Debating vision and refraction in Galileo’s time: Marcantonio De Dominis and Cesare Cremonini

The year 1610, as Floris Cohen has noted, marked a signal moment in the history of science.1 In that year, Galileo Galilei, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Padua, announced his discoveries with the telescope, including the craters of the Moon, several clouds of stars, and the moons of Jupiter, in a book he called the Sidereus nuncius ('The Starry Messenger').2 He wrote in a limpid Latin to reach an international community of readers; such was the importance of his message. The book was published in Venice, not only because Venice was the center of Italy's printing industry, but also because Galileo's home institution, the University of Padua, was that city's de facto university, chartered by the Venetian Republic rather than a Pope or a monarch.3 The title page of the Starry Messenger reveals, however, that Galileo harbored ulterior plans for his own career, for it records the fact that he has named the moons of Jupiter the Medicean Stars, paying homage to the sons of Cosimo II de' Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany.4 A Tuscan himself and a restless soul by nature, Galileo was hoping for an appointment to the University of Pisa, at a much higher salary and with greater prestige than Padua was willing to provide. The naming of the stars may have played a smaller role than the magnitude of Galileo's achievement in furthering his career, but he was certainly summoned shortly thereafter to join the faculty at Pisa, the shining star in that university's academic firmament.5

Among Actions, Objects, and Ideas:The Telescope in Thomas Tomkis’s Albumazar Vivian Appler (bio) “An engine to catch starres”: Thomas Tomkis and Natural Philosophy1 Albumazar is a play filled with things, from mundane household goods to lists of ancient and contemporary alchemists and magi to the eponymous astrologer’s collection of astrolabes, horoscopes, and almanacs. It is also the first play in English to feature a scene with a telescope onstage.2 However, whether many of the things in Thomas Tomkis’s (c. 1580–after 1615) science farce physically appeared onstage for its March 9, 1614 premiere at Cambridge’s Trinity Hall is uncertain. The questionable material status of Tomkis’s stage properties becomes significant when Albumazar is examined in a context of the history of science as well as the history of theatre. The original college production demonstrates the playwright’s cultural awareness of the emergent disciplinary distinction of astronomy through the incorporation of its star technology: the telescope.3 King James I (1566–1625)—witch-hunter, author of Daemonology (1597), and royal guest at Albumazar’s premiere— likely held a derogatory opinion of the telescope because of its potential use as a tool in the occult craft of astrology. The space between the textual narrative and the telescope scene as it might have been embodied by actors in 1614 reveals the delicate balance that Tomkis achieved by referring to truthful elements of astronomy while poking fun at astrology. The manner in which the telescope was performed—as a physical prop or mimed as part of a dumb show—indicates the range of Tomkis’s engagement with the tools and concepts of the “new science” in the only performance of the play recorded during his lifetime. [End Page 81] The “new science” advanced the idea of experimentation and experience as a means of exploring the natural world.4 This method prioritized embodied encounters and observations of natural phenomena (including things astronomical) over contemplation of Aristotelian causes thereof. The “new science” began to emerge with Galileo Galilei’s (1564–1642) empirical observations and was developed in England most famously by Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who preceded Tomkis at Trinity College, from 1573–1575.5 Staged representations of the telescope throughout the seventeenth century evidence a gradual shift in popular opinions about the “new science” and those who adhered to its philosophy. Tomkis’s use of the telescope in the play references a host of overlapping traditions of science, magic, education, and authority that were at odds with each other at the time of the play’s premiere. In 1614, astrology and astronomy were not entirely distinct disciplines and neither was completely condoned, or forbidden, by religious and scholarly authorities. Astrology had historically been taught at European universities, but the church and university considered certain aspects of astrology less offensive than others.6 Act 1 of Albumazar features a telescope (referred to throughout the play as a perspicill) and an otacousticon (a hearing aid).7 These devices situate the play at a pivotal moment in the history of science as reports of new discoveries made through the use of “Galilean” tubes spread across Europe.8 The traditional narrative of the telescope’s invention goes that in 1608, Dutch spectacle-maker Hans Lipperhey (1570–1619) was granted a patent for his telescope design from the States General in Hague, Holland, and so the chapter of the telescope was added to a global history of astronomical technologies.9 Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) announced his application of the telescope to the practice of astronomy in 1610 with the publication of Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger).10 What followed was a European battle of philosophies over the veracity of the celestial objects made visible through the telescope’s lenses waged throughout the seventeenth century.11 At the time, knowledge gained through the use of telescopes was not universally accepted because discoveries of new stars and planets, as well as the ability to trace their movements with greater accuracy, challenged a Ptolemaic (geocentric) model of the universe that was still popular within the academy and the church. Galileo’s observations made with the telescope supported a Copernican (heliocentric) model. [End Page 82] Thomas...

