ExLatinis

ExLatinis · July 23, 2026

The Hairy Star and the King of the Parthians: Erycius Puteanus's On the Comet of the Year 1618, a New Spectacle of the World: Two Books of Paradox-Discourse

When a bright comet crossed the skies of Europe in November 1618, most who wrote about it saw a warning of war, plague, and the death of kings; the Louvain humanist Erycius Puteanus—successor to Justus Lipsius in the chair of Latin eloquence—wrote instead to argue the fear itself into absurdity. His two-book Neo-Latin treatise, printed in 1619 as De cometa anni 1618. Novo mundi spectaculo, libri duo. Paradoxologia and dedicated to the Habsburg sovereigns of the Spanish Netherlands, reclassifies the comet as a citizen of heaven rather than a portent, and relocates the only true prodigies from the sky to the human soul. Composed on the eve of the Thirty Years' War, when the claim that a comet foretold conflict carried immediate confessional and dynastic weight, it turns natural philosophy, forensic polemic, and moral theology to a single end: stripping the heavens of their power to terrify.