environment, home to an extended family of which

Tycho was the head, sometimes stern, quite often jovial. Not content with merelynoting that Tycho s assistants were essential to his astronomical and alchemicallabours, or simply commenting on the difference made to their career prospectsby a stay on Hven, he sets out to document what life was like at Uraniborg. Hesucceeds in conveying not only the bustling activity of the observatory, and theoccasional drama of a royal visitation, but even the character of some of the moreobscure individuals. His observation that of all the workers on Hven it was onlythe Germans who clashed strongly with Tycho, and his explanation of this fact interms of the differing national approaches to contractual arrangements, are certainly

intriguing; even if one is inclined to suspect that this difference could actually bean artefact of the available evidence. And a newly found document Christiansonmakes use of, the memorandum of a young scholar who sought employment onHven, but who was frightened off by the harsh conditions that would have beenimposed on his residence, is nothing less than a revelation about the care withwhich Tycho negotiated the terms of employment of his would-be collaboratorslong before Kepler. More than any other historian has done, Christianson showsus that Uraniborg was an extraordinary environment constructed through Tycho scareful, even at times oppressive, direction and management.

2. Portraying Print: That Library Where Every Book Shall Lie Open?

In other respects, however, Part One of On Tycho s Island is less satisfactory.As Christianson notes at an early stage of the work, the success of Tycho s projectdepended not just on his management of local resources, but also on the develop-ment of connections to an international network of scholars and patrons. Tracingthe full extent and signi cance of that network has not been Christianson s priority;he has, quite sensibly, chosen to set at least some limits on what, in its scope, is

a less than modest study. Yet he does tell us how Tycho made and sustained thoseconnections. And although he certainly acknowledges that correspondence was oneimportant aspect of the astronomer s strategy, he places much greater emphasis onthe products of the printing press. This view of the relative importance of manu-script and printed communications is not one I am wholly convinced by.

Christianson s understanding of printing and its importance to Tycho is not with-out precedent. I think it fair to say that he has been persuaded by the argumentsof Elizabeth Eisenstein regarding the transforming power of the printing press, andfollows her in asserting the general importance to astronomy of the new repro-

ductive technology, as well as in celebrating the use made of it by Tycho. 5 Concern-

5 Eisenstein (1979), especially pp. 575 635.


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ing the impact of printing on the study of the heavens, Christianson s presentationof the case is enviably lucid. But readers may feel that no summary, however wellexecuted, can wholly rescue the Eisenstein thesis from the charge levelled at it bysome that of oversimplifying the historical phenomena. 6 Indeed, a synopsis is

rather more likely to compound any problem of this kind, by failing to take accountof the exceptions and complexities. It may be true, for example, as Christiansonclaims (p. 104), that the printing in 1538 of a good (Greek) edition of Ptolemy s Almagest 7 helped to raise to a new level the published literature on astronomy. Butit was perhaps an unhappy decision to cite this text, in this edition, alongside claimsabout the standardising power of the press, and immediately prior to the assertionthat tabulated data (amongst other things) could be reproduced precisely in print,as it could not in manuscript; unhappy, that is, for someone writing about Christian-son s subject.

We do not know whether Tycho ever possessed a copy of the 1538 edition of Ptolemy. It is not one of those books that he cited explicitly in any of his extantworks or correspondence, nor one a copy of which has survived from his library. 8

This fact may surprise some readers of Christianson s text. In particular, it maysurprise any who understand him to say that it was the circulation of this versionof the text, alongside Copernicus De revolutionibus , which presented the astron-omers of Tycho s generation with their great dilemma in cosmology: for that isone possible construal almost certainly not the one which was intended of theemphasis he gives to it. More importantly, Tycho s own comments on the reading

of Ptolemy suggest a somewhat different picture. Writing to Christoph Rothmann,mathematicus to Landgrave Wilhelm IV of Hessen-Kassel, Tycho explained that,when analysing the star positions recorded by his Alexandrian predecessor, he hadnot only employed the translation by George of Trebizond. 9 He had also consulted,a certain old copy of the Almagest, published nearly seventy years ago at Venice, 10

which expresses the declinations not in numerals, as the Trebizond version does,but to aliquot parts of a degree in letters. 11 In other words, not wholly trustingthe printed data in the tables, Tycho elected to check the entries against a copy of the work in which the numbers in the text were spelt out alphabetically. It was asensible precaution: a single digit error in a numerical string might be as dif cultto conjecturally emend as it was to detect, whereas a number spelt out in full wouldtolerate the misprinting of any one character. Of course, the same applies to textscopied by hand; and indeed, in an accompanying letter Tycho had remarked thatthe art of printing was devised scarcely 150 years ago, and in the great period of

6 See, for example, Grafton (1980) and Johns (1998), especially pp. 6 28.7 Grynaeus (1538).8 Norlind (1970), pp. 333 410.9

That is to say Schreckenfuchs (1551), which incorporates a reissue of Gaurico (1528). See Norlind(1970), p. 358.10 Ptolemy (1515).11 Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VI, p. 95: Tycho to Rothmann, 20th January 1587.


