The Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography of Tycho Brahe

536 Pages·1991·25.59 MB·English

by  Victor E. Thoren

The Lord of Uraniborg
EFFIGIESTTCHONIS BRAHE OTTONIDB DAKI
Dfrl DE KNVDSTRVP ET ARCIS MWflENBVRG LNt
INSVL\ HELUSPONTI D^NKI HVENNA FVNDATORIS
lNSTKyv\E^TORV7VVQ)' ASTRWQAMCORvTVl IK EADEM
INVENTORY ET STRVCTOR1S
^"LANNO 4O. AMNO DNa.I/d* ^.COA^PL.
Frontispiece from Tycho's Astronomical Letters of 1596. The inscrip-
tion reads "Likeness of Tycho Brahe, son of Otte the Dane, Lord of
Kundstrup and founder of the Castle of Uraniborg on the Island of
Hven in the Danish Hellespont, and inventor and builder of the
astronomical instruments used there. Done in 1586 at the age of 40."
THE LORD OF
URANIBORG
A Biography of Tycho Brahe
VICTOR E. THOREN
Professor of History and Philosophy of Science
Indiana University
with contributions by
JOHN R. CHRISTIANSON
The right of the
University of Cambridge
to print ami sell
all manner of books
was granted hy
Henry I III in 1534.
The University has printed
and published continuously
since 15X4.
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE
NEW YORK PORT CHESTER MELBOURNE SYDNEY
Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011, USA
10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia
© Cambridge University Press 1990
First published 1990
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thoren, Victor E.
The Lord of Uraniborg : a biography of Tycho Brahe / Victor E.
Thoren; with contributions by John R. Christianson.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-521-3 5158-8
1. Brahe, Tycho, 1546-1601. 2. Astronomers-Denmark-Biography.
3. Astronomy - History - 16th century. I. Christianson, J. R. (John
Robert) II. Title.
QB36.B8T49 1990
52O'.92-dc2O
[B] 9O-H77
CIP
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Thoren, Victor E.
The lord of Uraniborg.
1. Astronomy. Brahe, Tycho
I. Title
520.92
ISBN 0-521-35158-8 hardback
Transferred to digital printing 2002
Contents
Preface vii
i A Noble Humanist i
2 The New Star 40
3 Becoming a Professional 74
4 The First Years on Hven: 1576-1579 105
5 Urania's Castle 144
6 The Flowering of Uraniborg 192
7 First Renovations: The Solar Theory 220
8 The Tychonic System of the World 236
9 High Tide: 1586-1591 265
10 The Theory of the Motion of the Moon 312
11 The Last Years at Uraniborg 334
12 Exile 376
13 A Home Away from Home? 416
Epilogue 471
Appendix 1: Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Sources 481
Appendix 2: Glossary of Technical Terms 483
Appendix 3: The Tychonic Lunar Theory 486
Appendix 4: Figures for Footnotes 497
Appendix 5: Tycho}s Dwellings in Exile 500
Appendix 6: Letters, i5Qg-i6oi 502
Author Index 519
Subject Index 521