Paolo Beni da Gubbio (1553-1625) has been studied almost exclusively for his literary and rhetorical production. However, he finds an important place among the scholars of the Renaissance who developed a novel reading of Plato as an alternative to the predominent exegesis of Ficino and his followers. His writings represent a prime example of the interplay between exegetical discussions (both of literary and philosophical texts) and the emerging sciences. In the unpublished part of his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, Beni discusses Platonic natural philosophy - cosmology in particular - in light of the interpretations of other authors as well as the new scientific theories, mostly in relation to the Paduan scientific circles. From Galileo’s correspondence with Giovan Battista Manso, we know that Beni was wellinformed about Galileo’s astronomical observations and discoveries at the beginning of 1610, which were soon published thereafter in the Sidereus Nuncius. Further, we have information concerning Beni’s active role in the circulation of these observations. We wish to cast new light on the reception of these novelties by an advocate of the classical tradition such as Beni. Beni’s praise of the new discoveries is testified by his unedited commentary to the Ciceronian Dream of Scipio (1610-15), in which he criticizes the Aristotelian cosmological model, referring to the newly invented telescope and referring to Galileo’s astronomical observations. Echoes of new scientific and cosmological theories appear also in Beni’s commentaries on Tasso’s Delivered Jerusalem.

This book analyzes the construction and the impact of Galileo Galilei’s fame. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is perhaps best known for his involvement in the trial of 1633, in which the Catholic Church condemned him for heresy. However, both Galileo’s fame and his controversial status originated long before the trial of ... read more 1633, and can be traced back until at least 1610. This year saw the publication of his first major work, Sidereus Nuncius (1610), which evoked not only exalted praise but also fervent criticism. To date, however, Galileo’s rise to fame is mostly portrayed as the straightforward result of his merit. Such a view obscures the impact of social and cultural processes on the development of fame. Moreover, while fame was often presented as a positive asset, it was also frequently associated with vanity and pride – which meant that scholars accused of seeking fame could draw suspicion rather than approval. Considering Galileo’s fame as a direct result of his merit thus glosses over this complicated relation between scholarly credibility and fame. This book aims to remedy these lacunae in earlier scholarship. In doing so, it seeks to break ground in two major ways. First, this work shifts away the traditional focus on Galileo’s own self-fashioning and instead concentrates on the efforts of Galileo’s contemporaries. It demonstrates that the construction and development of Galileo’s fame required the active participation and engagement of others, who can be conceptualized as stakeholders in Galileo’s reputation. The book explores the means and motives varied groups of these stakeholders had for creating, shaping and opposing Galileo’s fame. It demonstrates that Galileo’s fame was the result of the active engagement of scholars and non-scholars alike. Moreover, it shows that most stakeholders were driven not only by their appreciation for Galileo’s scholarly merit, but by other motives as well. Second, by focusing on the impact of Galileo’s fame the book integrates the study of fame and the history of science. The question of how scholarly credibility was assigned and assessed has been on the forefront of recent studies into the history of science. Yet, while research has shown that various social norms and practices were of seminal importance to the construction of credibility, the role played by fame in this regard has not yet been examined systematically. This book demonstrates that the way contemporaries assessed Galileo’s fame in relation to his credibility depended to a large extent on their own position, interests and background. In evaluating Galileo’s fame, moreover, scholars and non-scholars alike drew on practices and assumptions pertaining to two other contexts: the juridical and the religious. The chosen scope and focus thus not only provide new insights into Galileo’s life and career; this case study also presents a novel perspective on the way fame is created. Moreover, in this book the case of Galileo – so often presented as the epitome of a clash between science and religion – is instead used to bring into focus where the cultures of scholarship, law and religion intersected. show less

A main area of Hans Blumenberg’s works, the history of science, has received little attention, in particular Blumenberg’s history of astronomy. Since 1955 Blumenberg [1920-1996] had undertaken a research on Copernican astronomy, and published many papers during the 50’s and 60’s, later put together in Die kopernikanische Wende [1965]. Blumenberg had also prepared preliminary studies on Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius and Cusa’s De coniecturis. All this work will culminate in Blumenberg’s monumental Die genesis der kopernikanischen Welt [1975] and his posthumous book Die Vollzahligkeit der Sterne [1997]. The aim of this paper is to undertake a review on this neglected area of Blumenberg’s works. We will focus on the Heideggerian background in Blumenberg’s history of astronomy. Our thesis is that in Blumenberg’s history of astronomy we can find a metaphysics of existence in a Heideggerian way, as astronomical existential paradigms.