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time prior to that many things, especially in the characters of the numbers, couldhave been allotted falsely through being rewritten so many times . But he went onto note that even in the printing art itself, error is easily admitted; unless a carefulcorrector is employed .12 The overall impression one acquires is that Tycho, like

many of his contemporaries, was as wary of typographical errors as he was of those that were scribal. For this reason, among others, he was ambivalent aboutthe printing press, viewing it as a technology that propagated erroneous texts andopinions as readily as sound ones. 13

To be fair to Christianson, when it comes to analysing Tycho s own use of thepress he does not shy away from describing the many practical dif culties theastronomer faced in maintaining his printing operation. And he does acknowledgeone of the drawbacks to the vast increase in the number of works in circulation,the problem that individual authors had in getting their texts noticed amidst a pleth-

ora of other ones (p. 105). In Christianson s account, however, this obstaclebecomes an opportunity for Tycho to shine; or rather a series of opportunities, forit is one that he is shown to have overcome on multiple occasions. And in verymuch the same spirit, early barriers to publication appear to spur the astronomerto adopt the most forward-looking of solutions. Tycho discovered that Copenhagenprinters were not equipped to deal with his new kind of technical scienti c publi-cation , Christianson tells us (p. 85); and so, motivated also by concerns over theaccuracy and quality of his projected works, and by a desire to retain control of his intellectual property, he set out to establish the world s rst working scienti c

press . As unproblematic as these statements may appear to the casual reader, theyare not ones that I feel can pass uncontested.

In the case of the rst claim, the dif culty may once again be an ambiguity of phrasing. But the more natural reading of Christianson s meaning, that there wasa causal connection between the content of Tycho s publications and the inabilityof the local printers to produce them, is problematic. Explaining to one correspon-dent the decision to establish his own printing operation, Tycho did indeed claimthat he had found himself unable to make use of the Copenhagen printers. Yet thetechnical nature of the proposed work was not the reason that he stated. Rather,it was because on account of the plague raging at this time, it would not be safe for the astronomer to employ them; and for the additional reason that, since theyare now occupied with certain other printings , he could not do so swiftly. 14 Admit-tedly, Tycho did go on to say that a consequence of establishing a press on Hvenwould be that he could closely oversee the publication of his work, thereby ensuringthe delity of the text and the data, and the suf ciency of the work s illustration.And Christianson may well be right to place more emphasis on Tycho s concernsover quality of content, not to mention intellectual property, than is apparent from

12 Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VI, pp. 71 2: Tycho to Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel, 18th January 1587.13 Regiomontanus was one of those who expressed a similar opinion; see Pedersen (1978), p. 177.14 Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VII, p. 81: Tycho to Heinrich Brucaeus, 1584.


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a strictly literal reading of this document. But the implication, accidental or deliber-ate, that Tycho was obliged by anything more than the circumstances of themoment to eschew the commercial print-trade is undoubtedly misleading. Heavilyillustrated texts were no great novelty by the mid-1580s, nor were books rich in

tabulated data. There was nothing about the layout or content of Tycho s publi-cations that would have presented insurmountable dif culties had he chosen tonance, and work closely with, an existing printing operation. 15

Had this not been the case, Christianson s second claim could perhaps have beenmore readily interpreted. A scienti c press could have been understood as onecapable of producing Tycho s new species of scienti c publication. As things stand,however, it is dif cult to understand what is meant by the claim that the astronomerset out to establish the rst printing enterprise matching this description. Working is an important quali cation here; it enables Christianson to dismiss, in an endnote,

the printing of ce of Regiomontanus as that of one whose achievements were toomodest to qualify (p. 398). But it is not clear, if something more than mere aspir-ation is to be counted, by what criteria the handful of publications produced atNuremberg by the earlier astronomer are to be assessed against the handful of publications produced by Tycho at Uraniborg and Wandsburg and found to bewanting. 16 Nor is it clear what is so qualitatively different about the operations of such astronomer-printers as Johannes Scho ner and Peter Apian, or of commercialprinters with a strong appetite for mathematical texts such as Erhard Ratdolt, Guil-laume Cavellat and Johannes Petreius, that they too can be dismissed as candidate

scienti c presses without even a mention. 17 Exclusivity of output is possibly Chri-stianson s chief consideration; and provided that we allow Tycho to be indulgedin the matter of his poetry, that much might be granted. Ultimately, however, itseems that if Tycho did set out to develop and perhaps even succeeded in estab-lishing a type of printing enterprise which was entirely without precedent, thenChristianson s vocabulary, dependent as it is on that ambiguous scienti c, is tooimprecise to describe it.

