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Attention to the science of astronomy, already so well sustained in the Wittenberg cultural sphere, received an unexpected boost with the dramatic and unheralded arrival of two apparitions in the skies of the 1570s. One was a brilliant entity—represented variously as a meteor, a comet, or a new star—that appeared in 1572 and remained until May 1574. The other—represented almost universally as a “bearded star” or comet—could be seen for just over two months between November 1577 and January 1578. This chapter explores planetary order, astronomical reform, and the extraordinary course of nature. It discusses astronomical reform and the interpretation of celestial signs, Thaddeus Hagecius's polemic on the new star, Tycho Brahe and his Copenhagen oration, Brahe's relationship with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Valentine Naibod's circumsolar ordering of Mercury and Venus, astrological and eschatological meanings of comets, and the language and syntax of cometary observation. Finally, the chapter considers the views of Maestlin, Brahe, Cornelius Gemma Frisius, and Helisaeus Roeslin regarding place and order, the comet, and the cosmos.

In the 1580s, second-generation interpreters of De Revolutionibus, mostly Nullists, rapidly produced a spate of new readings. These readings opened up issues that Nicolaus Copernicus himself had tersely bounded off (such as the universe's infinitude), merely used as a piece of his main argument (the Capellan arrangement of Venus and Mercury), altogether neglected to develop (heliocentric and geocentric transformations), or treated ambiguously (the ontology of the spheres). Planetary order, left out of consideration by the Wittenbergers, now moved from liminal to central consideration, making it at times a matter of aggressive advocacy and defense of priority. By 1588, a via media had become the site of a highly contentious priority struggle within which Tycho Brahe's geoheliocentric scheme emerged as the most visible and, ultimately, the most influential alternative. Brahe's encounter with Paul Wittich nicely frames the problematic of the via media. More likely, Christopher Rothmann followed a path somewhat like that of Wittich and the early Tycho. Giordano Bruno, an immediate contemporary of Wittich, Rothmann, and Brahe, was a second-generation advocate of Copernicus's theory.

Although this brilliant SN was recorded in both China and Korea, European measurements of its changing brightness and position are far superior to those from East Asia. Appearing in Cassiopeia, the SN became as bright as Venus and was briefly visible in daylight. It continued to be observed for eighteen months. Systematic brightness estimates by Tycho Brahe enable an accurate light curve to be drawn for the post-maximal phase. Measurements by Tycho Brahe lead to a position for the SN only about 1 arcmin from the centroid of the young remnant G120.1+1.4. This is also of the shell-type.

The point of departure for this chapter is the critique of the loss of experience in modernity—a critique perhaps inaugurated in Shakespeare's play. In Hamlet, experience is destabilized through the collapse of the perceptual body and the traditional epistemology constructed upon the proper functioning of the senses and the mind's ability to fashion knowledge based on sense perception. Confronted with the failure of the perceptual body, Hamlet is left to discover an alternative method for the recuperation of knowledge and action in the world. Hamlet's response is to attempt the recovery of knowledge through a strategic consolidation of experience derived from perception re-deployed within a network of practices and techniques that together render experience artificial and evidential. Hamlet secures a way to knowing through those practices that serve to construct what will become the defining feature of science, the experiment.

David Gans (1541-1613) was a Jewish polymath who lived in Prague and wrote a book on astronomy called Nehmad Vena’im (Delightful and Pleasant). This was the first Hebrew book to mention Copernicus by name. Gans was a student of the famous Rabbi Judah Loew, (Maharal of Prague, c.1512-1609), who had alluded to Copernicus in his Netivot Olam (The Paths of the World), published in 1595. Gans visited the observatory of Tycho Brahe, and adopted the Tychonic model of the universe, rather than that of Copernicus, and the reasons for this are discussed. The reception of Copernican thought in Judaism began with Gans’ respectful rejection, a position that was standard in the rest of the religious-scientific community. Gans is contrasted to his Italian contemporary Abraham Yagel (1553). For Yagel the litmus test of the acceptability of a scientific theory was whether or not he could find a rabbinic precedent for it. In this respect he differed from David Gans who was quite prepared to dismiss rabbinic beliefs in the face of new evidence.

