Tycho Brahe and the Inquisition in Iberia

It is known that throughout the seventeenth century the world system proposed by Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) assumed a preponderant position in the Iberian cosmological debate, affirming itself as the one with the best agreement to empirical evidence. Moreover, the Tychonian model (or variants thereof) did not present the difficulties of apparent contradiction with the scriptures, as the heliocentric proposal of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) did, since it kept the earth fixed at the centre of the world. However, Tycho as a Lutheran author was targeted by the Inquisition. Passages of various works of the Danish astronomer were included in the Spanish indexes of 1632, 1640 and 1707, although the formal condemnation of the Roman Inquisition never materialized. In the network of the Society of Jesus a seemingly informal censorship also circulated, apparently based on Tridentine determinations, published in 1651 in the influential work of Giambattista Riccioli (1598-1671) Almagestum novum. I will discuss the scope, effects and limitations of the censorship of Tycho's scientific books in Portugal and Spain, through the analysis of several annotated copies, preserved manly in Iberian libraries, with a special attention to books from ancient Jesuit colleges.