Galileo's Fame

Science, Credibility, and Memory in the Seventeenth Century

Inbunden, Engelska, 2025

499 kr

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From the beginning of Galileo’s career, well before the publication of the Sidereus Nuncius, his contemporaries took pains to shape his reputation and fame. They were fully aware that their efforts would shape the course of his career; they also knew that they would profit from helping him. With this book, Anna-Luna Post offers a welcome new perspective on the volatile dynamic between early modern fame and science in Italy, shifting the focus from the recipient of fame to its brokers. Galileo’s contemporaries knew his rise to fame was not a matter of course. Not only were his discoveries highly contested, he was also not the first to turn his telescope to the night sky. Yet, of the men who first observed the rugged lunar surface and Jupiter’s four largest moons between the summer of 1609 and the winter of 1610, Galileo is the only one who achieved both widespread fame and posthumous glory. Rather than the direct result of merit or extraordinary achievements, fame, Post ultimately reveals, is shaped through human intervention.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2025-09-09
Mått152 x 229 x 29 mm
Vikt574 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor296
FörlagUniversity of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN9780822948599

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Anna-Luna Post is a historian of knowledge, culture, and the environment at Leiden University. She is interested in all facets of the world of scholarship and learning in the early modern period. Trained as a cultural historian and Italianist, she is also fascinated by the intersections between early capitalism and environmental history, especially in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.Post has held fellowships at the University of Southern California, Cambridge University, the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, and the Medici Archive Project and the Netherlands Institute for Art History in Florence. She studied in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Bologna.

There is a story that fame was created in the Enlightenment. But long before that, Galileo Galilei became the famous father of the theory of planetary movements. His defense of his radical ideas and the international debates over science made him one of Europe’s first famous people. In Anna-Luna Post’s brilliantly crafted work, we see not only the origins of modern fame but just how important it was to the legitimacy and the maintenance of scientific authority. Post’s historical lessons seem very pertinent in our own turbulent times. This is a must read for anyone interested in the history of science and media.