Good condition. Bound in period parchment.
Silvestre Pietra Santa (Rome 1590-1647), also known as Coelius Servili, was a well-known Jesuit, publisher, heraldist, active religious visitor and great polemicist against the Protestants. In 1634 his most famous work entitled “Symbolis Heroicis” was published, which dealt with heraldry and iconography. In this book he established for the first time a system of traces to represent the colors of the heraldic enamels without the need to color the printed treatises of the heroic science. He also acquired great renown as the first visitor of the Piarist communities during the lifetime of their founder, St. Joseph Calasanz. He counted on the favor of Cardinal Pier Luigi Carafa, of whom he was his private confessor.
On November 11, 1572 the famous Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) observed in the constellation Cassiopeia a new star that shone brighter than Venus and Jupiter, becoming one of the eight supernovae that have been seen with the naked eye in the history of mankind. The phenomenon lasted eighteen months and its vision was extinguished at the beginning of 1574. This Danish astronomical observer, before the invention of the telescope, coined the term “Nova Stella” for the event, known today as SN 1572 or Nova Tycho in honor of its discoverer, who wrote an extensive work on the phenomenon that later influenced Kepler. Other European astronomers who saw the supernova were Francesco Maurolico, Wolfang Schüler, Thomas Digges, John Dee and Tadeás Hájek. In Spain it was recorded from Valencia by Jerónimo Muñoz and Bartolomé Barrientos from Salamanca.
In China during the Ming dynasty, where the new star was also perceived, it was interpreted as a bad omen. At that time Europe was immersed in the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648) between Philip II and the Protestants of the Netherlands, and to this was added the commotion caused by the massacre of 20,000 Huguenots ordered by Charles IX, King of France, which began on the night of August 24, 1572 and lasted until September 7 of that same year, about a month before the appearance of the star. Until that date it was believed in the immutability of the sky and soon ran all kinds of speculations among astronomers and Lutherans who interpreted the phenomenon as a divine warning in favor of their cause.
Silvestre Pietra Santa is the author of this manuscript as stated on the spine. The work is calligraphed in humanistic handwriting at twenty-one lines per page in Latin and Greek of which we have not found any bibliographical information. The work begins by acknowledging the discovery of Tycho Brahe and how this event served the Lutherans as a superstitious pretext to attack the Catholic empire of the Austrians.
The author structures the book in eleven chapters where he argues several theories and explanations for the appearance of the star in 1572. He establishes that it is a pilgrim star of the Milky Way already created by God at the origin of the universe and therefore alien to any providentialist interpretation. On the other hand, the author recalls that in that year the Catholic religion was in a supreme position supported by Philip II of Spain, Charles IX of France, Maximilian and Charles II Archduke of Austria among other European monarchs. Silvestre does recognize the crucial Catholic struggles against the Turks, Calvinist Huguenots and Lutheran Protestants led by William of Orange in Belgium as a danger to the Holy Roman Empire. The author adds that from that year of 1572 a splendorous cycle began in Europe after the victory against the Ottomans (Lepanto), the happy royal marriages of the European Catholic dynasties, enthronements, the counter-reformation initiated by Rome, etc.
He then reviews the royal genealogies and the history of the world to introduce us to chapters IX, X and XI, which are the most extensive and interesting for our purposes. Silvestre Pietra Santa is a Jesuit who honors his order in the intellectual field. He has first hand knowledge of Aristotle, Plato, Pliny, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, St. Augustine and above all Pythagoras. From this last philosopher and mathematician he takes his numerical relationships to demonstrate the hidden relationship between numbers and living beings and the historical universe where they fluctuate.
Coelius Servili uses the Greek texts and numerals to establish the historical correspondences, the chronologies and computations of the reigns subject to the rule of deterministic numerical logic, the genealogies of Christ with their equivalences of mathematical values, etc. All this to conclude with the reign of Ferdinand II of the Holy Roman Empire as a colophon and closure of this cycle initiated in 1572 with the Nova Stella.
The end of the reign of Ferdinand II ended in 1637, a date that seems to us closer to the elaboration of the text of Sylvester, who died in the eternal city in 1647, a year before the signing of the Peace of Westphalia that put an end to the Eighty Years’ War of Philip II with the Netherlands and the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. As a result, the Pope lost the rank of Caesar and the policy of “Universitas Christiana” created by Charles V was abandoned. It is striking how the author attacked the Lutheran superstitions of the astronomical event with the practices of deterministic numerology alien to free will that bordered on the Catholic heterodoxy of the time.
Good condition. Bound in period parchment.
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