Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love

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Everyone knows that Galileo Galilei dropped cannonballs off the leaning tower of Pisa, developed the first reliable telescope, and was convicted by the Inquisition for holding a heretical belief--that the earth revolved around the sun. But did you know he had a daughter? In Galileo's Daughter, Dava Sobel (author of the bestselling Longitude) tells the story of the famous scientist and his illegitimate daughter, Sister Maria Celeste. Sobel bases her book on 124 surviving letters to the scientist from the nun, whom Galileo described as "a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and tenderly attached to me." Their loving correspondence revealed much about their world: the agonies of the bubonic plague, the hardships of monastic life, even Galileo's occasional forgetfulness ("The little basket, which I sent you recently with several pastries, is not mine, and therefore I wish you to return it to me").

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Master Mind

--> Deemed by Albert Einstein to be "the father of modern physics...of modern science altogether," the man who dropped cannonballs from the Tower or Pisa, improved the telescope to discover the moons of Jupiter, and defended Nicolaus Copernicus's theory of the Earth's orbit was, in his day, considered a heretic.

Dava Sobel, the author of Longitude, the story of John Harrison's invention of the chronometer, returns with Galileo's Daughter, a fascinating biography that gives an intimate look at the life of Galileo through the 124 letters written by his eldest daughter, Virginia, published in translation for the first time from the Italian. Virginia was one of Galileo's three children born out of wedlock. Together with her depressive younger sister, she was placed in the Convent of San Matteo near Galileo's Florence home at the age of 13, where she took the name Suor Maria Celeste, in tribute to her father's work. Galileo recognized in Virginia an "exquisite mind," and she, in turn recognized the depth of her father's faith in Catholicism and proved to be an unwavering source of loyalty, support, comfort, and strength for him when he was brought to trial before the Holy Office of the Inquisition in 1633.

Born in Pisa on February 15, 1564, to a mathematician and the daughter of cloth merchants, Galileo betrayed his father's wishes to become a doctor and instead studied mathematics and philosophy, for he believed that "philosophy is written in this grand book the universe...but the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and to read the alphabet in which it is composed...mathematics." He began his career teaching at the University of Pisa and the University of Padua until he eventually procured the patronage of the Medici Grand Dukes.

Galileo's first commercial invention was the geometric and military compass in 1597, which functioned as an early pocket calculator. But the invention that would announce him to the world came ten years later, when he improved the Dutch spyglass, augmenting the power of the lens manifold times to focus the instrument on the moon and the stars. This reinvented telescope eventually enabled Galileo to discover four of Jupiter's moons, which he documented in his book, The Starry Messenger. His next book, Discourse on Bodies that Stay Atop Water or Move Within It, both challenged Aristotelian physics and announced the presence of sunspots, angering his colleagues and beginning his troubled future.

Of course, the real problems for Galileo began when he sought to publish Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, in which he began to establish proof of Copernicus's theory that the Earth revolves around the sun. While the bubonic plague was claiming lives throughout Europe and the Thirty Years' War was raging, Pope Urban VIII found Galileo's work most threatening. The pope believed that the motions of the heavenly bodies were the domain of the Holy Fathers of the Church and not of science or philosophy, and he found Galileo to be the greatest enemy of the Catholic Church since Martin Luther. The pope betrayed his former friend further when he forced a sickly Galileo to endure the grueling trials before the Inquisition, threatening him with torture and forcing him to live under house arrest for the remainder of his life.

Throughout his life, and especially during the trials, Suor Maria Celeste served her infamous father, whom she addressed as Lord Father, as she would a patron saint. She cared for her him from the convent, whose grounds she never left, through her constant letters, which were sent along with baskets carrying shirts she cleaned and mended for him, confectioneries and health tonics she prepared, and legible, ornate transcriptions of his notes as she prepared his final manuscripts. As these letters reveal, though she was profoundly dedicated to her calling, her devotion to her father, and his love and appreciation for her, was steadfast. She never once doubted his faith or his controversial scientific discoveries. They worried for one another during their frequent illnesses, offered heartfelt condolences when colleagues or relatives passed away. His daughter remained Galileo's constant reader and companion until her death of dysentery at age 27. Though she kept all of his correspondence, his letters have disappeared, likely to have been destroyed by the Mother Abbess of the convent.

By turns a moving portrait of the loving relationship between a father and daughter, a riveting chronicle of one of the most intensive battles between scientific truth and religious belief, and a fresh, revelatory biography of one of the most magnificent minds the world has ever known, Galileo's Daughter is a masterful weaving of the lives of the mind, the body, and the soul.