Este trabalho tem como objetivo usar as características orbitais das quatro Luas Galileanas de Júpiter para mostrar a equivalencia do movimento harmônico simples (MHS) com o movimento circular uniforme (MCU). Em nossos cálculos, empregamos os dados obtidos por Galileu Galilei em suas observações pioneiras com o primeiro telescópio da história, realizadas no começo de 1610, e reportadas na obra fundamental Sidereus Nuncius. Comparamos os desenhos de Galileu do Sidereus Nuncius com as imagens da posição de Jupiter e suas luas segundo o Cartes du Ciel, um programa open-source que funciona como efemérides interativa. Com os dados orbitais extraídos dos gráficos de separação angular dos Planetas Mediceanos até Jupiter, obtemos os raios das órbitas assumindo a terceira lei de Kepler.

When Galileo Galilei's Sidereus Nuncius appeared on the European intellectual scene in March 1610, the thin volume in quarto — composed of just 30 sheets — stood out in the panorama of the scientific literature of the times owing to a series of components of different kinds that took their place alongside the numerous and extraordinary celestial novelties contained in the text1.

Interview with Peter Sis Michael Joseph (bio) and Lida Sak (bio) Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1949, Peter Sis was trained at the famous Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague. During the early part of his career, his primary interest was film. Heads (his tribute to Arcimboldo), took the coveted German Golden Bear Award in 1980. Film also helped Sis slip under the Iron Curtain. In 1982, Czechoslovakia sent him to Los Angeles to make an animated film for the 1984 Olympics. When the Eastern Bloc countries withdrew, Czechoslovakia ordered him to return. He chose instead to remain, believing at 31, “If I didn’t do it now, I’d never do it.” Since illustrating his first children’s book in the United States, George Shannon’s Bean Boy (Greenwillow, 1984), Sis has lent illustrations to several more celebrated collaborations, including The Whipping Boy by Sid Fleischman (Greenwillow, 1985), Oaf, by Julia Cunningham (Greenwillow, 1986), and The Dragons are Singing Tonight, by Jack Prelutsky (Greenwillow, 1993). Sis’s first solo effort, Rainbow Rhino (Knopf, 1987) gained recognition from both Time and the New York Times, who placed it among the year’s outstanding children’s books. Works of steadily increasing artistic maturity have followed, including Follow the Dream (Knopf, 1991), A Small Tall Tale from the Far Far North (Knopf, 1993), and The Three Golden Keys (Doubleday, 1994). His newest work, Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei, will soon be published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. This interview is based upon a conversation the authors had with Peter Sis in January 1995, shortly after The Three Golden Keys won the Silver Medal from the Society of Illustrators. Peter Sis lives in New York City with his wife, Terry, a son, Matej, and a daughter, Madeleine. Q: How do you like New York? PS: I like the energy of New York, the opportunities in New York; I like New York in the autumn, have some problems with summers and winters and some of the stuff I find in the streets when I walk with my children. Q: When did you first realize that you were an illustrator? [End Page 131] PS: I first realized that I am an illustrator when I came to New York. Because until then I was an artist. Q: Did your parents encourage your art? PS: Very much so; I would even get assignments and deadlines from my father at a young age. A lot of the time he traveled around and he would come home and tell me about lots of things which I then felt like drawing. And my mother was an art student herself. Q: Were you encouraged to pursue art in school, as well? PS: First, yes, then no. I went through a terrible time in primary school because I had a teacher who thought that if you draw a duck, it should look like a duck. Later, I went through another terrible time in art school—which was like art high school—and again, the traditions were very academic. I had a teacher who would always select the best pictures and the worst picture. And, I always ended up with the worst! I ended up in the hospital because I just couldn’t take that guy. When I am teaching now, I try not to say if somebody is better or worse: it’s just my opinion anyway. It has nothing to do with reality. Q: Do you feel you have been influenced by other artists—Czech or American? PS: Obviously; a lot. I was very lucky in college because I was selected by Jiri Trnka to be his student. However, he died a year after that, but I had a wonderful man, Miroslav Jagr, who was his assistant, and he lifted me up and encouraged me. I liked Mr. Jagr very much, but it’s true that, when we ended college, all of us who graduated were drawing just like him: including the Vietnamese students. Then, in the 1960s, San Francisco poster art really interested me. Because we followed the magazines like Graphis and Gebrauchsgraphik, it is mind boggling for me to be in New York and to work with people I used...

