Galileo's Daughter (Soba)

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love
Dava Soba, 1999
Viking Press
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780140280555


Summary
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 as 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. (From the publisher.)

(Be sure to read the Historical Background on Galileo provided by Dava Soba and Penguin Group publishers.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—1947
• Where—Bronx, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., State University of New York, Binghamton
• Awards—American Academy of Arts and letters; Book of the
   Year (UK); Le Prix Faubert du Coton (France); Il Premio del
   Mare Circeo (Italy)
• Currently—lives in East Hampton, New York

Dava Sobel is an award-winning writer and former New York Times science reporter who has contributed articles to Audobon, Discover, Life, and The New Yorker. She has also been a contributing editor to Harvard magazine, writing about scientific research and the history of science.

Ms. Sobel has maintained an interest in Galileo since childhood and, with Galileo's Daughter, fulfills her ambition to plumb the renaissance scientist's life and times, and to reveal his little-explored relationship with his daughter, Suor Maria Celeste. In researching this book, she traveled to Italy four times and translated original documents, including more than 120 letters from Suor Maria Celeste to her famed father.

Ms. Sobel's previous book, Longitude, became an international bestseller and has been translated into more than twenty foreign languages. It has won several awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award, Book of the Year in England, Le Prix Faubert du Coton in France, and Il Premio del Mare Circeo in Italy. Also, in recognition of Longitude, Ms. Sobel was made a fellow of the American Geographical Society.

In summer 2000, the A&E Network broadcast a four-hour miniseries dramatization of Longitude produced as a joint production of Granada Films and A&E. In 2002 NOVA produced a television documentary, Galileo's Battle for the Heavens, based Soba's Galileo's Daughter.

Ms. Sobel lives in East Hampton, New York. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
Retelling the story of Galileo's famous battle with the Inquisition over geocentricism, she brings it to life by concentrating on the everyday- his professional feuds, his own sincere religious beliefs and- most important- his intense relationship with his eldest daughter, a cloistered nun. The result is no textbook-sterile debate between science and religion over whether the sun revolved around a fixed Earth but an epic battle over our place in the cosmos... Galileo's Daughter is innovative history and a wonderfully told tale.
Malcom Jones - Newsweek

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.... 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.
Casey Greenfield - Salon

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.
Publishers Weekly

Sobel, author of the bestselling Longitude (1995), has elegantly translated the letters Galileo's eldest child, Virginia, wrote to him and uses them as a leitmotif to illuminate their deep mutual love, religious faith, and dedication to science. Yes, Galileo had a daughter, in fact two daughters and a son, the illegitimate offspring of a liaison with a Venetian beauty. Both daughters, considered unmarriageable because of their illegitimacy, became nuns in a convent south of Florence, not far from where Galileo had homes. But Virginia, as Suor Maria Celeste, was deeply involved in her father's life work, even transcribing his writings, while managing convent affairs and serving as baker, nurse, seamstress, and apothecary. Thus, we learn that Galileo was often confined to bed with incapacitating illnesses and that he treasured the medicines as well as the sweets and cakes his daughter provided. He was also something of a bon vivant, enjoying the wines produced by his vineyards, writing ribald and humorous verse as well as literary criticism. Indeed, his celebrated Dialogues were conceived as dramas involving three persons, with one playing the role of simpleton as foil for the two. In the end, it was the Dialogues that argued for the Copernican view that the Earth moved around the Sun, which invoked the wrath of Pope Urban VIII, who had earlier been a loyal friend and supporter of Galileo. The subsequent trial in Rome ended with Galileo's recantation and his banishment first to Siena, and then to house arrest in Florence. Sobel provides a few correctives to tradition and fills out the cast of personae who were Galileo's chief defenders and enemies. But it's the deft apposition ofthe devoted and pious letters of Suor Maria Celeste that add not only verisimilitude, but depth to the character of the writer and her father—revealed as a man of great intellect as well as religious faith and loving kindness. Alas, his letters to her are lost.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
(Don't neglect the Historical Background on Galileo provided by Dava Soba and Penguin Group publishers.)

1. Suor Maria Celeste repeatedly asks Galileo for money in her letters, often apologetically. How does the tone and assuredness of these requests change over the course of the correspondence? Do you think Galileo was generous with his daughter? Is there any evidence that he refused any of her requests? How well did she manage his affairs when he was in Rome answering to the Holy Office of the Inquisition?

2. How do you envision the day-to-day routine in San Matteo in the years that Galileo's daughters lived there (see especially chapter 11)? Which of its deprivations were most trying for Suor Maria Celeste and her sisters in faith? How did a woman who never left the convent become so well-versed in the affairs of the world?

3. Under pressure from religious groups, the Kansas State Board of Education decided in 1999 to remove evolution and the big bang theory from the state-mandated curriculum. The move was opposed by a group named FLAT (Families for Learning Accurate Theories), a reference to the idea that the earth must be flat. Discuss the conflict between science and religion in Galileo's lifetime and ours. How have religious beliefs affected public policy concerning genetic engineering, cloning, and education?

4. Galileo's correspondence with his daughter reveals the value of many items in Renaissance Florence, from wheat and wine to thread and wedding dresses to Vincenzio's monthly allowance. Which were relatively costly, which inexpensive? How did their price compare to the value of a good farm, Galileo's first salary as a math professor, his rent in Bellosguardo and Arcetri, and the cost of a private room in the convent?

5. Why did Pope Urban VIII, once Galileo's ally, ultimately turn against him? How did external factors (the Thirty Years' War, alliances with France and Spain) affect his relationship with the scientist?

6. Galileo seems to have suffered from hernias, gout, and glaucoma. His elder daughter was plagued by headaches and tooth decay, and the younger may well have experienced major depression. How were these medical illnesses regarded during their lifetimes? What kind of home remedies did they use? How were doctors and surgeons regarded by the public at large and by Galileo?

7. The bubonic plague has been known for at least 3,000 years, and in the Middle Ages it depopulated entire cities. How did it touch the lives of Galileo and his family? Today plague still occurs in remote parts of Asia, Africa, South America, and even parts of the United States, but most cases can be treated with timely doses of antibiotics. What sorts of remedies—chemical, herbal, and religious—did Galileo and his daughters use to ward it off?

8. Galileo was famously wrong in his explanation of what causes tides. He thought, in essence, that the spinning of the earth caused the waters to slosh about their basins. Why did he dismiss the observation of his contemporary Johannes Kepler that the tides were related to the movements of the moon?

9. How do you think Galileo would react to the news that Pope John Paul II had called for a reexamination of his affair?

10. Given the suggestion in one of Suor Maria Celeste's letters that she wrote out the final manuscript for Galileo's Dialogue, how do you imagine the two of them might have worked together? How do you think each of them expected the final product to be received?

11. Viewed in this age of televised court cases, what did you think of the legal process of Galileo's trial?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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