Galileo's reading

258 Pages·2013·3.24 MB·English

by  Hall

GALILeo’s reADInG
Galileo (1564–1642) incorporated throughout his work the language
of battle, the rhetoric of the epic, and the structure of romance as
a means to elicit emotional responses from his readers against his
opponents. By turning to the literary as a field for creating know-
ledge, Galileo delineated a textual space for establishing and valid-
ating the identity of the new, idealized philosopher. Galileo’s Reading
places Galileo in the complete intellectual and academic world in
which he operated, bringing together, for example, debates over the
nature of floating bodies and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, dis-
putes on comets and the literary criticism of Don Quixote, mathemat-
ical demonstrations of material strength and Dante’s voyage through
the afterlife, and the parallels of his feisty note-taking practices with
popular comedy of the period.
CrystAL HALL is currently Assistant Professor of French and Italian
at the University of Kansas.

GALILeo’s reADInG

CrystAL HALL
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8Bs, United Kingdom
Published in the United states of America by Cambridge University Press, new york
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© Crystal Hall 2013
This publication is in copyright. subject to statutory exception
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of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2013
Printed in the United Kingdom by CPI Group Ltd, Croydon Cr0 4yy
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Hall, Crystal, 1981–
Galileo’s reading / Crystal Hall.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
IsBn 978-1-107-04755-6 (hardback)
1. Galilei, Galileo, 1564–1642. 2. Galilei, Galileo, 1564–1642–Language. 3. Galilei, Galileo,
1564–1642–Literary style. 4. Ariosto, Lodovico, 1474–1533. orlando furioso. 5. Ariosto,
Lodovico, 1474–1533–Influence. I. title.
QB36.G2H35 2013
195–dc23
2013020833
IsBn 978-1-107-04755-6 hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence oraccuracy of
UrLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to inthis publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents

Acknowledgments page vi
Introduction 1
1 The poetry of early modern philosophy 14
2 starry knights 44
3 sarsi and the saracens 71
4 Galileo’s lesson on Don Chisciotte (1622–1625) 102
5 shipwrecked, clueless, and quixotic 129
Conclusion 162
Notes 173
Bibliography 225
Index 243
v
Acknowledgments

I owe thanks to a great number of individuals and institutions for their
assistance in bringing this book to press. The editors and the anonymous
readers at Cambridge University Press offered priceless advice for refining
and strengthening the presentation of my arguments. This research was
made possible by the support and collaboration of several institutions: the
University of Pennsylvania, the University of Kansas, the Galileo Museum
in Florence, the Biblioteca nazionale Centrale di Firenze, the Archivio
di stato di Firenze, the Huntington Library, the Houghton Library, the
Linda Hall Library, and the spencer research Library.
I am particularly in debt to Victoria Kirkham, in whose course I
first discovered Galileo as an author of literature. At the University of
Pennsylvania, when this book only existed as a kernel inside my disser-
tation, I am fortunate to have had the support of Kevin Brownlee, Fabio
Finotti, Michael Gamer, and e. Ann Matter. I found guidance and inspir-
ation in many places outside my home institutions, but I would like spe-
cifically to thank Arielle saiber, eileen reeves, Patrizia ruffo, Michele
Camerota, tom settle, renée raphael, Marilyn Migiel, Bill Wallace, and
Albert Ascoli for their contributions to my research.
The support of the Department of French and Italian at the University
of Kansas has been consistent and abundant, with particular thanks owed
to Caroline Jewers, Jan Kozma, Van Kelly, Karen Cook, sally Cornelison,
Cara Polsley, the KU Libraries, and Interlibrary Loan services.
Finally, a list of personal thanks to colleagues who became close friends and
the friends who became colleagues after many hours spent listening to me talk
about this project: Lillyrose, sarah, Federica, stefano, Kim, Charlie, Bruce,
Michelle, Louis, Alethea, Leigh, nicole, rebecca, and Kraig. I do hope that
Ingrid Horton and Misty schieberle will want to read this book one more
time after patiently reviewing so many early drafts. In the end I hope to have
produced a book that my mother will enjoy reading, with the precision that
my father expects, written in the good spirit that my sister exemplifies.
vi
Introduction