The extent of Tycho s success as an author is also, I think, open to question.As mentioned already, Christianson holds that, faced with the problem of makinghis own work stand out from those of other authors, Tycho adopted a strategy thatwas highly successful; so much so, in fact, that it set the established the format

15 I do not mean to imply that the production of astronomical texts could not be formidably dif cultfor those engaged in the process: witness Kepler s struggles to have the Tabulae Rudolphinae printed,as documented by Caspar (1993), especially pp. 308 328. But the establishment of Tycho s printingoperation on Hven clearly did not prevent him from having to make provision for whatever type andother necessaries the Copenhagen printers might have lacked; it simply rendered the supervisory processless inconvenient.

16 On Regiomontanus as a printer, see Pedersen (1978), as well as the article by Wingen-Trennhaus

(1991), cited by Christianson. Swerdlow (1993), p. 165, refers to Regiomontanus operation as thevery rst printing rm devoted to scienti c publishing .17 For these printing operations see, respectively, Schottenloher (1907), van Ortroy (1963), Redgrave

(1894), Risk (1982), Pantin (1988) and Shipman (1967).


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for future scienti c authors. Of the De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis(1588) he writes that: Chapter Ten established a model for what would eventuallybecome a standard part of scholarly monographs: a critical survey of other literatureon the subject . . . From now on, there would be only one standard work on the

comet of 1577. It was a breakthrough publication in the history of science, andbecame a paradigm for the work of other scientists (p. 122). It is a strong claim,and yet certainly one with considerable merit: Christianson has, I think, correctlyarrived at Tycho s objective in subjecting the cometary treatises of other authorsto extended critical scrutiny. But as I encountered it, at more than one point in thetext, I found myself wondering. How innovative was Tycho s literature survey,within the domains of both astronomy and scholarship in general? Who, whensubsequently referring to literature on the comet of 1577, preferred Tycho s book to others that could also have been mentioned? And if it is true that the structure

of Tycho s work in uenced succeeding generations of scienti c authors, whereand when did this in uence rst manifest itself, and how did it propagate? Answersto at least some of these questions could have been made readily available. In thecontroversy over the comets of 1618, for example, several of the disputants referredto Tycho s De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis , and it is clear that theyconsidered it an important work, if not one that was awless. 18 And if the answersto others would likely prove a little more elusive, for that very reason Christiansonought to have supplied whatever assistance he could to those of his readers whomight have been curious. But, apart from the bibliography of On Tycho s Island ,

no such help is forthcoming.I was left wondering, too, by Christianson s assessment of Tycho s Astronomiae

instauratae mechanica (1598). His assertion (p. 223) that it was one of the mostelegant scienti c works ever produced, and set a new standard for description of technical apparatus raises very similar questions to those previously mentioned.When, how and on whom did this work exert the in uence with which Christiansoncredits it? Moreover, his claim that, used in conjunction with the text, the illus-trations allowed readers to reproduce the instruments in precise detail , is anotherclaim that seems to stand without the assistance of any accompanying evidence.True, it is well known that Tycho s instruments inspired those constructed in Chinaby the Jesuit missionary Ferdinand Verbiest (1623 1688); they seem also to havebeen the model for those deployed in Brazil by the astronomer Georg Markgraf (1610 1644). And yet the extent to which the Mechanica , or Tycho s other publi-cations, enabled their precise duplication has not, I think, been clearly established. 19

Modern theoreticians would have us believe that the replication of instrumentalapparatus is hardly so simple; 20 and in fact the view on the matter from Uraniborgitself seems to have been remarkably similar. One of Tycho s assistants was

18 See Drake and O Malley (1960).19 See Chapman (1984), Halsberghie (1994) and North (1979).20 For example, Collins (1985) and Schaffer and Shapin (1985), especially pp. 225 282.


