One of the central figures of the modern scientific breakthrough, Tycho Brahe was also a multifaceted cultural personality and a promoter of Renaissance art and culture in Scandinavia. Among his many talents he excelled as a poet writing in Latin. For Brahe, as for all academics of his time, Latin was the preferred mode of written expression, and he wrote almost everything in this language. The only notable exceptions are his letters, written in Latin, German, and Danish, depending on their recipient.

Several weighty astronomical books comprise Brahe's official oeuvre, along with his epistolary Epistolæ Astronomicæ (Astronomical Letters, 1596). His Latin poetry served a different purpose, written mainly in regard to his social life and the development of his career. As was common at the time, Brahe's poetry possesses, to a large extent, the quality of occasional verse. Some of his poems appear in his scientific works...