Аннотация:THE comet visible across Europe in the last two months of 1618 sparked considerable interest, providing astronomers with the first opportunity to observe a comet through telescopes and further stimulating the hot debate between Galileo and his opponents.1 At the same time the traditional assumption that comets, or ‘blazing stars’ as they were often called, served as supernatural warnings or heralds still held sway. In an early sixteenth-century treatise republished in 1618 Friedrich Nausea records this view: The Religious Divines, like very well of this plausible and true opinion, that Blazing starres come of no other cause, then from the holy Counsell and Providence of God; that there is no matter of their generation, as Phylosophers imagine, but that God maketh them immediate messengers and Ministers of his will, according to the time and place, as it best pleaseth his hie and eternall Majestie:2
