 As Elaine Limbrick points out, Sanches wrote Carmen de cometa anni M.D.LXXVII in the style of Lucretius’ De rerum natura or The Nature of Things. His two main targets were (1) Francesco Giuntini’s Discours sur ce que menace devoir advenir la comete apparue à Lyon le 12 de ce mois de Novembre de 1577. laquelle se voit encores à present, a treatise that proposed that the comet of 1577, and comets in general, were prophetic phenomena of bad things to come, such as plagues and the deaths of kings; and (2) Aristotelian notions of the heavens, the spheres, and the place of comets within this hierarchical, astronomical ontology.