Sagredo’s gradual entry into disparate epistolary networks is described, within several determining contexts. First, the conflict between the Jesuit College and the University in Padua, which had first erupted in the early 1590s, and resulted in the closing of the Jesuit establishment. This conflict is generally assumed to provide the basis for later Venetian anti-Jesuitism, but instead we find ongoing negotiations between patricians and the Society of Jesus to revive the College. In this same period, at the cusp of the seventeenth-century, Sagredo appeared as a marginal figure in Tycho Brahe’s correspondence in a little-known exchange with Frans Tengnagel, as a broker of knowledge in the Veneto, and also as a letter-writer to William Gilbert, whose recent work on magnetism seemed to promise a general reform of natural philosophy to Sagredo, Galileo and Paolo Sarpi.

This contribution shows how Aristotelian authors used Aristotelian principles they deemed more fundamental to deny Aristotelian tenets they regarded as secondary. This general point is illustrated by taking as a case study the early seventeenth-century debate on comets. In particular, the discussion focuses on the role played in this debate by the Flemish academician Libertus Fromondus (1587–1653), professor of philosophy and theology at Leuven, and very actively engaged in debating the ‘new’ science with many natural philosophers around Europe, including Descartes and Galileo. Fromondus criticises the Aristotelian account of comets but rejects Galileo’s explanation as well. Fromondus uses some entrenched Aristotelian principles against the Aristotelian conclusion that comets are terrestrial exhalations. For Fromondus, as it was for Tycho Brahe, superlunary comets would count against the solid spheres and for fluid planetary heavens. However, not everyone took the route followed by Fromondus. One might even count Galileo among the traditionalists, or at least among Tycho’s opponents, about comets. The upshot is that Fromondus made significant modifications to his Aristotelianism to accommodate astronomical novelties such as superlunary comets. While he could be thought of as a traditionalist, spending his whole career as an academic, he made changes that went well beyond what could be described as the articulation of the Aristotelian tradition.

Based on the quantitative and qualitative study of 11 syntactically parsed texts (485,767 words) from the Tycho Brahe Parsed Corpus of Historical Portuguese, this chapter argues that Classical Portuguese, i.e. the language instantiated in texts written in Portugal by authors born in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is a V2 language of the kind that Wolfe calls ‘relaxed V2 languages’. These are languages in which V1 and V3 sentences coexist with V2 patterns. To account for the sentential patterns observed and their interpretation, a new cartographic analysis of the left periphery is proposed. The existence of sentences in which quantified objects precede fronted subjects suggests that there are two distinct positions in the CP layer to which preverbal phrases can move. The higher one is the familiar Focus category. It is argued that the lower one is neuter with respect to the topic/focus dichotomy and merely encodes a contrast feature. Other constituents can be adjoined at the higher portion of the left periphery where they are interpreted as topics or frames. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of textually diversified corpora as the basis of historical syntactic studies.

The fourth chapter centres on the Lutheran mayor Bartholomäus Scultetus (1540–1614) who introduced the Gregorian Calendar to Lusatia and the Bohemian lands. Other Lutheran territories, most notably Saxony, refused to accept the more accurate calendar on religious grounds. Scultetus, however, advocated for the calendar and exchanged letters with Catholic dignitaries, praising the benefits of a calendar reform. He dedicated multiple works to Catholics, was friends with some of them and even included woodcuts of his Catholic friends or their coat of arms in his works. Other examples of this cross-confessional exchange include a monk who was one of the most popular godfathers in Zittau until the 1540s or the peaceful negotiations between Lutheran town councils and Franciscan monks regarding new town schools. Scultetus and other councillors also engaged in the creation of a Reformation memory, but without a clear shape of Lutheranism, these histories did not follow a unified pattern.