---
title: "Patronage in astronomy"
chunk: 2/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage_in_astronomy"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:37:06.257744+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Nicholas Jardine ===
In his article titled The Places of Astronomy in Early-Modern Culture, Nicholas Jardine looks to examine how the system of patronage and the codes of courtly conduct shaped a new agenda for astronomy: the quest for the true world system. Jardine begins his article by noting that astronomy “did not then make up a specialty or discipline in anything like the modern sense… rather, it comprised a whole series of practices widely diffused through the various social sites and strata.”  The focus of University teachings on astronomy was “predominantly practical and utilitarian, directed towards the calendrical, navigational, agricultural, and above all, medical applications of the subject… [p]lanetary models were on the whole considered as fictions devised for predictive purposes.”  But, during the course of the sixteenth century “there arose an entirely new kind of princely and aristocratic involvement in astronomy, an involvement in which astronomical observations, instruments, models, and ultimately world systems themselves became objects of courtly production, exchange, and competition.” Some notable places of this “new courtly culture of astronomy were the court of Landgraf Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel, Tycho Brahe’s island of Hven (held in fief from Frederick II of Denmark) and, some decades later, Rudo III’s imperial court at Prague, the Medici court and the papal court.”  By the later decades of the sixteenth century, in these places, as a consequence of astronomers utilizing the patronage system, a fair number of astronomers found themselves dining at princely tables “rather than seated below the salt at university feasts.”  Jardine divides the main sites of astronomy into university, court and city, and notes aspects of University such as appointments and curricula as “very often under direct or indirect court control: Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel, for example, closely supervised appointments and the curriculum at his father’s new university of Marburg… [a]nd conversely, court mathematical appointments were often held concurrently with university posts or filled on university nomination.”  Further, Jardine argues that at “least in the court context, the model of stable, salary-based patron-client relationships is inappropriate… [r]ather, power and dependence arose out of mechanism of mutual recognition of status and honour, regulated by exchange of gifts, tokens, and services.”  He notes that in “such an ‘economy of honour’, princes often competed to secure the service of notable astronomers; and they, in turn, played patrons off against each other as they shifted and multiplied their allegiances... [in] [other] [words] patrons and clients collected and displayed each other. Jardine observes how recent authors have noted ways in which the new cosmologies of the sixteenth century embodied courtly ideals. For example, “in his De rebus coelestibus of 1512 Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, secretary and ambrassador of the Aragonese rulers of Naples, projected into the heavens a court society, in which the planets dance to the tunes of their master, the Sun; much like how that at the Neapolitan court, as at many other European courts, the courtiers danced before their ruler on ceremonial occasions.”  Not merely the “forms of the new cosmologies, but the very quest for a true world system was”, Jardine believes, “a product of courtly ethos.”  He recalls that many recent historians “have emphasized the constitutive roles of gift exchange in the sixteenth-century court… [where] [g]ifts were displayed as symbolic representations of power and as object of erudite, often playful conversation- that is, in a somewhat later idiom, as ‘conversation pieces’.”  Often it was through the presentation of instruments, gift-books, and “discoveries in the case of astronomy- that positions of service at court were solicited and secured.”  Patronage relationships often helped both parties achieve social distinction, maintaining honor and mutual distinction, even after death; for example:

in 1592 Hieronymus Treutler, Professor of Law at the University of Marburg, delivered a funeral oration for Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel. At the end of the oration Treutler turn[ed] to the Landgraf’s astronomical activities… prais[ing] him as a skilled practitioner and celebrat[ing] him as a patron who ha[d] emulated those great examples Julius Ceaser, patron of Sosigene’s reform of the calendar, and Alfonso the Wise. He [told] how the Landgraf’s clockmaker, Jost Bürgi, made a wonderful gilded globe, “which in accordance with the most exact observations exactly represented the motions not only of the planets, but of the entire firmament”.  The Emperor Rudolf heard of the globe and requested that it and its maker be sent to him. “It is wonderful to relate”, declare[d] Treutler, “what pleasure this gave our Prince.” In return, the Emperor sent a personal thank-you letter, received just before the Landgraf’s death.

Jardine notes that this “honourable exchange of tokens figures in the oration as the culmination of the Landgraf’s life. Jardine also highlights a dispute between Tycho Brahe and Ursus where Ursus was accused of stealing a diagram of Tycho’s planetary ordering while at Hven. Tycho eventually brought in the help of Kepler, who wrote a detailed defence of Tycho’s claims to priority  Jardine contends that “in the course of these challenges and counter challenges Tycho and Kepler had redefined the object of the dispute in Tycho’s favour… [t]he claim to priority in the construction of a world system was not the starting point of this courtly duel, but its end-product… [being] so to speak, the final challenge.”  Upon recognition of these events, and looking through this interpretation, it seems “the very setting of the world system- a complete physically grounded model of the cosmos—as the goal of astronomy was a product of the competitive practices of courtly exchange of gifts and novelties.”  In conclusion, Jardine points that early modern astronomy was formed by its cultural settings, settings in which patronage played a significant part. Further, he suggests that the “courtly patronage of astronomy generated a new agenda for astronomy—specifically, the quest for the true and complete world system.” 