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assigned, in 1591, the task of compiling a description of Uraniborg s instrumentsto be sent to Landgrave Wilhelm of Hesse; subsequently published in Tycho s Epistolae astronomicae , the resulting document was in many ways a forerunner of the Mechanica .21 Yet its own author succinctly expressed its limited value. But

truly , he wrote, to describe all these [instruments] with that accuracy which isneeded, and to explain all their parts, so that their construction and use could beunderstood in all respects, would be a more dif cult labour than this brief synopsiscan encompass; for not even very many words would suf ce for this, but rathermanual handling and visual inspection is required, and that by those who under-stand these things well and have learnt to use them correctly. 22 Other contemporaryevidence supports his assessment. Giovanni Antonio Magini constructed Tychonicinstruments; but he did so with the assistance of Gellius Sascerides. 23 Jacob Kurtz,Imperial Prochancellor and mathematician, and Thaddeus Hagecius, the Imperial

Physician, had a Tychonic sextant constructed before Tycho came to Prague; yet,despite being supplied with engravings and models of Uraniborg s instruments,they relied upon the expertise of the talented Jost Bu rgi, the Hessen artisan whohad improved the instruments of Kassel after receiving instruction from anotherformer worker on Hven, the mathematician Paul Wittich. 24 And in 1598, even ashe sent him the Mechanica , Tycho suggested to Joseph Scaliger that he seek assist-ance from a third student, Christian Hansen Riber, if he wished to build for himself one of the illustrated sextants or quadrants. 25 Each of these cases casts doubt onthe claim that the book would have been suf cient in itself as a set of crafts-

man s instructions.My reservations about Christianson s portrayal of Tycho s printing success

extends beyond his characterisation of individual works, to the claims he makes

21 See Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VI, pp. 250 295.22 Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VI, p. 288.23 Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VII, p. 303: Magini to Tycho, 22nd July 1591, and p. 305: Tycho to

Sascerides, 1591. See also Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. V, p. 128: Magini to Tycho, 1st February 1592,this letter being the one with which Magini dedicated his Tabula Tetragonica (1592) to Tycho, andwhich Tycho reproduced in his Mechanica (1598). Although Magini obviously did not have access to

the Mechanica at the time that he constructed his instruments, he did possess some of the engravingsit would contain, for these had been reproduced in the De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis(1588), of which he was one of the privileged recipients. See Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. IV, pp. 369 377, and vol. V, p. 125: Magini to Tycho, 13th September 1590.

24 For the letter in which Hagecius requested the models, see Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VII, p. 244:Hagecius to Tycho, 1st June 1590. Tycho assented in his letter to Kurtz of August 1st 1590, thoughdoubting their utility. See Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VII, p. 257. Like Magini, Hagecius already hadaccess to the engravings of some of the instruments, these having been sent to him both as loose sheetsand in the copy of the De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis that Tycho had sent to him. SeeDreyer (1913 1929), vol. VII, p. 96: Tycho to Hagecius, 25th August 1586, and p. 120: Tycho toHagecius, 3rd May 1588. The existence of Curtius sextant, and Burgi s part in its construction(Confectus est a quodam insigni arti ce Lantgraviano . . . ), was reported to Tycho by Hagecius onDecember 14th, 1593. See Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VII, p. 357. Wittich s role in the transfer of tech-

nology between Hven and Kassel has been well documented, and is discussed by Christianson. Bu rgi swork is treated most comprehensively in Leopold (1986).25 Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VIII, p. 107: Tycho to Scaliger, 17th/23rd August 1598. See, on this

overture, Grafton (1983 1993), vol. II, pp. 476 477.


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for the role of the press in establishing Tycho s reputation during his lifetime. Onthis point I do feel that I need to be cautious; for as someone whose research todate has been largely Tychocentric, I consider myself badly placed to assess theextent to which the astronomer was known to scholars of his age with whom

he had no form of contact. I cannot help wondering, however, whether ProfessorChristianson is not hampered, to a smaller degree, by the same limitation. And, inparticular, when he tells us that from the 1580s onwards the printing press helpedto make Tycho and his island known to a broad European public, I suspect thathis assessment of the astronomer s fame may be overly generous.

In part, Christianson s claims rest upon a publication that did not emanate fromUraniborg: the Civitates orbis terrarum of Georg Braun, the fourth volume of which did indeed offer its readers a brief glimpse of Tycho s island and equip-ment. 26 And there are other works that Christianson could have mentioned (but

doesn t), in which the existence of the Dane s observatory was reported: workssuch as Heinrich Rantzau s Catalogus (1580) of kings and princes who supportedastrology, the popularity of which is suggested by the fact that it was swiftlyreprinted, 27 or Giovanni Antonio Magini s Geographia universa nova (1596), pub-lished in conjunction with an edition of Ptolemy s Geography , a text which waspaid the unwelcome compliment of being pirated almost immediately. 28 When theworks dedicated to Tycho are taken into consideration as well, texts such as the Aegloga de eclipsi solari anno 1574 (1574) of Peder Jacobsen Fleml se, 29 theTabula Tetragonica (1597) of Magini, 30 and the De natura caeli libri triplicis

libellis tres (1597) of Cort Aslakss n,31 then it is clear that Christianson has apoint. Printed books must surely have done something to bring Tycho s name tothe attention of his scholarly contemporaries.

