Giacopo Castelvetro in Scandinavia

ELEANOR ROSENBERG

IN 1975 the Columbia Libraries acquired an interesting and
valuable late sixteenth-century manuscript formerly in the
library of the late Doris Hellman and given in her memory
by her husband, Mr. Morton Pepper. A professor of history at
Queens College, Doris Flellman was widely known for her con¬
tributions to the history of science and especially for her fine book.
The Comet of i^ii: Its Place in the History of Astronomy. It is
not surprising, therefore, to discover that the manuscript now
catalogued as W'estern 3 2 contains, among its twenty-two items,
an exchange of letters between the great Danish astronomer,
Tycho Brahe, and his friend Caspar Peucer, the celebrated Ger¬
man mathematician and physician. Tycho's work on the comet of
1577 was published in 1588; his letter to Peucer is dated on Sep¬
tember 13 th of the same year. Although both Tycho's letter and
Peucer's response have been published. Miss Hellman's possession
of handwritten copies made no later than 1595 must have given
her great pleasure. Now it is our pleasure to count this manuscript
among Columbia's treasures and to do honor to her memory.

Upon examination, the manuscript turns out to be a varied col¬
lection of documents—letters, discourses, reports, the whole range
of materials that the Italians called relazioni~\v\\ic\\ throw light
upon aspects of history in the latter part of the sixteenth century.*
Only the two letters exchanged by Tycho and Peucer are of sci¬
entific interest. A sizable volume containing some 260 written
leaves. Western 32 is bound in a parchment cover made from a
piece of Latin manuscript of the late twelfth or early thirteenth
century. Its title-page, however, is neatly lettered in the unmis-

* I wish ro thank my friends Ruth J. Dean and Paola Ottdlcnglii VcUi for tiicir
valuable assistance in the preparation of this article.