Synopses & Reviews
The Dutch telescope and the Italian scientist Galileo have long enjoyed a durable connection in the popular mind, so much so that it seems this simple glass instrument transformed a rather modest middle-aged scholar into the bold icon of the Copernican Revolution. And yet the extraordinary speed with which the telescope changed the course of Galileo's life and early modern astronomy obscures the astronomer's own curiously delayed encounter with the instrument. This book considers the lapse between the telescope's creation in The Hague in 1608 and Galileo's alleged acquaintance with such news ten months later. In an inquiry into scientific and cultural history, Eileen Reeves explores two fundamental questions of intellectual accountability: what did Galileo know of the invention of the telescope, and when did he know it?
The record suggests that Galileo, like several of his peers, initially misunderstood the basic design of the telescope. In seeking to explain the gap between the telescope's emergence and the alleged date of the astronomer's acquaintance with it, Reeves explores how and why information about the telescope was transmitted, suppressed, or misconstrued in the process. Her revised version of events, rejecting the usual explanations of silence and idleness, is a revealing account of the role that misprision, error, and preconception play in the advancement of science.
Along the way, Reeves offers a revised chronology of Galileo's life in a critical period and, more generally, shows how documents typically outside the scope of early modern natural philosophy: medieval romances, travel literature, and idle speculations, relate to two crucial events in the history of science.
Review
Eileen Reeves' book provides us with a significant effort for a better understanding of the cultural features involved in the making of the telescope. Highly original and innovative, Galileo's Glassworks paves the way for further inquiries that will deepen our knowledge of the relationship between well-established cultural models and technological innovations. Michele Camerota, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Cagliari
Review
The telescope was "invented" in 1608. But what about the events leading up to it? Galileo and his contemporaries were searching for a device with which "from an incredible distance we might read the smallest letters." Eileen Reeves tells a story of "cultural optics:" magical mirrors and political intrigue, and investigators looking for magnifying power in all the wrong places, while the solution lay in the humble spectacle lenses on their noses. An excellent read, and an important contribution to the history of science. Albert van Helden, Lynette S. Autrey Professor of History, Rice University
Review
In Galileo's time, [Reeves] reports, many scientists and amateurs were experimenting with optics and purloining each other's results in a complex game of cross-national thievery. Reeves's study is a skillful interpretative blend of legend, history and science about lenses, mirrors and their conjoining in the telescope. Publishers Weekly
Review
Scattered with intriguing nuggets. -- Publishers Weekly
Review
Fascinating...Eileen Reeves shows just how tangled with myth and legend the history of the telescope, and Galileo's pioneering use of it, actually was...Ms. Reeves recounts this complicated history with great flair. She is more interested in the missteps and the stumbles that accompanied momentous discoveries than in their scientific significance, and rightly so. The tale of Galileo's telescope is, as it turns out, an intensely human one. Sometimes, amid the intrigue and the campaigns of slander and distortion which surrounded Galileo's discoveries, it seems as if the chief obstacle to a clear-sighted gaze at the heavens lay not in better optics but in piercing dense clouds of misconception. As Ms. Reeves shows, Galileo was no isolated genius; he built on the scattered findings of his predecessors. To certain contemporaries, he appeared as a modern Prometheus, but he was also a shrewd operator, as ambitious as he was inquisitive. There was something both sublime and stubborn in his nosiness, yet in the end it led him to the stars. Eric Ormsby
Review
Reeves's splendid account is a cultural and social history that sets Galileo's telescope in the rich landscape of optical science from the Middle Ages to the modern period. New York Sun
Review
Scattered with intriguing nuggets. Kirkus Reviews
Review
