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 GALILEO'S
DAUGHTER
Inspired by a long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable
surviving letters of Galileo's daughter, a cloistered nun, Dava
Sobel has written a biography unlike any other of the man Albert
Einstein called "the father of modern physics- indeed of modern
science altogether." Galileo's Daughter also presents a stunning
portrait of a person hitherto lost to history, described by her
father as "a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most
tenderly attached to me."
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 masterfully 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 about to be overturned. In that same
time, while the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation
and the Thirty Years' War tipped fortunes across Europe, one man
sought to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with
the heavens he revealed through his telescope.
With all the human drama and scientific adventure that distinguished
Dava Sobel's previous book Longitude, Galileo's Daughter is an unforgettable
story.
Dava Sobel is the author of the international best-seller Longitude,
and co-author of The Illustrated Longitude. She lives in East Hampton,
New York.
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