Preface
PERHAPS the best measure of the perception of Tycho's influence
through the years is that this book is at least the fifth serious
biography of him. Less than fifty years after Tycho's death, when the
concept of biographical writing had barely begun to be extended
from the lives of saints to the lives of kings, the French Catholic
philosopher Pierre Gassendi had already conceived the notion of
portraying the life and career of the Danish Lutheran astronomer
Tycho Brahe. Because he did, and because he wrote to Denmark to
get as much information about his subject as he could, we have
details of Tycho's life that would probably not otherwise have been
preserved. Gassendi used those details - along with Tycho's observa-
tions, letters, and published descriptions of his scientific work - to
amplify the seven-thousand-word autobiographical sketch written
by Tycho in his last years into an eighty-thousand-word biography
published in 1654 as Tychonis Brahei, Equitis Dani, Astronomomm cory-
phaei, Vita. By the following year a second edition had been printed,
and reprintings appeared in 1658 and 1717 as the fifth volume of
Gassendi's own Opera Omnia.
As was the case for history generally, the nineteenth century was
the great period of discovery in Tycho studies. Numerous docu-
ments touching on Tycho's life were found in repositories in Copen-
hagen, Prague, Vienna, and Basel. The most active excavator was
the Danish historian F. R. Friis, who, unfortunately, did much of his
work after he published the first modern biography of Tycho in 1871.
The only serious shortcoming of Friis's work was that he had very
little feel for Tycho's life's work.
This crucial facet was added by the distinguished astronomer and
historian of astronomy, J. L. E. Dreyer. Utilizing the general com-
mentaries on Tycho's work that had already begun to appear a
century earlier in various histories of mathematics and/or astro-
nomy, Dreyer produced an authoritative biography in English (1890;
German edition, 1894), accurately subtitled "A Picture of Scientific
Life and Work in the Sixteenth Century." (For a complete bibliog-
raphical citation, see Appendix 1.)
Unfortunately, Dreyer, like Friis, also did his work backwards, so
to speak. After writing the biography (extended sections of which
are virtual translations of either Gassendi or Friis) - and, no doubt, to
a considerable degree because of the enthusiasm generated by his
viii Preface
extremely readable portrayal of Tycho - Dreyer embarked on what
turned out to be a fifteen-year task of publishing Tycho's collected
works. The resulting fifteen volumes of Tychonis Brake Dani Opera
Omnia - published between 1913 and 1929 with the collaboration of
the classicist Hans Raeder - are widely recognized as models of the
enterprise and have been indispensable to the writing of my biog-
raphy. The virtue of having quick and easy access to such a mass
of materials, all of which consist of either rare books or unique
manuscripts, will become obvious. The difference between puzzling
through convoluted Renaissance Latin in print and deciphering it
from the hand of someone writing in an observation log at night, or
entering additional notes in limited space between the observations at
some later time, will be less obvious but surely has been even more
important. Since the publication of the Opera Omnia, a few more
documents have been discovered. But with the possible exception of
one displaying an intermediate form of Tycho's lunar theory, thus
far they have been of only marginal interest.
Among the spate of quick and worthless publications that ap-
peared as a cruel jest to commemorate the fourth centenary of
Tycho's birth was a biography written in English by John A. Gade.
It was sufficiently readable to have been reprinted since then, but it is
not authoritative in any sense and, moreover, suffers from the
author's proclivity for embellishing historical fact without giving
any warning that he is doing so. How little Gade or most of the other
impromptu writers of 1946 had to contribute to Tycho scholarship
may be judged by the fact that in the following few years both
Dreyer's seventy-year-old biography and Gassendi's three-hundred-
year-old original (translated into Swedish) were republished. The
latter was accompanied by extensive annotations that effectively
doubled the total content of the original, and in 1971 the translator
and annotator of this work, Wilhelm Norlind, published his own
biography (in Swedish), which presented much new information
gleaned from the archives of Europe, primarily concerning the
history and preservation of Tycho's printed works.
Historians have been described as people who carry bones from
one grave to another. Philosophers have been characterized, similar-
ly unflatteringly, as people who make a living taking in one another's
wash. Inevitably, in the fifth biography of a subject, there will be
some of each enterprise. But the twentieth century has produced a
great deal of scholarship, and some of it has shed light even on the
basic data of Tycho's life. This light has been mostly indirect and has
been thrown mostly into such shadowy areas as Tycho's fostering by
his uncle and aunt, the duel that disfigured him for life, and the
background and implications of his morganatic marriage. Looming
Preface ix
behind these curious characteristics of his life and fundamentally
responsible for all three - and for most of the rest of Tycho's
aspirations and actions - is the fact that he was born into the highest
ranks of the Danish nobility. Previous biographers of Tycho have
paid little attention to this, either because they regarded the conse-
quences as too obvious to require discussion or because they felt them
to be an inappropriate subject for comment. For people raised in
twentieth-century, more or less classless, society, however, the issue
cannot be left to chance (no matter how much the notion of a noble
class may offend our sensibilities), because the implications and
ramifications of privilege are infinitely more subtle than are the
technicalities of Tycho's astronomy and every bit as significant for
his career: To try to understand Tycho the noble as Tycho the man is
futile.
Fortunately, however, the basis of noble privilege was noble
lineage. And because of this, noble families were collecting, already
before the sixteenth century, records that preserved vital facts con-
cerning the conditions of noble existence. At the end of the last
century these genealogies were published in the "Annals of the
Danish Nobility" (see DAA in Appendix i). I have mined them
extensively for facts and generalizations that reflect light on the noble
life-style. I have also benefited considerably from the labors of other
Danish scholars who compiled the extended sketches of prominent
personages available in the "Danish Biographical Lexicon" (DBL).
It is in the description of Tycho's scientific work, however, that
previous biographies are now truly obsolete. Because the history of
science has become a considerably less lonely undertaking than it was
for my predecessors, it is possible to say that virtually every aspect of
Tycho's work in astronomy has now been elaborated well beyond
the level at which it was presented by Dreyer, who alone among
Tycho's previous biographers was able to research it, or even
understand it. The fruits of the interests, talents, and industry of Yas
Maeyama, Owen Gingerich, Robert Westman, and Edward Rosen
will be clear from my references to them in Chapters 7, 8, and 13. I
have not always used their ideas in precisely the form in which they
advanced them, but (for that reason, among others) I have used their
translations wherever they offered them. Most of the translations,
however, are my own renditions.
The nuclei of Chapters 5 through 10 are my own publications and
depict the life's work of an astronomer. Most of the discussion will
be comprehensive to the lay reader who is willing to give it
serious attention and to spend perhaps five minutes coming to grips
with the concept of parallax. Chapters 7 and 10 will probably be
heavy going for most readers, even though I have included a glossary