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  • Bearing the Heavens: Tycho Brahe and the Astronomical Community of the Late Sixteenth Century
  • Patrick J. Boner
Adam Mosley . Bearing the Heavens: Tycho Brahe and the Astronomical Community of the Late Sixteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xiv + 354 pp. index. append. illus. tbls. bibl. $99. ISBN: 978–0–521–83866–5.

In assuming the central role of Bearing the Heavens, Tycho Brahe shoulders the burden of "a latter-day Atlas" (2), upholding the emergence of an international astronomical community over the course of the late sixteenth century. Yet the weight under which Tycho labors does not consist exclusively of his observational program of unprecedented precision and his controversial conception of a third world system rivaling those of Ptolemy and Copernicus. As Mosley argues, Tycho "was as assiduous and meticulous with respect to the communication of astronomical material" (3) as he was about its apprehension, digestion, and interpretation. Mosley thus mainly considers the modes of communication [End Page 247] through which Tycho acquired, conveyed, and effectively transformed astronomical knowledge, treating in four consecutive chapters "the exchange of letters, the production and use of books, the manufacture and transfer of ownership of instruments, and the movement from one site to another of individual practitioners" (2). From Mosley's diligent dissection of "the blood vessels and connective tissue" (295) of the metaphorical body of the ascendant astronomical community, a clearer, more comprehensive view of the communicative conduits accessible to Tycho emerges. And, if such an approach is "better suited to accounting for, rather than demonstrating, Tycho's contemporary and historical significance" (30), it is to Mosley's credit that Tycho's ingenuity in exploiting every available communicative medium, including "the etiquette of the day" (178), is witnessed to rival his more celebrated accomplishments in astronomical observation and instrumentation.

Indeed, Mosley does not confer pride of place to Tycho according to the Dane's self-tailored title of "prince of astronomers" (27), but rather in recognition of his regal-like rule over the evolving communicative pathways to promotion and publicization. Accordingly, the view from which Mosley invites his audience to survey "the nature and activity of the international astronomical community" (30) is not only cast from the heights of Tycho's castle-observatory, but comprises a complex panoply of perspectives, from which members of the community are seen to carry out their objectives in different ways. A stage initially occupied by Tycho is thus quickly crowded with a considerably sized cast, notably Tycho's proclaimed predecessor as prince of astronomers, Landgrave Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel. Many of these individuals —such as Bavarian Chancellor Johann Georg Herwart von Hohenburg, who is seen as "increasingly indispensable" (174) for his contributions as an epistolary intermediary and as "a very rich source of books" (174) —find long overdue importance in Bearing the Heavens. And if Mosley's attempt to represent the astronomical community graphically, something "only selectively possible" (35), comes up staggeringly short, it is on account of what the author identifies as the need for a new "narrative or analytic form" exploiting "the possibilities presented by the new media of our age" (295–96). Such a necessity, despite Mosley's dominance of the relevant primary sources, is made apparent by the dense multidimensionality of the many instruments, letters, and manuscripts constituting the connective agents of the emerging community.

Among the many achievements of the monograph, it is worth underscoring that Mosley's call for "shifting focus from individual people and places to the objects and events that united them" (295) elucidates the social context informing the actions of individuals who collectively gave rise to the astronomical community. In response to Tycho's recurrent conviction of "paranoid secretiveness" (238) in his priority dispute with Nicolaus Raimarus Ursus, for example, Mosley rightly reinterprets Tycho's case in terms of entitlement, that is, in terms of which individuals were entitled to reveal Tycho's innovations to others and within what constraints he could claim their authorship. Similarly, Mosley suggests that Tycho's interpolations in the Epistolae astronomicae (1596), ostensibly evidence of [End Page 248] Tycho's "domineering personality" (140), can be better understood as an ambitious example of the "publishing program" (206) espoused by the...

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