In this original and well-researched book, Anna-Luna Post invites us to consider not so much the history of Galileo’s reputation, but the way he and his contemporaries thought about, judged and deployed fame. If scientific knowledge is social, she asks, how can we move beyond the relatively static categories traditionally deployed by historians of science to describe actors (class, gender, race and so on), and incorporate, rather, the rich, fluid, ambiguous symbolic resources that constitute social relations? More concretely: how is fame not just something that happened to Galileo, but a resource he used while making his discoveries and arguments? How did his detractors understand and attack his fame, recasting it as vainglory, pride, arrogance? What media enabled fame and infamy? Who else benefited from its production? And how could it be channelled, diverted or destroyed?
The result is an interesting book, in which Galileo’s well-analysed debates are reread as being as much about the nature of fame as about the cosmos. Skirmishes over the authorship and inventorship of the geometric and military compass here become mechanisms whereby Galileo could blare his unblemished honour to a world largely unaware of his existence (a Medici receipt from 1608 refers to him as ‘Giulio’). Despite his protracted protestations, the early whiff of plagiarism clung to Galileo, lingering on through his adoption and adaptation of the telescope and poisoning later debates too. To rise above this miasma, Galileo had to become, on title pages, and in dedicatory poems, courtrooms and courts, not only credible, but also famous. Fame was not the product of science, but its enabling condition, a key resource that Post argues has hitherto not been recognized or analysed as a powerful actor category.
The introduction takes us through the iconography of fame in early modern prints. Most histories of fame, Post writes, ascribe its rise to the media revolutions of industrialization, but she illustrates its earlier presence, especially through the iconography of Fama herself. Post’s introduction is more a literature review than a thick description, and the dense discursive gardens of dictionaries or commonplace books, alba amicorum or medal cabinets are left untended and unharvested, and we are swiftly whelmed instead by the figure of Galileo himself. Here Post is an attentive and close reader, noticing details that have eluded other scholars and unpacking the surprising semantic range of early modern fame with care and skill: we are led through Galileo’s understanding of legal phrases such as publica voce et fama (common repute), shown the disconcertingly constant systems of academic reputation and its exploitation by competing universities, and walked through the distressingly familiar deployment of stereotypes, which were used by some to read Galileo’s Florentineness as ‘cunning’, a vice and virtue still heard today (Chapters 1, 2). But the trawl net of fame lets other more devious fish escape: Galileo’s early pseudonymous publications, which surely complicate the construction of fame, are skipped over, as is one enemy’s scurrilous account from 1610 of Galileo as syphilitic, gouty and mentally ill. Galileo’s early infamy itself seems almost famous, but we’re not really provided with comparative models of what fame looked like, ideally or practically, for other subjects, so it’s hard to tell whether Galileo is playing a game or making one up.
Post’s account builds on the work of many scholars, most notably Mario Biagioli, but lacks his inimitable theoretical agility and heft. A large amount of recent secondary literature in many languages is generously digested, and this carries us to a fine account, in Chapter 4, of the sermons of Raffaelo dell Colombe, denouncing Galileo even before the Sidereus Nuncius, which have received little anglophone attention since their rediscovery by Luigi Guerrini.
We are told early on that this is not a biography of Galileo, but enough standard biographical material is included to make the book accessible to non-specialists. The work is organized both conceptually and chronologically, and occasionally the compromise between these two principles homogenizes source selection. There’s a methodological problem lurking here: fame must be understood through the study of aura’s reception, and we’re told, somewhat blandly, in the Epilogue, that ‘Galileo meant different things to different people’ (p. 174), but the reliance on the National Edition of the Works of Galileo means that we don’t get to see reception in action much beyond correspondence, published tracts and a few portraits. Some excellent work on the surprising diversity amongst disparate readerships of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius and his Discorsi has been done, but those studies are not taken as models to trace the refractions of Galileo’s projected image as these rays ricocheted through the cultural catoptrics of early modernity. Such processes are cumulative, not sequential, but the longevity required of fame is undercut by the discrete exchanges described here. We are shown some interesting vignettes of post-mortem commemoratory strategies, but the many dangerous attempts to reassemble Galileo’s textual corpus, from Manolessi’s 1656 Opere on, are not considered, even though such ventures, with their inclusion of biographies, were the central organs by which ‘Galileo’ came into being. Still, this is an innovative and fresh approach to the historical construction of scientific iconicity, which should stimulate research in many fields.
In her Epilogue, Post argues that the case study of Galileo’s fame shows ‘the fraught and fragmented nature of the public sphere as it developed’ (p.177), and that some of our current science wars may be the direct products of these early conflicts. The long history of deployments of Galileo as both a maverick and a patron saint makes this book both timely and relevant.