And yet, with the possible exception of Aslakss ns text, none of these workscould really have conveyed much to their readers about the identity and importanceof Tycho and his observatory. That, as Christianson well knows, would haverequired the distribution of Tycho s own publications. But the rst of these, Denova stella (1573), which was produced before Uraniborg was properly established,and prior to Tycho s command of his own printing operation, was not marketed

26 I have used the facsimile edition, Braun and Hogenberg (1965). For the description of Hven, seevol. II, part 4, fol. 27r 28r. For the publishing history of the work, see vol. I, pp. xxiv xxvii.

27 See Rantzau (1580), p. 30. Zinner (1964) records three subsequent sixteenth-century imprints, pro-duced at Leipzig in 1581, 1584 and 1590.

28 I have consulted one of these pirate copies: see Magini (1597), fol. 99v, and Bennett and Bertoloni-Meli (1994), p. 141.

29 However, this work, brie y mentioned by Dreyer (1890, pp. 117 8), Thoren (1990, p. 92), andChristianson himself (p. 278), was probably not widely distributed.

30

See Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. V, pp. 127 8, for the letter of dedication, as reproduced inTycho s Mechanica .31 See Aslakks n (1597), sig. A2r A4r, for the dedication, and Moesgaard (1972), p. 122, for a brief

discussion of the text.


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widely by its publisher-printer. 32 It was Tycho who sent copies to certain individ-uals outside of the country, to friends such as Paul Haintzel of Augsburg andGeorge Buchanan of Scotland: men to whom he was already known one way oranother. 33 And essentially the same strategy, that of presenting copies to a select

group of correspondents and patrons, was employed by him as a means of distribut-ing all of the writings that he subsequently printed. 34 This careful selection of readers is hardly compatible with the claim that printing made Tycho s work fam-iliar to numerous scholars with whom he had no other form of acquaintance; and,indeed, Christianson does not ask us to believe that his assertion rests on thisinadequate basis. Instead, he tells us that the poetry Tycho published was put up forsale at Frankfurt (p. 96), that some copies of the De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis were likewise distributed (p. 124), and that news of the Mechanicaoutstripped Tycho himself in reaching Prague and the Emperor (p. 226).

On some or all of these points Christianson s view may be the correct one.Tycho himself stated, in a letter to Landgrave Moritz of Hessen-Kassel, that somecopies of his Epistolae astronomicae (1596) were sent for sale to Frankfurt. 35 Itwould not be entirely out of character, therefore, for Tycho to have entrusted hisearlier writings to one of the merchants of the Book Fair. But what basis theremight be for the claim that they were put up for sale is not made clear in eitherthe text or the endnotes. With respect to the poetry, I would hazard a guess thatthe source in question is Christoph Rothmann s letter to Tycho of September 1587.For here Rothmann wrote that he had obtained a copy of some of Tycho s poems

from Hans Aalborg on the occasion of the last Fairs at Frankfurt; 36 and it is Aal-borg, bookseller to the University of Copenhagen, whom Christianson credits withthe commercial distribution of these verses (p. 96). Yet Rothmann s testimonydoes not necessarily indicate that Rothmann purchased the poems from Aalborgat Frankfurt, nor that they were sold there on earlier occasions: Tycho frequentlymade use of merchants travelling to the Frankfurt Fairs to courier letters and docu-ments to and from various places, Kassel among them. 37 I am inclined to believethat, in this case, as in others, the distribution of the printed material followed thedistribution of manuscript letters.

Christianson s reasoning in the case of the De mundi aetherei recentioribus

32 This was Tycho s own complaint in his Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata (1602), when hereproduced a portion of the 1573 text. See Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. III, p. 96.

33 See Dreyer (1913 1919), vol. VII, p. 14: Hainzel to Tycho, 10th March 1574, and p. 21, Buchananto Tycho, 6th April 1575.

34 See, for details of the recipients of the various works, Norlind (1970), pp. 122 7, 232 7, and 286 293. In addition, Hagecius and Kurtz were sent a partial copy of the Progymnasmata as early as August1590. See Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VII, pp. 274 5.

35 Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. XIV, pp. 107 8: Tycho to Moritz, 17th June 1597.36 Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VI, pp. 117 8: Rothmann to Tycho, 21st September 1587.37

Indeed, Tycho s letter to Rothmann of January 20th 1587, to which this letter of Rothmann wasa belated reply, had been conveyed by an unnamed courier travelling from Denmark to Frankfurt andback again at the time of the Spring Fairs. See Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VI, p. 105: Tycho to Rothmann,12th August 1587, and p. 110: Rothmann to Tycho, 21st September 1587.


