Inside the Stargazer's Palace by Violet Muller

Inside the Stargazer’s Palace:

The Transformation of Science in 16th-Century Europe

By Violet Muller

Pegasus Books 2025

The epicenter of the 16th-Century scientific revolution was undoubtedly the 1543 contention by Copernicus that Earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around. But in her delightfully enthusiastic new book Inside the Stargazer’s Palace, historian Violet Muller proposes a potential rival: a very visible change in the night sky. In November of 1572, a new and very bright star was suddenly seen in the constellation of Cassiopeia. “If you had to pick the most important celestial moment in the sixteenth century, this would be it,” Muller writes, and the whole world noticed:

Astronomers all over the world, from China to Sweden and beyond, saw it and marvelled. Dee in his garden, Brahe with his uncle, Tadeas Hajek in Prague, ad-Din in Instanbul and the landgrave on his balcony – they all gazed up in wonder. This was another of those rare moments when everything begins to change.

Both of these standout moments helped in the sudden and ramshackle process by which the intellectual world ended the centuries-long domination of Aristotle, and Muller draws a vivid portrait of the hybrid nature of the age, when superstitions like alchemy or astrology were being elaborately pursued right alongside the first efforts of what we might recognize as actual science.

She makes the wise choice to center her story of that birth of science on all of the vivid personalities of the time. She concentrates on some of the big names, figures like the quasi-sorcerer John Dee or the hyper-productive Francis Bacon, but plenty of other, lesser-known names crowd these pages and get brief but colorful thumbnail cameo appearances – including Bacon’s own “extraordinarily erudite” mother, Anne Cooke, a prolific translator of religious tracts who “gained a reputation for piety and scholarship” (and who made some good money in the process by the effort of her pen).

But of all these figures, big and small, the starring role of Inside the Stargazer’s Palace goes to Tycho Brahe, the truculent and eruptive proto-scientific genius who never used a telescope and yet planted the modern discipline of astronomy on a firm foundation. Muller follows Brahe through the various stages of his career, including the move to Leipzig as a young man when all his initial choices already displayed the typical scientist’s beetling focus on the craft: “Tycho revelled in the new world he found, making the most of everything it had to offer, including the shops,” Muller writes. “Like any young nobleman he had plenty of money to spend, but instead of heading to the tailor for elaborate clothes, he made a beeline for the booksellers and instrument workshops.”

Even outspoken Brahe wasn’t free from the dual nature of mental inquiry in his day; he was hired more often to do astrology than to do science, and even though he had a respectable private income, much of his research was dependent on the whims of patrons even more aristocratic than himself. But he’d laid a great deal of groundwork, and although he died wanting to do more (as one writer pointed out, he lacked only time), he’d laid that groundwork with a degree of aplomb that quite out-shines the lineup of nerds elsewhere in these pages. A great big biography of the man is long overdue.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News