This article examines the use of maps in the works of Czech author- illustrator Peter Sis in order to consider the role that cartography plays in the construction of four of his biographical picturebooks: Follow the Dream: The Story of Christopher Columbus (2003/1991), Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei (1996), The Tree of Life: A Book Depicting the Life of Charles Darwin, Naturalist, Geologist and Thinker (2003), and The Pilot and the Little Prince: The Life of Antoine de Saint-Exupery (2013). The profusion of maps found in Sis’s biographical picturebooks expresses an understanding that the exploration of identity is intimately linked with the exploration of the spaces in which that identity is formed. The maps represent three basic functions for Sis: first, he uses maps to situate the reader in a specific time and place; second, maps are elements that initiate adventure; and third, the profusion of maps, combined with other textual elements, raises a question that runs through all of Sis’s work regarding the limits of representations of reality. The article illustrates the three functions by presenting a walk through the pages of the four chosen picturebooks, describing and analysing the different types of maps that Sis uses.

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was born in Pisa. As a young boy he attended a monastery school, where he studied Latin classics and Greek. He went on to study medicine and mathematics at the University of Pisa, but left without a degree due to lack of funds. After this, he spent a few years doing private teaching and independent research, then went on to serve as a lecturer at the University of Pisa before he was appointed to chair of mathematics at the University of Padua in 1591. It was here that he carried out the work which would be published in 1610 under the title Sidereus Nuncius—the sidereal, or starry, messenger. The following text selections were translated from the latin text of Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger by Edward Stafford Carlos in 1880 and revised by Maurice A. Finocchiaro in 2008. Galileo’s sketches of the moon, contained herein, have been kindly provided by the History of Hydraulics Rare Book Collection which is maintained by the IIHR at the University of Iowa. Galileo begins this text by describing the spyglass—or telescope—with which his ground-breaking observations were made possible.

The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History. By Maurice A. Finocchiaro. University of California Press: 1989. Pp.382. Hbk $50, £31.25; pbk $12.95, £8.Sidereus Nunclus or the Sidereal Messenger. By Galileo Galilei. Translated with introduction, conclusion and notes by Albert Van Helden. University of Chicago Press: 1989. Pp.127. Hbk $29.95, £19.25; pbk $7.95, £6.25.

A CONTEMPORARY OF GALILEO Ilario Altobelli: Scienziato, Teologo, Corrispondente di Galileo Galilei. Alessandro Giostra, Francesco Merletti and William Shea (empatiabooks, Camerano, Italy, 2011). Pp. 143. euro15. ISBN 978-88-906165-0-1.This is an interesting little book making a modest contribution to our knowledge of early modern science. It contains three chapters, each more or less concerned with Ilario Altobelli, a Franciscan scholar with astronomical and astrological interests who was also, as the title states, an occasional writer of letters to major figures of his day, including Galileo, Clavius, and Magini. It is unclear how many of those letters were ever answered, making it difficult to argue for Altobelli's significance for the history of his time, but exploring his thoughts on the subjects of, first, Kepler's supernova of 1604 and, second, the publication of Galileo's Sidereus nuncius (1610), offers insights into how a minor, but well-informed and opinionated, character sought to contribute to the major issues current in his world.The first chapter, by Merletti, surveys Altobelli's life, publications, and other writings. A considerable expansion on the biographical material available in the Altobelli entry of the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, this short chapter is a useful contribution to the literature. Its oddly discursive nature (it devotes a short section to a biography of Mauro Saraceni, who might or might not have been a teacher of Altobelli) sets the tone for the other contributions, which occasionally end up wandering far from their titles.The second chapter, by Shea, is a short essay on the early history of the telescope. Although a competent account for the most part, it is almost entirely superseded by Van Helden et al. (eds), The origins of the telescope (Amsterdam, 2010). It also has effectively no connection to Altobelli aside from the fact that after the publication of Sidereus nuncius, Altobelli asked Galileo to send him a set of lenses so that he could make his own instrument. However, Galileo never sent him lenses and there is no evidence that Altobelli ever made or used a telescope. So Shea's essay lays a background certainly relevant to Galileo's reception of Altobelli's request, but not for a scene in which Altobelli himself ever makes an entrance, despite his desire to do so. The odd sense of Altobelli's conspicuous absence, almost a negative presence, so to speak, builds. Giostra's chapter constitutes the bulk of the volume. He examines Altobelli's brief reports to Galileo on the nova of 1604 in which the former details his observations and defends the priority of his very early sighting in the evening sky of 9 October. Altobelli expresses sympathy with Galileo's public lectures in Padua on the nova and his energetic demolition of Aristotelian explanations thereof. Giostra also draws on Altobelli's much later (1610) congratulatory letter to Galileo about the discoveries detailed in the Sidereus nuncius. …