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phaenomenis is even less clear to me. Perhaps he takes Tycho s assertion (in Nov-ember 1589) that of the copies of this work except for a very few I have notallowed these to be distributed to others 38 as evidence that some small numberhad been made available commercially. Certainly Tycho always projected the com-

mercial distribution of his astronomical writings: he produced them in substantialeditions of 1500 copies, and he repeatedly mentioned Frankfurt as a possible mar-ketplace. 39 Yet the De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis was intended tobe the second part of a three-volume work on celestial phenomena, and, as Tychowrote to Thaddaeus Hagecius in 1590, he had kept possession of most of the copiesbecause I did not want to make it public until all the volumes were printed. 40

They never were, at least not in the form the astronomer had originally intended.I believe, therefore, that the promised sale of this text only occurred after the deathof its author.

As regards the Mechanica , and the two manuscript works that were concurrentlydistributed, if Rudolph II knew that princes and scholars throughout Europe wereturning the pages of those marvellous volumes before he had seen them (p. 226),then this occurred contrary to Tycho s explicit instructions and ostensible interests.Fearing, or pretending to fear, that as the dedicatee of these works the Emperorwould feel aggrieved that he had not been the rst to receive them, Tycho askedthose to whom they were presented to keep their possession of them a secret. 41

That news of these works percolated nevertheless to the Imperial Court is far fromimplausible; indeed, it is possible that Tycho fostered this process himself, knowing

that, provided an appearance of propriety was maintained, it could work to hisbene t. But here, as in the other cases I have discussed, Christianson does notsupport the claims of his lively narrative with any argument or evidence.

Undoubtedly some latitude should be allowed to Christianson in respect of thework s annotation, partly because his work is in places a synthesis of existingstudies, and partly because it has been written at such a level as to allow it to beassigned as undergraduate reading. Even so, I repeatedly found myself wishingthat the author and the press had considered it appropriate to supply a richer setof endnotes. At times, the lack of argument and annotation makes it dif cult toseparate attested historical fact from justi able speculation, and justi able specu-lation from purely literary licence. The account of Tycho s arrival on Hven, forexample, which Christianson invests with considerable dramatic tension, describingeven the details of costume and gesture (pp. 32 33), is entirely unannotated. Is the

38 Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VII, p. 213: Tycho to Hagecius, 1st November 1589.39 See both the letter mentioned in the preceding note and Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VII, p. 122:

Tycho to Bartholomew Scultetus, 17th August 1588, and p. 327: Tycho to Scultetus, 12th March 1592,as well as various other places in Tycho s correspondence. On this point, I disagree with the analysis

offered by Johns (1998), pp. 14 18.40 Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VII, p. 224: Tycho to Hagecius, 25th January 1590.41 See, for example, Tycho s account of this request being made to Prince Maurice of Orange, in

Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VIII, p. 67: Tycho to Holger Rosencrantz, 8th May 1598.


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reader to conclude that it has been compiled without the aid of the report of evena single contemporary witness? Similarly, Christianson con dently asserts (p. 102)that Marsilio Ficino was one of those depicted among the portraits of seven Italianphilosophers, who ourished around one hundred years ago, contained in one and

the same picture to be found in Tycho s musaeum ;42

a fact of some signi cancein the light of his emphasis on the in uence on Tycho s circle of Ficinan Neopla-tonism. But we never learn what source permits us to know this. And it is parti-cularly frustrating when assistance promised by a note turns out to be of anotherform than we might have expected. When Christianson tells us, for example (p.79), that the lengthy suppers customary in the households of the Danish nobilitywere transformed by Tycho into a daily staff meeting for the scholars and mech-anics of Hven, one looks to the accompanying endnote to provide the proof thatmatters of business were routinely discussed at Uraniborg s table. Instead, we are

directed to evidence that such meetings are still an essential feature of modernscienti c organisations: a reference that is either irrelevant to what occurred onHven, or else, in respect of Christianson s larger argument about the character of Uraniborg, somewhat guilty of begging the question. In either case, the point couldeasily have been omitted to make room for one of those references which arewanting. Non-specialists may not miss the precise annotation that one would expectof an article in a journal, but those who work on early-modern astronomy willgreatly regret that On Tycho s Island has been packaged as if it were no more thana text-book.

3. The Cartography of Relations: Every Man is a Piece of the Continent, aPart of the Main?

Throughout Christianson s work, the names of certain individuals mentioned inthe text are printed in bold. By this typographical convention it is indicated thatentries exist for these persons in Part Two of On Tycho s Island , a biographicaldirectory containing details of almost a hundred of the astronomer s close col-leagues and acquaintances. It is here, for example, that one may nd out the truth

about Uraniborg s jesters: Per Gek, a brief visitor to Hven mentioned in contempor-ary sources, and Jeppe, the famous prescient dwarf whose actual existence, it turnsout, must be doubted. One may learn here all that is known about Han Crol, poss-ibly the foremost maker of Uraniborg s instruments. Or one may read shortaccounts of Johannes Kepler, Christian Longomontanus, and other assistants of Tycho who achieved their own small measure of celebrity. By pursuing the ident-ities of Tycho s coworkers, great and small, through the polyglot pages of nationalbiographies, articles and monographs, Christianson has done other scholars in theeld a substantial service, potentially saving them a signi cant labour. On the

42 Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VI, p. 269.


