Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love
Dava Sobel
Language: English
Pages: 432
ISBN: 0802779654
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Inspired by a long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of his daughter Maria Celeste, a cloistered nun, Dava Sobel has crafted a biography that dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishments of a mythic figure whose early-seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion-the man Albert Einstein called "the father of modern physics-indeed of modern science altogether." It is also a stunning portrait of Galileo's daughter, a person hitherto lost to history, described by her father as "a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me."
Moving between Galileo's grand public life and Maria Celeste's sequestered world, Sobel illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during the pivotal era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was about to be overturned. During that same time, while the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and the Thirty Years' War tipped fortunes across Europe, Galileo sought to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed through his telescope. Filled with human drama and scientific adventure, Galileo's Daughter is an unforgettable story.
Praise for Galileo's Daughter :
"[Sobel] shows herself a virtuoso at encapsulating the history and the politics of science. Her descriptions of Galileo's ideas…are pithy, vivid, and intelligible."-Wall Street Journal
Not a Normal Country: Italy After Berlusconi
Psychopathia Sexualis in Italian Sinema
Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis
the additional 4, which would have completed the number you state in your letter, Sire, must have been liberated by some charming little kitten who thought of tasting them ahead of us, because they were not there, and the cloth cover had a large hole in it. How fortunate that the gray partridges and woodcocks were at the bottom, one of which and two thrushes I gave to the sick girl, to her great joy, and she thanks you, Sire. I sent another gift, also in the form of two thrushes, to Signor
of all created things, and his wisdom was from God. Thus it is not likely that he would affirm something which was contrary to a truth either already demonstrated, or likely to be demonstrated. And if you tell me that Solomon spoke only according to the appearances, and that it seems to us that the Sun goes around when actually it is the Earth which moves, as it seems to one on a ship that the shore moves away from the ship, I shall answer that though it may appear to a voyager as if the shore
characteristics of paper, such as the distinguishing rhinoceros watermark from the end of his Paduan period.) Although Suor Maria Celeste often sacrificed neatness for speed in her own writing, she readily lent her stylish script to Galileo, as well as to the mother abbess, for whom she did not merely copy letters from drafts but composed them from scratch. To begin, she enlarged the first letter of the first paragraph’s first word, as in an illuminated manuscript, and festooned the capital
see what it says. Here are some cakes I made a few days ago, hoping to give them to you when you came to bid us adieu. I see that this will not happen quite as soon as I feared, and so I want you to have them before they turn hard. Suor Arcangela continues still to purge herself, and she does not feel terribly well after having had the two cauteries on her thighs. I am still not very well either, but by now I am so accustomed to poor health that I hardly think about it, seeing how it pleases
to buy food and blankets aplenty. Something far worse than material poverty, in Suor Maria Celeste’s analysis, threatened to undermine San Matteo. Therefore she made bold to name the problem to her father, and to suggest precisely how the pope might crush the menace. Her letter described the impropriety of the men attending certain supervisory needs of the convent, beginning with the spiritual guidance that had once come from the blessed Francis himself. Our Visitator shall always be from
