Perhaps the best measure of the perception of Tycho's influence through the years is that this book is at least the fifth serious biography of him. Less than fifty years after Tycho's death, when the concept of biographical writing had barely begun to be extended from the lives of saints to the lives of kings, the French Catholic philosopher Pierre Gassendi had already conceived the notion of portraying the life and career of the Danish Lutheran astronomer Tycho Brahe. Because he did, and because he wrote to Denmark to get as much information about his subject as he could, we have details of Tycho's life that would probably not otherwise have been preserved. Gassendi used those details – along with Tycho's observations, letters, and published descriptions of his scientific work – to amplify the seven-thousand-word autobiographical sketch written by Tycho in his last years into an eighty-thousand-word biography published in 1654 as Tychonis Brahei, Equitis Dani, Astronomorum coryphaei, Vita. By the following year a second edition had been printed, and reprintings appeared in 1658 and 1717 as the fifth volume of Gassendi's own Opera Omnia.

As was the case for history generally, the nineteenth century was the great period of discovery in Tycho studies. Numerous documents touching on Tycho's life were found in repositories in Copenhagen, Prague, Vienna, and Basel. The most active excavator was the Danish historian F. R. Friis, who, unfortunately, did much of his work after he published the first modern biography of Tycho in 1871.