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strength of its second half, it seems likely that On Tycho s Island will endure asa work of reference even if its rst part should ever begin to look dated.

Of course, these capsule biographies , as the dustjacket calls them, are restrictedin their scope and accuracy by their rather limited volume. Inevitably, the necessity

of conserving space has produced some statements capable of misleading. In theentry on Rothmann, for example, Christianson asserts that, in the course of corre-spondence with Tycho, the Hessen mathematicus concurred with him that the tailsof comets were due to the effect of sunlight passing through the comet s rare edsubstance (p. 348). Yet it was precisely during these exchanges that Rothmannretracted his support for the theory that tails were merely optical phenomena thatbeing the view which, following Girolamo Cardano and others, he had upheld inhis unpublished treatise on the 1585 comet and advanced instead the idea thatthey were dispersed plumes of the comets material. 43 And although Tycho did

subscribe to the optical hypothesis, he postulated that the tail of the comet he hadstudied most closely was generated by the passage not of solar light through itslens-like head, but of light emanating from Venus. 44 Thus, although Christianson sstatement approximates the views of both Rothmann and Tycho, it is precise aboutneither. And it has the effect of making what was actually con ict of opinionslook like a consensus.

In such a case, the source to which the cautious scholar should have recourseis immediately obvious. But this is not true of all the statements which Christiansonmakes in his capsule biographies. Rather than referring each claim to an individual

source, he has simply opted to append a list of references to every entry, sortingthese not according to their merits, but merely by the alphabet. The dif culty thatthis presents to those wishing to check Christianson s facts has been exacerbatedby an inclusion policy that is sometimes overgenerous. Consider, for example, theentry for the Dutch globemaker Arnold van Langren. At rst sight, theaccompanying references seem reassuringly plentiful. But several of the sourcesturn out not to concern Arnold at all, dealing instead with his son, and heir in thetrade, Michael. And if the inclusion of these is justi ed by Christianson s descrip-tion of him, at the end of Arnold s biography, as the most famous of the wholedynasty of the van Langrens, it would surely have been desirable to omit thosein which even he is only mentioned in the footnotes or in passing. 45 Of the othertexts listed, many have Willem Janszoon Blaeu, the van Langren family s chief commercial rival, as their principal subject; so that just one article, except for thosecontained in the dictionaries of national biography, is concerned entirely with thevan Langren business and family. Scrutiny reveals, therefore, a remarkably slender

43 For the views expressed by Rothmann in his cometary treatise, see the later publication of thiswork by Willebrord Snel (1619), pp. 130 9. His revised view is contained in the letter to Tycho of

September 19th 1588; see Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VII, pp. 155 6. A useful survey of the history of the optical theory of comets is provided by Barker (1993).44 Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VI, pp. 171 2: Tycho to Rothmann, 21st February 1589.45 van Helden (1974) is a case in point.


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foundation for the various facts about Arnold which Christianson retails, in bothparts of the text, with apparent authority.

I have selected the case of Arnold van Langren for a particular reason. In Christi-anson s account of Tycho s life and work, as in previous ones, Arnold and his

brother Hendrik are characters on the very periphery. At the request of Jacob, theirfather, these two globemakers both travelled to Hven seeking permission to useTycho s star catalogue as the basis of a new celestial instrument. But Tycho with-held his consent, refusing to release the stellar data before his catalogue was n-ished and made available to the public. Consequently, a competition between threerms ensued, so that in Amsterdam, during the winter of 1598 9, the Langrens,Blaeu, and Jodocus Hondius the Elder, working with Petrus Plancius, were racingto construct the rst published celestial globes based on Tycho s data (p. 230).This is what we are told, but in fact Christianson has been grievously misled by

his sources.46

The story derives, ultimately, from the Vita Tychonis of the seven-teenth-century atomist Pierre Gassendi. 47 As Christianson himself notes, this is awork that should be used with some caution; and its shortcomings in this instanceare indicated by the fact that the visit of only one van Langren brother to Hvenis mentioned, whereas the names of both clearly appear in the diary kept at Urani-borg. In fact, two other contemporary sources make it evident that Gassendi s lateraccount and chronology are somewhat erroneous. The rst of these, reproduced inTycho s Opera , is the letter addressed to the astronomer from Frankfurt, in whichCort Aslakks n stated that: You should know that a celestial globe set out anew

according to your observations, and skilfully and ingeniously crafted, has beenissued at these Fairs, to the great joy of many. But it was thought to be clearlytoo dear, at 22 thaler together with a terrestrial globe of the same magnitude. 48

The second is an extant example of this celestial globe preserved in the FrankfurtHistorisches Museum: it is clearly marked as the work of Jacob, Arnold and Hend-rik van Langren, and it indicates that it has been based on data supplied by theDane Tycho Brahe. It even reproduces the astronomer s portrait. And it, like theletter, is dated not 1599, but 1594.

