Bearing the Heavens: Tycho Brahe and the Astronomical Community of the Late Sixteenth Century by Adam Mosley (review)

REVIEWS 305 Ralf Stammberger likewise underscores the convergence of scholastic theology and German monasticism. He highlights Admont as important to the transmission of several of Hugh of St. Victor’s works since it held six twelfthcentury manuscripts that contained his work. The monks at Admont, and perhaps more specifically the abbot Irimbert, were responsible for preserving one of the earliest versions of Hugh’s scriptural commentary. Lisa Fagin Davis closes the volume with a codicological study on the works of Bernard of Clairvaux. Davis first discusses the bonds that the transmission of manuscripts between monasteries establishes. She then notes that monasteries in German-speaking lands of differing reform traditions, such as the Fruttuaria and the Hirsau traditions, exchanged manuscripts and ideas. In contrast, the transmission of the sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux demonstrates that monks did not exchange manuscripts between orders. In other words, once Bernard’s sermons had made their way to Austria, Davis finds no codicological evidence for an exchange of manuscripts between Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries . Davis does not pursue the implications that this lack of exchange between Benedictine and Cistercian may have. The contributors to this volume write on topics well known within scholarship on the German Middle Ages. The literacy of nuns (Cohen, Hotchin, Seeberg , Lutter), German monastic reform (Joyce), and the influence of German scholastic theologians (Beach, Mews, Stammberger, Davis) each have a significant literature. The collection more reminds the reader of work current in the last ten years than renews an interest in Germany as Nigel Palmer suggests that it should. As a whole, however, this volume pulls together some of the significant trends in scholarship on Germany. Further it highlights the distinctiveness of German interpretations of reform and women’s literacy while calling for a reevaluation of the insights that the German Middle Ages can offer for our understanding of the twelfth century. RUTH MILLS ROBBINS, History, University of Southern California Adam Mosley, Bearing the Heavens: Tycho Brahe and the Astronomical Community of the Late Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007) xiv + 354 pp. In the acknowledgements at the beginning of Bearing the Heavens, Mosley announces that he has been glad “to study and work at a number of institutions where the boundaries between professional collegiality, intellectual exchange, and friendly conviviality have been happily blurred”(xii). The blurring of boundaries is his model for this study of Tycho Brahe’s life and work. While this book is primarily about Tycho Brahe, the sixteenth-century Danish astronomer whose new world system broke boundaries, it is not only about him; instead, it works outward from Tycho’s position at the center of overlapping networks—of communication, of instruments, of areas of study—in early modern Europe. It is as much about the history of how both ideas and objects are transmitted in a Renaissance scholarly community as it is about a way of envisioning the cosmos. Mosley makes the case for studying Tycho as a fairly typical (yet still extraordinary) sixteenth-century printer, scholar, author, scientist, and patronage-seeker, all through the multivalent topic of communications networks . Bearing the Heavens accomplishes the difficult task of remaining nar- REVIEWS 306 row enough to be interesting, scholarly, and very thorough, yet broad enough to be valuable for early modern scholars in just about every discipline. Chapter 1, “Bearing the Heavens,” acts as an introduction, provides crucial historical background of Tycho’s observatory Uraniborg, and defines the terms and methodology of Mosley’s deeply layered study. It begins with a selection from Tycho’s letters, which Tycho published in 1596. As mentioned above, it is not Tycho, however, but his “international astronomical community” and its different methods of communication that the book will explore (2). In this chapter Mosley examines images of Atlas in early modern Europe, in part because Tycho liked to connect both himself and his patrons to the image. Mosley shows how Atlas images often decorated astronomical manuscripts and instruments in the period. As Tycho is for the sixteenth-century astronomical circle, so Atlas becomes a symbol, Mosley explains, for the four different overlapping methods of communication employed by this intellectual community: letters, books, instruments, and the movement of people across the same...