A small library’s worth of rare medieval and Renaissance books are heading to auction on July 9. The expansive lot includes a portable Magna Carta, an early scientific encyclopedia, a surgical codex, and one of the oldest surviving Sephardic Torah scrolls. But according to Christies’s Auction House, one manuscript is the first of its kind to go up for sale in over a century: a copy of the first pseudonymous astronomical text co-written by Galileo Galilei.
The evening of October 9, 1604, offered an unexpected and ultimately revolutionary moment for astronomy. Without warning, a star in the night sky suddenly illuminated brighter than nearly every other celestial object around it. Although inexplicable at the time, German astronomer Johannes Kepler spent weeks studying the event as it ultimately reached a peak brightness greater than Jupiter. What is now known as Kepler’s Supernova remained visible to the naked eye for 18 months, and formed the basis for the theorist’s 1606 work, De Stella Nova. This seminal text challenged the prevailing theory of an eternal, unchanging heavens.
However, another famous polymath beat Kepler to the publisher a year earlier. In 1605, a dialogue titled Dialogo in perpuosito de la stella nuova appeared from someone writing under the pseudonym Cecco di Ronchitti. In it, Italian peasants Matteo and Natale discuss this same cosmic occurrence in the rustic Paduan dialect of the time. The decision to have the pair debate in everyday vernacular wasn’t a creative flourish—it allowed the author to present complex astronomical theories to a general audience.
The pseudonym wasn’t due to the writer’s shyness, either. Dialogo in perpuosito de la stella nuova directly refuted the idea of an unchanging, fixed Aristotelian cosmology. Largely accepted as scientific fact across Europe for nearly 2,000 years, Aristotelian astronomical theory formed the cornerstone of understanding prior to the scientific revolution. To dismiss it was to court controversy from the Church—something most people hoped to avoid.
A second edition published the following year lightened certain Aristotelian criticisms, as well as removed heretical allusions to the Copernican idea of a rotating Earth. Regardless, Dialogo in perpuosito de la stella nuova presented markedly wild ideas for the era—theories that scholars widely believe could only have come from Galileo Galilei and his student, Girolamo Spinelli.
Galileo continued writing in conversational language for his landmark 1632 work, Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo. However, unlike his 1605 dialogue, Galileo didn’t hide behind a pseudonym—a decision that famously led to the very sort of attention he initially sought to avoid.
The first edition of Dialogo in perpuosito de la stella nuova set for auction on July 9 is one of eight complete copies known to exist, as well as the only one not currently held by an institutional archive. Although not quite as revolutionary as Galileo’s later works, the manuscript represents a monumental achievement in scientific inquiry amid an era that actively sought to stifle such research.
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