While in theory frowned upon, comments on the (regional) provenance of scholars frequently found their way into the scholarly debates of the Republic of Letters. This article uses early responses to Galileo Galilei's Sidereus Nuncius as a case study to explore various broader assumptions and associations underlying the use of such comments on provenance. Presenting a typology of these arguments, the article contends that provenance was used as a rather flexible marker of credibility, which allowed seventeenth‐century scholars to employ it to either advocate for, or against credibility. Scholars made full use of the rhetorical possibilities that origin‐based associations offered, demonstrating their flexible – if not to say opportunistic – attitude towards scholarly credibility in the process. This article furthermore investigates the motives Galileo's contemporaries had for invoking surreptitious boasts or slurs about provenance. In doing so, it illuminates a crucial mechanism informing the selection of specific arguments: competition on a personal, regional and national level.

Against the background of the traditional scholarly portrayals of Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum as the religious gesture of a woman writer in early 17th-century England, whether sincerely spiritual or socially motivated, this essay complicates the understanding of the poet's range of intentions and stock of concepts for the expression of her ideas. Lanyer's conceptions of sympathetic sight and communion-based vision are presented as a probable poetic interaction with contemporary male-centered discourses of objectivity. In the context of early 17th-century philosophical disputes over the nature of vision and optics—with the publication of Johannes Kepler's Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena in 1604 and of Galileo Galilei's Sidereus Nuncius in 1610—Lanyer's poetry presents sight in religious terms as the glorious means through which a woman could aspire to gain an essential understanding of things and acquire a clear perception of Christic truth. While Kepler and Galileo promoted a model of vision which separated the physical perception of things from their subjective understanding, making the act of seeing imprecise at best and deformed at worst, impersonal and absolutely unrelated to the observer's consciousness, Lanyer's religious poetry presents sight as the means for the reader to internalize the perceived and attain a state of Eucharistic communion with it. While vision was becoming the passive and impersonal reception of light rays, and the mind's conceits of things were believed to be the result of a deception of the sense of vision, Lanyer wrote and published her poetry as a moment of Eucharistic perception: the perception of Christ's "perfect picture," hidden behind the aenigmata of her poetry, was attainable, for Lanyer, solely through the "eie of Faith."

This essay explores significant methodological breakthroughs a Swiss couple contributed to material bibliography and Shakespeare studies.It does so through consideration of publications attributed to a Genevan named Charles-Mose Briquet, especially Les Filigranes (1907), and their influence on the resolution of famous bibliographical puzzles, such as the dating of the Shakespeare "Pavier Quartos," the Misssale Speciale, and a 2014 forgery of Galileo Galilei's Sidereus Nuncius, or Starry Messenger (1610).Les Filigranes has long been used by scholars wishing to learn more about the paper used to make manuscripts and printed books, but Caroline Long's role as Charles-Mose's collaborator, and the couple's contribution to bibliographical research and Shakespeare's print history has remained somewhat obscure.Building on recent studies seeking to reinscribe into the history of bibliographical studies the contributions of marginalised groups-including female scholars and those working beyond anglophone countries-I suggest that, in addition to historical biases within the field, failure to recognise the Long-Briquets' methodological breakthroughs and links to major discoveries can be attributed to issues with reproduction, translation and typesetting.