Mantuanus und die Astronomie. Eine ungliickliche Liebe?

In his verses, Mantuanus was fond of pointing out the position of prominent con­stellations at the time of great developments on earth. Sometimes however he got confused whether a star was rising or setting. The nature of early sky-globes and planispheres, who looked at the stars ‘from the outside’, might be the reason for this uncertainty. In his Fasci and elsewhere, Mantuanus reproduced the star-catalogue in the 5th book of Manilius, without seeing that these are so called paranatellontes and without realizing what this would imply. And then there is this tricky wandering of the equinox: if the sun stands at a given day somewhere, that does not mean, that exactly 1500 years earlier it was at the same position. But Mantuanus stands by no means alone among Neo-Latin poets in his failures mentioned. And in a way all these misinterpretations and errors are understandable: astronomy is no light matter.