Crafting Early Modern Readers: Galileo and His Interlocutors

Rhetoric and Psychology

“…In his Dialogo dei massimi sistemi (1632), Galileo famously structured his cosmological ideas in a debate between three personae, whose different habits of mind and modes of speaking evolve similarly to characters in a stage play. Moreover, the Dialogo makes ample use of frontispieces, quotations from other literature incorporated into the dialogue, instruments and illustrations, and different type fonts (Johns 1998;Moss 2003;Biagioli 2006;Reeves 2008;Hall 2017). A few decades earlier, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) had combined the genre of the erudite dialogue with Lucian's Satires and the modes of contemporary mannerist theater in order to represent the infinite universe to the finite human mind (Gatti 1999).…”