—Kera Bolonik

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The son of a musician, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) tried at first to enter a monastery before engaging the skills that made him the foremost scientist of his day. Though he never left Italy, his inventions and discoveries were heralded around the world. Most sensationally, his telescopes allowed him to reveal a new reality in the heavens and to reinforce the astounding argument that the Earth moves around the Sun. For this belief, he was brought before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, accused of heresy, and forced to spend his last years under house arrest. Of Galileo's three illegitimate children, the eldest best mirrored his own brilliance, industry, and sensibility, and by virtue of these qualities became his confidante. Born Virginia in 1600, she was thirteen when Galileo placed her in a convent near him in Florence, where she took the most appropriate name of Suor Maria Celeste. Her loving support, which Galileo repaid in kind, proved to be her father's greatest source of strength throughout his most productive and tumultuous years. Her presence, through letters which Sobel has translated from their original Italian and woven into the narrative, graces her father's life now as it did then. Galileo's Daughter dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishment of a mythic figure whose seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion. Moving between Galileo's grand public life and Maria Celeste's sequestered world, Sobel illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during the pivotal era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was being overturned.

SYNOPSIS

Inspired by her long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of his daughter, which Sobel has translated into English for the first time, Galileo's Daughter is a book of great originality and power, a biography unlike any ever written on Galileo. Sobel, the author of the bestseller Longitude, brings Galileo to life as never before—boldly compelled to explain the truths he discovered, human in his frailties and faith, devoted to family, especially to his eldest daughter.

The voices of Galileo and his daughter, Suor Maria Celeste, echo down the centuries through letters and writings, which Sobel masterfully weaves into her narrative, building toward the crescendo of history's most dramatic collision between science and religion. In the process, she illuminates an entire era, when the flamboyant Medici grand dukes became Galileo's patrons, when the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and prayer was the most effective medicine, when the Thirty Years' War tipped fortunes across Europe, and when one man fought, through his trial and betrayal by his former friend, Pope Urban VIII, to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed thorough his telescope. An unforgettable story, Galileo's Daughter is a stunning achievement. With forty black-and-white illustrations.

FROM THE CRITICS

Casey Greenfield - Salon

It's easy to be a little skeptical about the idea behind Dava Sobel's new book. It's built on Sobel's translation (the first into English) of 124 letters written to Galileo Galilei, the Renaissance Italian philosopher, mathematician and physicist, by his illegitimate daughter Virginia. Galileo's letters to her have not survived; they are presumed to have been destroyed by the nuns at her convent. But Sobel, author of the 1995 bestseller Longitude, showing once again her keen eye for the compelling stories that simmer beneath great discoveries, turns this seemingly meager material into genuine historical drama.

That Galileo even had a daughter may come as a surprise to many readers. And indeed, he never married. But in an affair with Marina Gamba of Venice he fathered a son, Vincenzio, and two daughters, Virginia and Livia. The daughters were considered unfit for marriage because of their illegitimacy and were placed in convents. Virginia, the eldest, took vows as Sister Maria Celeste, a name she chose in part out of respect for her father's infatuation with the stars.

From her letters, it's difficult to tell much about her personality, but they do show a loving and protective rapport with her father. "Dearest lord father," reads a typical passage in a 1633 letter, "I wanted to write to you now, to tell you I partake in your torments, so as to make them lighter for you to bear: I have given no hint of these difficulties to anyone else, wanting to keep the unpleasant news to myself, and to speak to the others only of your pleasures and satisfactions." The father and daughter corresponded regularly throughout her adult life; her death at 34 tormented him until his own death nine years later.

As interesting as Sister Maria Celeste's letters are, Sobel's true protagonist is Galileo himself. For his belief in Copernicus' finding that the Earth moves around the sun, and not the other way around, Galileo was accused of heresy by the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Rome. He was banished to Siena and eventually put under house arrest in Florence, despite his heartrending public disavowal of his private beliefs: "The falsity of the Copernican system must not on any account be doubted," Galileo wrote in 1641, facing threats of excommunication, "especially by us Catholics, who have the irrefragable authority of Holy Scripture interpreted by the greatest masters in theology, whose agreement renders us certain of the stability of the Earth and the mobility of the Sun around it."

Sobel intersperses factual descriptions of the scientist's life and work with passages from Maria Celeste's letters. As the social burdens he bore as a heretic and outcast increased, so did his bodily afflictions; Maria Celeste's concern for these chronic infirmities -- gout, hernia and ocular infections, among other ailments -- runs as a leitmotif through her letters. Through this focus on his physical troubles, she is able to express a more daring support for him in his struggles with church and state officials.

The book is most remarkable for its graceful combination of scholarly integrity and rhapsodic tone. Sobel imbues this potentially dry, academic story with the language and cadence of oral storytelling, and she gives it all the dramatic suspense that narrative demands.

She conveys also a timeless caution against the dangers of forest-for-the-trees myopia. As she tells a story about how difficult it was for many people to accept the Earth's place in the solar system, she suggests a simple explanation for why people so often fail to understand their own place in the world: "As participants in the Earth's activity, people cannot observe their own rotation, which is so deeply embedded in terrestrial existence as to have become insensible."

Galileo's Daughter makes us pause and consider other aspects of our existence of which we may be insensible, and that we should perhaps regard with slightly less certainty.

