The breakdown of Galileo’s Roman network: Crisis and community, ca. 1633

Abstract

Rome has long been central to the story of Galileo's life and scientific work. Through an analysis of the metadata of Galileo's surviving letters, combined with a close reading of the letters themselves, we discuss how Galileo used correspondence to build a Roman network. Galileo initially assembled this network around the members of the Lincean Academy, a few carefully nurtured relationships with important ecclesiastics, and the expertise of well positioned Tuscan diplomats in the Eternal City. However, an analysis of Galileo's correspondence in the aftermath of the trial of 1633 provides us with a unique opportunity to interrogate how his altered circumstances transformed his social relations. Forced to confront the limitations on his activities imposed by Catholic censure and house arrest, Galileo experienced the effects of these restrictions in his relationships with others and especially in his plans for publication. In the years following 1633, Galileo turned his epistolary attention north to the Veneto and to Paris in order to publish his Two New Sciences. While Galileo's Lincean network and papal contacts in Rome were defunct after 1633, we see how Rome remained important to him as the site of a number of Roman disciples who would continue his intellectual project long after his own death.

Shattering crystal with crystal: Galileo’s rhetoric, lenses, and the epistemology of metaphor

“…92 These texts were intended for audiences beyond their titular addressees, and the surviving Roman correspondence from this period shows the pathways by which these letters moved through Galileo's Roman network. 93 Galileo's opening statement that he thought people following these conversations in Rome would already have heard a version of his response to Welser may not have been literal, but it indicates the degree to which these letters were circulating as treatises in and of themselves. Communities of readers accessed these texts at the level of natural philosophical treatises and also as social documents meant to bolster the credibility of the scientific claims by situating themselves as part of an intellectual network.…”

A long history of breakdowns: A historiographical review

“…As the recent literature on go-betweens has shown, most concentrated knowledge exchanges survived only as long as a particular agent, such as Edward Bancroft or James Dinwiddie, was active and present on a site (Schaffer et al, 2009). As Findlen and Marcus' (2017) article in this issue exemplifies, it makes perfect sense for early modern studies to understand the growth, fluctuation and dispersion of networks as conditioned by the actions and lifespan of one charismatic figure, such as Galileo.…”

“…What happens when scientific networks break down? If the Catholic Church condemns you to house arrest in Florence, how can you, Galileo, manage to remain in touch with your scholarly contacts locally, in Rome, and abroad (Findlen and Marcus, 2017)? Or, if you are a 21st-century lab scientist, and your collaborative project falls apart over the interpretation of your results, how do you recalibrate the work of your research team, find new partners, and branch in new directions (Lakoff, 2017)?…”