Reviews
Reviewed work(s): Galileo’s Reading. Crystal Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. vi + 250 pp. $95. Erminia Ardissino
University of Turin
Scholars of Galileo and the epistemological change of modern science have always recognized that he not only created a new form of scientific writing, but was also capable of skillfully manipulating the argumentative techniques and linguistic devices of rhetoric. Hall’s totally new approach to these issues answers many questions and clearly explains Galileo’s debt to the literary works that shaped his early education and nourished the rest of his life. The basic element for such a study could certainly be the catalogue of Galileo’s library published by Antonio Favaro more than a century ago, but Hall’s inquiry goes far beyond this list by dealing with the texts themselves. She sees the books as mines from which Galileo could extract forms and phrasings, and is concerned with the reading strategies, attitudes toward commentary, critical approaches, and writing resources of the time. Her essay is above all a study of the method of reading and writing, not only that of Galileo, but also that of his opponents and followers.
It is impossible to summarize the richness and variety of this book in just a few lines. Poetry, philosophy, and science are intertwined in order to define the way in which physical objects meet the words that Galileo and his contemporaries used to describe them in Italian or Latin. The main genre considered in the book is epic poetry, which was much appreciated by Galileo. His father and his contemporaries used epic poetry because it was seen as providing
authoritative representations of the world and natural phenomena, and because poetry was everywhere in the lives of these thinkers and their readers. Galileo’s considerazioni on Ariosto and Tasso not only mirror his literary tastes, but constitute linguistic sources for philosophical argument because the poets’ verses were incorporated into his
discussions. Hall starts by observing the use of epic vocabulary in Galileo’s publications concerning his lunar
observations, in the dialogues written under pseudonyms, in the proposed second edition of the Starry Messenger, and in the postille to his detractors’ works; it continues with the Assayer and the dialogues. She outlines a method of reading natural-philosophical treatises that is similar to that used for literary criticism. The scrupulous nature of her analyses even allows her to identify a quotation from Tasso’s poem, never previously recognized.
However, her most brilliant contribution is her comparison of Galileo’s scientific writing with that of Spanish novels, especially Cervantes’s Don Quixote, an Italian translation of which was included in Galileo’s library. Cervantes’s satirical representation of an outdated chivalric world has much in common with Galileo’s battle against the old Aristotelian view of the validity of a “world on paper” and of the fioretti poetici. The key question for both is the relationship between res and verba, which eventually means forging a new philosophy that better relies on the one and the other, overcoming the opposition of literary culture and the world of the physical senses. “By mapping the striking similarities between the concerns of the two texts [the novel and the Assayer],” it can be seen “how Galileo adopts a literary cultural methodology to create a space for his philosophical ideals and their representatives” (102). The only difference is that Quixote travels the ways of the world in order to verify that poems are real, while the new
philosophers travel to learn from the unpredictable variety of the things displayed for their curiosity (the story of the researcher of sounds in the Assayer is paradigmatic).
Literary scholars and historians of science both have a lot to learn from this book, which is soundly based on a rich study of primary and secondary sources. I would say that the only neglected aspect is the role of the members of the Accademia dei Lincei, especially of Federico Cesi, who played an important role in checking and editing some of Galileo’s masterpieces and suggesting quotations.
