SOURCE: "Tycho Brahe's German Treatise on the Comet of 1577: A Study in Science and Politics," in Isis, Vol. 70, No. 251, March, 1979, pp. 110-40.

In the following excerpt, Christianson details the political, religious, and cosmological implications of Brahe's publication of his vernacular treatise on the comet of 1577.

I

Tycho Brahe was born into a family with strong political traditions. His father was governor of Aalborg castle and fief, then of the key stronghold of Helsingborg on the Sound, and he ended his days as a Councillor of the Realm. Both of Tycho's grandfathers, all four of his great-grandfathers, and many of his more distant ancestors had also been members of this sovereign Council (Rigsråd) which elected kings, declared wars, made peace, and in short functioned as the core of an aristocratic oligarchical regime for much of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.¹ In Tycho's own day, two of his brothers...