In this eye-opening book, Renée Raphael studies readers’ responses to Two New Sciences (1638), which Galileo published under house arrest. In it, Galileo daringly used the three personas and four-day structure of his prohibited 1632 Dialogue to introduce a conversation about a treatise by an academician (Galileo). Raphael’s book probes a cohort of real interlocutors in dialogue with Two New Sciences, and sometimes with one another.
The reputation of Two New Sciences has been prospective. The standard account of the book’s reception treats the self-proclaimed new sciences unevenly. Privileging conceptual sequence over the responses of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century readers, it overshadows the strength of materials (days 1–2) with the science of motion (days 3–4), which is taken to amplify the Dialogue’s Copernican agenda and to culminate in Isaac Newton’s Principia. Raphael’s research changes all this by evaluating the significance of Two New Sciences through the reactions of the first two generations of readers (Newton is missing: he encountered this material at second hand). Raphael’s quarry is elusive. Unlike scholarly reviews, most responses to books are silent or oral. The next best hope for historians lies in pen marks: underlining and other ambiguous signs, marginal annotations, chatty letters to friends and colleagues, and reading notes and commentaries.
Raphael uses such clues to show that Galileo’s assertions of novelty in Two New Sciences persuaded more historians of science than early readers, who treated his claims more critically. His readers’ use of well-established sixteenth-century and earlier approaches to texts also demonstrates both their appropriation of the book for their own purposes and the endurance of traditional textual and reading techniques.
Chapter 1 treats anonymous heavy annotations probably by Giovanni Battista Baliani, a life-long correspondent of Galileo’s. Baliani’s known writings seem to reinforce the classical historiography, whose “‘ideal’ reader” (35) sees Two New Sciences as an extension of the Dialogue and treats it experimentally rather than textually. But the anonymous notes, which Raphael cautiously ascribes to “Pseudo-Baliani,” show more interest in textual comparison and mathematics than in experimental verification, and none in engaging the Dialogue.
This crack in the traditional historiography of reception becomes irreparable when Raphael shows that the remaining readers conform even less to its ideal reader. Vincenzo Viviani (chapter 2), often called Galileo’s last student, approached the book with sixteenth-century textual methods, a sense of Galileo’s mathematical lineage, and silence about Copernicus. In treating Marin Mersenne, the French Minim at the heart of a vast epistolary web (chapter 3), Raphael goes beyond the obvious loci by examining additional marginalia about Two New Sciences in his own Harmonie universelle and his record of reactions to Galileo in Descartes’s letters. Chapter 4 turns to Seth Ward and Christopher Wren, Oxford astronomy professors and founding Fellows of the Royal Society. Here Raphael challenges the thesis that Two New Sciences stimulated experimentalism in scientific academies. The annotations of the two professors focused on its mathematics, largely neglecting physical concerns and cosmological implications. Instead, Ward adapted to experimental purposes the humanist commonplace-book techniques of note-taking, which Wren imbibed in the act of copying.
These readers form the tiny minority that responded extensively to the text (most copies are clean). In chapters 5 and 6, Raphael shifts to an institutional focus, turning to readers from the University of Pisa and the Jesuit order. She shows that traditionalist Pisa masters used Galileo’s work selectively to comment critically on Aristotle, revealing topical interests and illustrating moderation and eclecticism. Her sources do not conform to the contemporary rhetoric of academic conflict between old and new, behind which she sees not substance but personal and pedagogical tensions. By 1658, the Jesuits were also engaging with themes from Two New Sciences in their Aristotelian quaestiones.
Raphael’s brilliant epilogue has far-reaching implications for narratives of change. Her critique of the prevailing historiography of the Scientific Revolution highlights deep flaws in its warfare model of change, in which traditionalists fight innovators and noncombatants are irrelevant. Leading by example, she suggests that researchers learn to appreciate that most readers neither embrace nor reject novelty in toto. The pick-and-choose eclecticism that Raphael has found among readers of Two New Sciences makes for less triumphalist melodrama, but much more convincing history.