Christianson could have learned about the 1594 globe in at least two other places:a 1983 article in Der Globusfreund which simply describes it, 49 or a comprehensivework on Netherlandish globemaking which provides illustrations as well, and whichis in any case a much richer source on the van Langrens than those he consulted. 50

The fact that he did not is quite understandable. The earlier article is not indexedin the Isis cumulative bibliography; and while the monograph is, it does not appear

46 In addition to my comments in the text on this point, it is worth noting that the Hondius globe of 1598 did not make use of Tycho s data, but the one produced by him which did only appeared in 1600,and was copied from Blaeu s. See van der Krogt (1993), pp. 152 162.

47

See Gassendi (1654), pp. 120 and 135.48 Dreyer (1913 1929), vol. VII, p. 368: Aslakks n to Tycho, 23rd October 1594.49 Holbrook (1983).50 van der Krogt (1993), pp. 83 135, 421 459.


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under the names of either Blaeu or van Langren. It is to be regretted, however,that the globe s existence was not brought to Christianson s attention; and forreasons other than merely establishing a correct chronology. Like the later globeshe describes, the van Langren instruments were a splendid advertisement for

Tycho s observational programme. And if I am right about Tycho s own publi-cations, they may have been the rst tangible evidence of that programme to bemade widely available. This means, I believe, that the van Langrens deserve amore central place in the story of the propagation of Tycho s reputation than theyhave yet been accorded. If the printing-press did help to make the astronomerfamous, it may have rst done so not through books, but through instruments.

It is possible, I think, to draw a more general lesson from this rather narrowobservation. While some of the entries in Christianson s register have the characterof cradle-to-grave biographies, this fact only re ects how little is known about

the more obscure of the astronomer s assistants and acquaintances. Elsewhere theemphasis is rmly on individuals relations with Tycho and the Tychonic legacy.For the biographies are really an exercise in tracing and making sense of thecultural, material and intellectual networks that connected these persons to oneanother, and to the astronomer especially (p. xi). The case of the van Langrensshows that this task, as important and urgent as it is, is also formidably dif cult.After all, it is in the details of one life and another that we nd their points of contact; and when it comes to interpreting the signi cance of the intersection of those lives, other small details may make every conceivable difference. Yet, with-out wishing to denigrate Christianson s achievement in any way, for one scholar tomaster the details of a hundred or so lives in this fashion may simply be impossible.Moreover, while concentrating on one central gure does make this project some-what more feasible, it does so by limiting the interactions recorded to some subsetof those involving all the persons in the register. If we wish to better understandthe community of which Tycho is a part, however (and I believe that this is indeedsomething which Christianson would think valuable), then we would want to mapnot only Tycho s relations with, say, Arnold van Langren, Christoph Rothmannand Johannes Kepler, but also the points of contact between any two of theseindividuals, those obtaining between their friends and acquaintances, and so onfor some considerable distance outward from the Danish astronomer. AlthoughChristianson encourages his readers to continue and extend his work (p. xi), I amnot convinced that On Tycho s Island presents us with a model of the best way of doing so. Historians, not just of early-modern astronomy, but of scholarship ingeneral, may wish to think more about how we can best chart the internationaland local networks inhabitated by gures such as Tycho.

But to end on such a note would be both discourteous and misleading. If I have

criticised Christianson s work before the mortar has quite dried, so to speak, it isbecause it is likely to be seen as an authoritative treatment by an acknowledgedexpert on this material. It certainly deserves to be. It is, as I said at the outset, an


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important contribution to our understanding of Tycho; and as such it should bewelcomed by both scholars, and teachers, of the history of astronomy and the early-modern period.

Acknowledgements Although the opinions expressed here are entirely my own, I would like to expressmy gratitude to Nicholas Jardine and Liba Taub for their guidance and advice during my researchesinto Tycho. It also seems appropriate to register here my debt to Silke Ackermann, who rst broughtto my attention the existence of the 1594 van Langren globe in the Frankfurt Historisches Museum. Iam grateful to John North for guidance on a point of translation, and for referring me to his articleon Markgraf.

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