A Brill Calendar: December 14

Tycho Brahe and European Scholarly Unity

Few vindications for Europe’s unity are more convincing than the history of scholarship & learning.

A flamboyant example of that maxim is the achievement of the aristocrat Tycho Brahe, born on December 14, 1546 in Knudstrup, Scania, Denmark, and dying in Prague, Bohemia on October 24, 1602.

Between both dates, a life developed that refuted the silly idea that a scientist’s existence must be boring. Tycho’s era coincides with the age in which magic & alchemy started to part ways with science & technology. Albeit often unnoticed. Brahe preferred to observe the stars – measuring, documenting and listing their fixed positions - than the planets in their ostentatious roaming. It seems that devising, designing and building new tools and instruments to ply a lofty trade wasn’t below his dignity as a nobleman. His extremely observant discovery of a brand-new star, a ‘Nova’ - in a firmament that was supposed to be beyond change on November 11, 1572, catapulted Brahe into European glory. Princes and Kings, even the Holy Roman Emperor, became his supporters.

It is seldom that a new branch of inquiry can be attributed to one man, whipped forward by an urge and passion to distinguish himself, with panache and aplomb, as a genius. The second half of his existence runs parallel with the first three decades of Leyden University. The patriarch of the Dutch Blaeu dynasty - cartographers and mapmakers, producing both terrestrial and celestial globes in the 17th century - Willem Blaeu the Elder (Alkmaar, 1571 – Amsterdam, 1638) received prerequisite training before embarking on his enterprise that would depict the globe for further exploration with increasing precision in Brahe’s almost regal ‘entourage’. During the final quarter of the 16th century, inquisitive minds could still act as artists, craftsmen, scientists, entrepreneurs and wizards at the same time.