Pierre Gassendi · 1654
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A life of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601): his fabled observatory on the island of Hven, the magnificent instruments he built, the campaigns of observation that remade astronomy, his bold model of the cosmos, and his turbulent final years in Prague.
The life runs to six books, and the volume around it is as interesting as the narrative. An appendix gathers the material that accumulated around Tycho’s death: a funeral oration on his life and death, an elegy on his passing, a formal eulogy of him as the Cimbrian Atlas and knight, and a piece on Tycho’s elixir — the medical and alchemical side of his work, which later accounts tend to pass over.
The volume also reproduces primary matter rather than only describing it. It carries Tycho’s own preface to the accurate restoration of the fixed stars of the eighth sphere, addressed to the Emperor Rudolf II, together with a comparison of positions of certain fixed stars as variously given in the several catalogues — the substance of Tycho’s claim to have re-founded stellar astronomy on measurement. Some unpublished pieces and Tycho’s poems close it out, with an index to the life.
Three shorter lives — of Copernicus, Peurbach, and Regiomontanus — round out the book, setting Brahe within the tradition he inherited.
Gassendi was a first-rate astronomer and philosopher writing barely fifty years after Tycho’s death, with access to people and papers now lost. That makes this a foundational source for the history of the science rather than a derivative biography: much of what is repeated about Hven, the instruments and the final Prague years traces back here. The grouping with Copernicus, Peurbach and Regiomontanus is itself an argument — a claim about who the moderns’ true predecessors were.
The translated source is the 1654 printing, which includes a summary of the printing privilege, the author’s preface, and a list of errata in the preface to be corrected by the reader.