Margherita Sarrocchi's Letters to Galileo

Meredith K. Ray is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Delaware, USA. She is the author of Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy and Writing Gender: Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance.

• I. Introduction.- II. Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in Seventeenth-Century Italy.- Sarrocchi and Galileo in Rome.- Science and the Scanderbeide.- Sarrocchi’s Scanderbeide and Galileo’s “Enemy Eye”.- The Controversy Over Galileo’s “Medicean Stars”.- Reading the Stars.- Diverging Paths.- III. Letters of Margherita Sarrocchi and Galileo (With Three Related Letters)

“The slim volume will be a resource not just for readers and researchers but also for classroom discussion, where the letters could serve as great primary sources to feature in a number of course contexts. Enjoy!” (Carla Nappi, New Books network, newbooksnetwork.com, March, 2017)