and#8220;Galileoand#8217;s Idol is an engaging, original, and important work, and it makes several crucial contributions to early modern history of science. First and foremost, Wilding revises in significant ways our understanding of the two main protagonists, Galileo Galilei and Gianfrancesco Sagredo, bringing into focus a great deal of new information about their relationship to each other, to the Venetian Republic, to other natural philosophers of their day, to the bookmen whose business it was to import and export such knowledge, and to that looming exilic community, the Society of Jesus. In addition, he uses new information, much of it painstakingly reconstructed from archival materials, to argue for something other than a prescient, far-sighted, single-minded Galileoand#8212;that is, for one whose multiple strategies and various allegiances were contingent moves, not always successful and occasionally in conflict with each other. Wildingand#8217;s study brings attention to issues such as the relationship of natural philosophy to statecraft; the establishment, shaping, and distortion of authorial identity; and the relevance of book and manuscript history to our understanding of how information traveled and was consumed by a vast range of readers.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Best known as the sidekick in Galileoand#8217;s Dialogue, Sagredo comes to life here as a real person. Wildingand#8217;s careful sleuthing reveals the crucial roles that Sagredo and other intermediaries played in facilitating the flow of books and letters, of information and disinformation, from Aleppo to Venice and beyond around the turn of the seventeenth century. This book sheds brilliant new light on Galileoand#8217;s entangled efforts to gain money, reputation, and scientific knowledge.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;In Wildingand#8217;s hands, Sagredo becomes a window onto two overlapping worlds: the culture of European baroque science and that of the Venetian patriciate. In both cases we are treated to new, powerful, and surprising insights, not to mention unexpected evidence that most historians thought unavailable. Through Sagredo, we see Galileo at an angle that no previous study or biography has been able to capture, and we also watch the Venetian patriciate from the ground up, through the mundane daily practices that made that culture so unique. The locus of Galileoand#8217;s Idol is remarkably localand#8212;a few small islands in a lagoonand#8212;but the picture we see is quite different: a small insular community that is what it is because of its vast networksand#8212;not only military and commercial, but also networks of oral and printed communication. Through an emphasis on technologies of communications, Wilding demonstrates how much the Venetian patriciate and Galileoand#8217;s career were a result of mediaand#8212;both the production and circulation of books, manuscripts, notes, and gossip and their skilled and often subversive readings. Galileoand#8217;s Idol is detective work at its best, building new complex tableaux from newly found or noticed traces and indexes scattered far and wide. A must read for anybody interested in Galileo, early modern science, Venetian history, and Mediterranean studies.and#8221;
Review
andquot;Brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read.andquot;
Synopsis
Galileo and the Dutch telescope have long enjoyed a durable connection in the popular mind, transforming a rather modest middle-aged scholar into the icon of the Copernican Revolution. And yet the speed with which the telescope changed the course of Galileo's life and early modern astronomy obscures his actual delayed encounter with the instrument. This book considers the lapse between the telescope's 1608 creation in The Hague and Galileo's acquaintance with such news ten months later. Along the way, Reeves offers a revised chronology of Galileo's life in this critical period.
Synopsis
Galileoand#8217;s Idol offers a vivid depiction of Galileoand#8217;s friend, student, and patron, Gianfrancesco Sagredo (1571and#150;1620). Sagredoand#8217;s life, which has never before been studied in depth, brings to light the inextricable relationship between the production, distribution, and reception of political information and scientific knowledge.
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;
Nick Wilding uses as wide a variety of sources as possibleand#151;paintings, ornamental woodcuts, epistolary hoaxes, intercepted letters, murder case files, and othersand#151;to challenge the picture of early modern science as pious, serious, and ecumenical. Through his analysis of the figure of Sagredo, Wilding offers a fresh perspective on Galileo as well as new questions and techniques for the study of science. The result is a book that turns our attention from actors as individuals to shifting collective subjects, often operating under false identities; from a world made of sturdy print to one of frail instruments and mistranscribed manuscripts; from a complacent Europe to an emerging system of complex geopolitics and globalizing information systems; and from an epistemology based on the stolid problem of eternal truths to one generated through and in the service of playful, politically engaged, and cunning schemes.
About the Author
Nick Wilding is associate professor in the Department of History at Georgia State University.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1 The Generation and Dissolution of Images
2 Becoming a and#8220;Great Magneticall Manand#8221;
3 Drawing Weapons
4 Interceptions
5 Interconnections
6 Transalpine Messengers
7 Masks
Conclusion: Science, Intercepted
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index