Apr 22, 2025 - Sale 2701
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Sale 2701 - Lot 305

Price Realized: $ 37,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
Brahe, Tycho & Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655)
Tychonis Brahei Vita, [with] Manuscript presentation leaf from another volume in Brahe's hand inserted.

Paris: Apud Viduam Mathurini Dupuis, 1654.

First edition, quarto, illustrated with full-page engraved portraits of Brahe and Copernicus; bound in contemporary limp parchment (water stain affecting inner bottom corner, some worming; one mended marginal tear); 8 1/2 x 6 1/2 in.

[Together with] A single quarto-format laid paper leaf inscribed by Brahe to Hungarian humanist bishop, politician, and nonprofessional astronomer Andreas Dudith (1533-1589), reading, "Magnifico Nobiliss[im]o Eruditiss[im]o viro D[omi]no Andreae Dudithio ab Horehunisa Caesaris Consiliario Prudentiss[im]o. dono misit, Tycho Brahe de Kundtsdorp & Uraniborg Anno 1588 Cal. Maij"; another dedication leaf from the same month and year was sold at auction in 2012, and was reportedly taken from Brahe's De Mundi Aetherei; the leaf tucked inside Gassendi's biography; the book and leaf housed in a custom slipcase labeled as housing book and leaf; 8 1/4 x 6 1/4 in.

Dudith published a work after the appearance of the Great Comet in the night skies over Europe in 1577. "A fascinating example of the epistemological changes in scientific discourse and astronomical method that characterized the era. With his zealous advocacy of rational argumentation, insistence on the primacy of 'the most direct causes', and caustic criticism of superstition, Dudith was in a complex discussion with the Aristotelian tradition and the theological-astrological explanations of his day, thus helping clear the way for modern scientific thought. As his voluminous correspondence makes clear, he spent the final decades of his life trying to make a professional astronomer of himself, and though his friends in the Respublica helped guide his research, he never mastered the requisite mathematical methods, though remained a patron of science." (Quoted from Marcell Sebok's "Practicing and Patronizing Science in the Republic of Letters: Andreas Dudith's Radiating Curiosity, Vanity, and Skepticism," published in Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 20 March 2024.

Ex libris Professor, Astronomer, Historian & Bibliophile Owen Gingerich.
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