I learned of the book Galileo’s Daughter from the anniversary list of books published by Penguin. It was written by Dava Sobel who also wrote the book Longitude about the man who invented a clock that sailors could use at sea to determine their east-west position. I read that book several years ago. We also visited the Old Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England in 2004. We saw the ball drop at exactly one p.m. and we also saw some of the clocks mentioned in Longitude. Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter is actually about both Galileo and his daughter, Suor Maria Celeste, a nun confined to her convent in a small Italian village. The source material for much of the book is letters from Suor Marie Celeste to her father and the text includes many direct translations of these letters. The letters back from Galileo to his daughter were likely destroyed so all Sobel had was the one-way conversation along with other sources on Galileo such as Vatican records and Galileo’s own published writings.
The book Galileo’s Daughter looked longer than it was because it was printed on thick old-looking paper in fairly large type, though not quite “blind edition.” There are also many illustrations of people and things mentioned in the text. The book is separated into several parts, each roughly named after where Galileo lived at the time (e.g. Siena). Each part is separated into several chapters each usually named with a quote from a letter that appears in that chapter. Each part starts with a page with a copy of a painting of Galileo, usually from the time period or depicting it such as Galileo on trial at the Vatican or Galileo very old and almost blind working with a young assistant. The book covers all of Galileo’s life, but focuses primarily on the time period of his daughter’s correspondence. The main event covered is his trial for heresy. Like Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter occasionally got a bit dry and technical, but there was just enough interest in the people to keep me reading and I’m glad I did.
Galileo and Suor (Italian for sister) Maria Celeste lived in a time when traditional and religious beliefs had very high importance. The Catholic Church had a lot of power. Scientific ideas and theories were only beginning to gain traction. People believed that the sun and everything else rotated around the earth as God intended it. That was obvious since they figured, “If the Earth rotated and revolved, then a ball tossed into the air would not fall right back into one’s hands but land hundreds of feet away, birds in flight might lose their way to their nests, and all humanity suffer dizzy spells from the daily spinning of the global carousel at 1,000 miles per hour” (p. 51). When I think about it, we say “sunrise” and “sunset” even though the sun does not travel across the sky. The earth rotates. In Galileo’s time, one Catholic Church objection to the sun-centered universe was the story of how God made the sun stand still so Joshua could continue fighting the battle. A non-astronomy belief more easily disproved by science was that “(Andreas) Vesalius…had staged sensational popular demonstrations showing the male and female skeletons to contain the same number of ribs, thus defying the widespread belief, based on the Book of Genesis, that men came one rib short” (p. 173). Another religious custom I learned about that I think is still observed today is that new Popes can choose for a name either their own Christian name or the name of any pope who preceded them except Peter that was forbidden by tradition.
Sobel goes into detail about the science, both theorized by Galileo and eventually determined by later scientists. She includes an allusion to her earlier book when she describes how “Galileo confided himself for the next several years to the safe application of his great discoveries, such as using the moons of Jupiter to solve the problem of finding longitude at sea—especially as success might win him the lucrative prize offered by the King of Spain” (p. 81). Galileo also works on the problem of recasting the giant bell for Archbishop Piccolomini’s cathedral’s campanile. One of Galileo’s later books, Two New Sciences, contained “a geometric proof showing why the forty-five degree angle surpasses all others—because the parabola thus described has the greatest possible amplitude, and therefore the shot carries the farthest” (p. 337). The book mentions comets and that there was no close-up view of a comet until 1986 when several spacecraft observed Halley ’s Comet at its closest to the sun. I remember seeing it in the sky in late 1985 or early 1986. At one point, it was in between two stars.
Some health sciences are described in the book since Galileo suffered from various ailments. His “early career teaching astronomy to medical students had familiarized him with astrology since doctors needed to cast horoscopes to see what the stars foretold of patients’ lives, as an aid to diagnosis and treatment, as well as to ascertain reasons for particular illnesses and determine the most propitious times for mixing medications” (p. 29). Galileo himself had a bout of incapacitating illness in 1615 possibly aggravated by the pressures of the church trying to suppress his work at that time. Perhaps he suffered from digestive ailment because “Suor Maria Celeste regularly sent him her handmade papal pills, which contained dried rhubard (a natural laxative)” (p. 325).
