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Galileo and the Church: Political Inquisition or Critical Dialogue?

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I am normally sceptical of history (or any other) books that cite that mountebank Michel Foucault with approval, as Rivka Feldhay does early in this book. However, this proved to be a magnificent exception. Dr Feldhay's fresh look at the Galileo affair is a work of original scholarship and great erudition. She challenges the familiar triumphalist account given by most historians of science, which offers as its sole explanatory key the conflict between courageous empiricism and authoritarian obscurantism. Importantly, she does so without a trace of the science-bashing to which lesser students of the history and philosophy of science are sometimes given.

Drawing on her profound knowledge of Thomist philosophy and of the academic and cultural milieu in Counter-Reformation Europe, Dr Feldhay resituates the Galileo trials in the midst of an intellectual turf war between the Dominicans and the Jesuits. None of the protagonists, including Galileo, comes out the story looking especially heroic. The story is one of immensely sophisticated and learned men who were misled by their own institutional, personal and scholastic rivalries and by epistemological confusion over the nature of scientific hypotheses into a foolish, unnecessary and short-sighted condemnation of Copernicanism and silencing of Galileo. In doing so, they not only distorted the teachings of the Council of Trent on the intepretation of scripture, they also did lasting damage to the vibrant school of Catholic, mostly Jesuit, astronomy. Tragically, the popular understanding of the Galileo story persists to this day as emblematic of the supposed conflict between faith and reason.

If the book has one flaw, it is that it assumes the reader is well acquainted with the facts of the Galileo trials. However, as someone who has no particular familiarity with the Galileo case, I can still unreservedly recommend the book as a fine exercise in intellectual history.

[Readers of this book may be also be interested in Richard J. Blackwell's 'Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible' (1991 University of Notre Dame Press), which includes the complete translated texts of several of the documents discussed by Dr Feldhay.]