The author was professor of logic at Heidelberg. Inspired by his inheritance of Rheticus’s library, he made astronomical observations of his own, which are set out in this work. He was the first person to include telescopic sights on instruments such as the sextant and Jacob’s staff.

This copy is from the large (some 3000 volumes) and remarkable library of Federico Cesi (1585-1630), founder of the Accademia dei Lincei. Although dominated by books on medicine and natural history, the library also included works of astronomy, notably editions of Kepler and Copernicus, works by Galileo and his disciples, and by the opponents of Galileo, such as Christoph Scheiner and Orazio Grassi. Two inventories of the Cesi library are analysed by Maria Teresa Biagetti, La biblioteca di Federico Cesi (Rome 2008); the present volume was entered in these as "Theoria lunae ex nouis Hyptothesibus Autore Iacobo Chorstmano 1611" (Biagetti p.111 no. [318]).