Related to health, the book includes several references to food both what they ate and mentioned in their writing. When writing about a nova, Galileo has the hero call it either quintessence or polenta. Suor Maria Celeste grew many foods in her garden to send to her father such as capers and chickpeas. In return, Galileo brought her treats from outside the convent “such as creamy white egg-shaped lumps of mozzarella cheese made from water buffalo’s milk” (p. 318). For a sick nun in her convent, Suor Maria Celeste and the other nuns make soup with boiling broth and dried wild asparagus.
As with most books I read, I came across some words that were new to me. In his writings, Galileo decried “the immutability of the heavens, the farrago of the celestial sphere, and the immobility of the earth” (p. 56). Per my Random House dictionary, farrago is a confusing mixture or jumble. When writing of his father, Vincenzio Galilei mixed his memories with hagiography or the lives of the saints. In the acknowledgement section of the book, Dava Sobel sincerely thanked Stephen Sobel for the lute misic and calendrics. This last word wasn’t in my Random House dictionary. Online I found it defined as, “of, relating to, characteristic of, or used in the calendar.” The book also taught me a word origin. Several plagues of disease spread through the areas where Galileo and his daughter live. “The doge’s council, seeking to isolate visitors form the Orient, had decided on the duration of forty days—quaranta giorni in Italian, from which the word quarantine is derived—by selecting the same period of time that Christ sequestered himself in the wilderness” (p. 202).
The book has a bit of subtle humor that’s unintentional. In the spring of 1613 Galileo’s friend Cesi published Galileo’s correspondence with Welser as History and Demonstrations Concerning Sunspots and the Phenomena. This publication retained all the chitchat about Welser’s gout and Galileo’s miscellaneous infirmities. Later Galileo got into a bit of a dispute via correspondence with Father Grassi. When retaliating again later in his turn, Grassi accidentally on purpose referred to Galileo’s book (Il Saggiatore or The Assayer) as “Assaggiatore, or Winetaster—to imply that Galileo, a notorious lover of good wine, had been drinking when he wrote The Assayer” (p. 91).
There are several apartment complexes in the City West area just west of Downtown L.A. and north of the 101 that were built by Geoff Palmer within the last ten years. They are resort-style luxury apartments that have very high rents. The theme is Italian architecture and they have Italian names. To my delight, all four of the names are mentioned in Galileo’s Daughter. Early on Galileo attended a banquet hosted by the Grand Duke de Medici and Don Paolo Giordano [Orsini]. The book mentions how the nervous Tuscan Ambassador, Piero Guicciardini, dreaded the cost of Galileo’s theory that the tides proved that the earth rotates. Galileo also “presented his manuscript on the tides to one of the newest cardinals in Rome, twenty-two-year-old Alessandro Orsini, a cousin of Grand Duke Cosimo (de’Medici)” (p. 75). Much later, Galileo’s book The Dialogue…is viewed by the Master of the Sacred Place (the censor) who also has his associate, Father Visconti, view it. Maybe Geoff Palmer’s next development will be called the Galileo.
I liked that the book was somewhat entertaining and very edifying at the same time. I learned a lot. Galileo was born in 1564 (February 15), the same year as William Shakespeare (April 23) and the year during which Michelangelo Buonanati died (February 18). Galileo died on January 8, 1548, the same year as when Isaac Newton was born on December 25. I thought it was slightly amusing that Pope Urban VIII changed Galileo’s place of imprisonment to Arcetri, his hometown—“not so much to commute his sentence as to make it harsher, since the ambience of (the initial place) Siena, approached that of an exclusive salon” (p. 341). After Galileo died and was buried, a student of his spent his life trying to get him moved to a place with a memorial more worthy of his accomplishments. After many years of lobbying and fundraising, and even after the student died, his goal was finally realized. The occasion of moving Galileo’s remains from his original tomb under the campanile of San Croce to the monument designed for him in the same church “also saw the ritual removal of a single vertebra from the venerated scientist, along with three fingers of his right hand and a tooth—and surely would have included the preservation of his brain as well, if by some miracle that organ had still survived” (p. 366).
Galileo’s Daughter tells a story of science and religion, and of family. In a way Galileo and his daughter represented science and religion and yet they were very close and supported each other. That’s the closeness Galileo wanted between his science and religion. He believed that if the Catholic Church did not accept his findings, others would and the church would be hurt. Still, he walked a very fine line trying to bring out the truth of his science while respecting his church. His daughter died young after helping him through his stressful trial and punishment from the church, but thanks to Sobel, she lives on in her letters. I now think of both Galileo and his daughter when I see the sun appear to rise or set.
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