Newsweek

Sobel finds a new way to celebrate history's intellectual heroes.

Publishers Weekly

Despite its title, this impressive book proves to be less the story of Galileo's elder daughter, the oldest of his three illegitimate children, and more the story of Galileo himself and his trial before the Inquisition for arguing that Earth moves around the Sun. That familiar tale is given a new slant by Sobel's translation--for the first time into English--of the 124 surviving letters to Galileo by his daughter, Suor Maria Celeste, a Clarisse nun who died at age 33; his letters to her are lost, presumably destroyed by Maria Celeste's convent after her death. Her letters may not in themselves justify a book; they are devout, full of pious love for the father she addresses as "Sire," only rarely offering information or insight. But Sobel uses them as the accompaniment to, rather than the core of, her story, sounding the element of faith and piety so often missing in other retellings of Galileo's story. For Sobel shows that, in renouncing his discoveries, Galileo acted not just to save his skin but also out of a genuine need to align himself with his church. With impressive skill and economy, she portrays the social and psychological forces at work in Galileo's trial, particularly the political pressures of the Thirty Years' War, and the passage of the plague through Italy, which cut off travel between Florence, where Galileo lived, and Rome, the seat of the Pope and the Inquisition, delaying Galileo's appearance there and giving his enemies time to conspire. In a particularly memorable way, Sobel vivifies the hard life of the "Poor Clares," who lived in such abject poverty and seclusion that many were driven mad by their confinement. It's a wholly involving tale, a worthy follow-up (after four years) to Sobel's surprise bestseller, Longitude. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Like Sobel's best-selling Longtitude, this is a compelling and gracefully written science history, retelling the familiar story of Galileo's battle with the Roman Catholic Church through the letters of his daughter, a cloistered nun. What results is a new view of the scientist. (LJ 10/1/99) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

The author of Longitude (1995) presents a biography of the man Einstein called the father of modern physics, and the Church long branded a heretic, as revealed through the newly translated letters of his confidante daughter. Includes b&w illustrations of featured personalities, locales, and scientific paraphernalia, and a chronology demonstrating Galileo's legacy through the present. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Read all 8 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

From the Author

The seventeenth century draws me and holds me because it embraces the most stunning reversal in perception ever to have jarred intelligent thought: We are not the center of the universe. The immobility of our world is an illusion. We spin. We speed through space, circling the Sun on our own wandering star.

Although the Polish cleric Nicolaus Copernicus had suggested this notion in 1543, it remained the quiet conjecture of scholars for more than sixty years before Galileo brought the Sun-centered universe to the attention of the general public. Beginning in 1609, his telescopic discoveries afforded the first tentative evidence in support of overturning the world order. In no time, Galileo the man became identified with the unpopular new paradigm, so that he attracted not only followers who lauded his insights, but also jealous competitors who vied with him for fame, outraged philosophers who questioned his veracity, and angry churchmen who accused him of heresy. Because, in the seventeenth century, Galileo's new cosmos was not simply a matter of astronomy, but appeared to violate an article of faith.

The Bible spoke specifically to this issue. The Psalms, for example, noted how God had "fixed the Earth upon its foundation, not to be moved forever." And surely the Sun must have been moving through space when Joshua entreated it to stand still.

A devout Catholic all his life, Galileo entertained these objections seriously. He believed in the absolute truth of the Bible, but he also believed in the fallacy of human interpretation of Holy Writ. Even the simplest sounding passages might hold the most hidden meanings. Thus, wherever the findings of astronomy appeared to contradict the teachings of Scripture, Galileo maintained, someone must have misconstrued the Biblical text.

The Bible was a book about how to go to Heaven, Galileo believed, not how the heavens go. Why would anyone turn to the Word of God to study astronomy when the Works of God stood open to scrutiny for that very purpose?

As enlightened as his viewpoint was -- indeed it became the official position of the Catholic Church in 1893 -- Galileo argued as a layman in an era of religious upheaval. The Council of Trent, after deliberating for two decades in response to the Protestant Reformation, in 1546 had issued a formal profession of faith that ceded Biblical interpretation to the Holy Fathers of the Church.

Galileo's championing of the Copernican system backfired miserably. In 1616, a formal Edict issued by the Holy Congregation of the Index declared the Sun-centered universe "false and contrary to Holy Scripture." And in 1633, Galileo stood trial before the Roman Inquisition for his persistent defense of the banned ideas, earning his enduring reputation as an enemy of church.

The rift between science and religion that we trace to the seventeenth century -- and specifically to the figure of Galileo -- opened in spite of him, not at any urging of his own. As the long-neglected letters of his daughter, a cloistered nun, have enabled me to show in my new book, Galileo's Daughter, Galileo endeavored always to conform his duty as a scientist with the destiny of his soul. The shift in perception that eventually rocked the world from complacency was for him the natural consequence of God's true omnipotence.