Galileo’s Reading developed around Galileo Galilei’s (1564–1642) frequent
claims in his philosophical texts that he was playing the part of one of the
Christian knights in Ludovico Ariosto’s (1474–1533) Renaissance master-
piece Orlando furioso (1516, 1521, 1532). The studies in this book show that
Galileo methodically and consistently incorporated the literary elements
from his favorite poem and similar works into the philosophical argu-
ments he championed. This authorial choice intersects with issues of
wider concern in the seventeenth century: the definitions of truth and
fiction, the interdependence of philosophy and poetry, reader reception
in both specialized and courtly audiences, and the generation of know-
ledge. Galileo’s Reading brings Ariosto’s and Torquato Tasso’s (1544–1595)
Christian knights, pagan warriors, and ferocious monsters face to face
with the Paduan Aristotelians, Jesuits of the Collegio Romano, and the
fictitious interlocutors in Galileo’s final works. By chronologically con-
sidering specifically the appearance of epic poetry within Galileo’s entire
corpus, this book compares the fictional works Galileo read with the sub-
sequent literariness of his writing, uses the material history of Galileo’s
library to examine the interplay of natural philosophy and epic poetry in
creating knowledge, and suggests a more widely based literary and cultural
genealogy for Galileo’s new epistemology than that previously considered
by scholars.
The conflicts in which Galileo was involved erupted during a fruitful
period of innovation and interdisciplinarity, making the identification of
key terms a necessity for any discussion of the fields in which he oper-

ated. Learned men like Galileo wore many complementary hats: math-
ematician, poet, astronomer, dramatist, philosopher, artist, and scientist.
Accordingly, finding a tidy label for Galileo and his associates is problem-
atic. When Galileo moved to the Medici court in Florence in 1610, he
asked to be called a mathematician and philosopher, that is, an intellectual
who used geometric and numerical demonstrations to inform hypotheses
1
2 Introduction
about the causes of natural phenomena generally described in terms of
dialectical, logical reasoning. For that reason, I will refer to Galileo as a
mathematician, philosopher, or natural philosopher. His opponents also
distinguish the territory of these fields from astronomy, making the terms
critical to an identification of the presumed conventions of practitioners
in these disciplines.
Operating hand in hand with philosophical best practices are also
Galileo’s concerns with the role of the literary in this new paradigm. In
many ways the literary was precisely what Galileo was working against
with geometric, numerical, and logical analysis. Literary language con-
tinues to be constructed in such a way as to invite, if not necessitate,
multiple interpretations of the author’s text. The literary points to not
just one physical objective reality of the kind that Galileo was trying to
describe, but many. These include the traditions of the genre, the need to
ingratiate a princely or imperial court, establishing symbolic or allegorical
claims about society and the human condition, and presenting models
of behavior for readers. Thus, while Virgil’s verses can accurately describe
the received tradition of the movement of constellations, the language
in which the poet expresses that idea is suspect (to Galileo) owing to its
role in the much larger, subjective project that is the Aeneid. According
to Galileo’s perspective, descriptive terms were not necessarily chosen for
their direct correspondence to an object or phenomenon, but to satisfy
requirements of meter, form, and style in the service of the literary elem-
ents listed above. His preference for things, res, has been well documented
by modern criticism, but the mechanism for his success was still depend-
ent on a tradition of words, verba.1
Because the implications of the Copernican reconsideration of the place
of the Earth in the heavens were so dramatic, so too was the opposition.
Since the means of expression of these ideas were critical to the success
or failure of Galileo in intellectual debates of the period, literary models
and sources became catalysts in the acceptance of a philosophical idea.
Authors in these debates speak widely of the philosophy and poetry that
inform their theories. This is an era in which Tycho Brahe (1546–1601),
famous for his compromise solution to the Copernican–Ptolemaic
debates, could claim that the Book of Proverbs was written by “Poetae.”2
Pliny’s prose Natural History was as authoritative on matters of natural
philosophy as the verses of Virgil’s Aeneid and Lucan’s Pharsalia. For that
reason, “poetry” in Galileo’s Reading will refer to verses indicated as poetry
by the authors of these works. Epic poetry and the epic project are spe-
cifically poems depicting large-scale conflict often written with the intent