Customer Reviews

Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read the Shank-Biagioli dispute the reviewer mentions. If you accept Shank's critique, it undermines one chapter but not the entire book. For anyone interested in Galileo, scientific patronage, or religion and science, this is a must-read. Even if you do not agree with everything Biagioli says, his book has been incredibly influential.

This book is a real eye-opener. Fascinating, readable, well-researched, Mario Biagioli takes us beyond the ever-present conventional portraits of Galileo as "father of modern science." Biagioli weaves an enthralling tale that takes us into a world that is very different than our own. Here we see Galileo in his 16th century context, rather than through the anachronism of enlightenment and positivism. And what a strange and wonderful picture it is. A world of courtly patronage and emblamatics that Galileo navigated as skillfully as he did the worlds of mathematics and natural philosophy. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the history, science, the Renaissance or even just a good story with fascinating ideas and personalities.

In this book we learn how Galileo shaped is scientific career, or rather how his being involved in a princely court influenced his works and the debates he become involved in (e.g., bouancy, sunspots).

Mario Biagioli takes us through court life, and descibed Galileo's unique position in this court culture. Galileo was able to become close to a prince (Cosimo II), and used his title as "philosopher" to try to validate his ideas.

We also learn how Galileo's fate was tied to court life. A pope, who as a Cardinal enjoyed Galileo's works, turned upon Galileo due to criticisms by his peers. Biagioli calls this "the fall of the favorite."

This is an interesting look at Galileo's professional life and its influence on his scientific musings and how court life gave him both his glory and downfall.

This is an alarm call to Biagioli's own field of the History of Science, which is highly controversial, groundbreaking and brilliantly crafted. This subversive work of critical Historiography is housed within a text about the history of Science, and its surface focus is Galileo's court society context. But careful and clever readers will find he is taking structures of science, History practices, and the modern university to task. He blends theoretical reflection with historical analysis, incorporates visual evidence alongside textual proof, and forces alert readers to confront a series of assumptions concerning Galileo and early modern science that, over the years, have calcified into articles of faith. Perhaps most importantly, he opens up imagined barriers to generate further scholarship. Both directly and indirectly Biagioli challenges his readers to stretch their framework and test his ideas.
And what does he get for this dangerous shot into the crowd?... Why tenure at Harvard, as he should.

Other reviews here focus--quite rightly--on the main narrative issues, and with them it is best to learn about the upper bulk of this book. But the heart of what Biagioli is up to was beautifully demonstrated by another critical reviewer here. He supplies the perfect quote in illustration:
"from Michael Shank's review (Shank, Michael H. 1994. Galileo's Day in Court. Journal for the History of Astronomy 25:236-242.) and Biagioli and Shank's later exchange on the book in Early science and medicine Vol 1, 1996.
Shank concludes, and I agree, that Biagioli manipulates the evidence and does not "behave in the way in which good, honest, historians behave"."

Shank responds in this typically defensive and indoctrinated way, because Biagioli's inspired use of Historiography does by definition take ossified historians to task. The book reveals the limiting problems inherent in intellectuals refracting in EXACTLY this way: he "does not 'behave in the way in which good, honest, historians behave'." Conversely, Biagioli follows intellectually rigorous curiosity, and divergent methodology, and thus arrives at valid conclusions that modern scholarly disciplinary strictures often preclude.

According to Shank, Biagioli's then breached an imaginary and obscurant "moral historian code," by pointing his finger back at historians. That's actually hilarious: Shank thus proves Biagioli's entire subtextual argument, which was built in through the entirety of the work. If one reads this book carefully, understanding Biagioli's allusive use of a complex combinations of footnotes, his purpose is clear and would threaten the bejesus out of any "trained" thinker who is cemented in the status quo.

Writers looking for a template on how to shake up a system while working within the confines of it--look no further.

This book bombastically puts forth the thesis that much of Galileo's work is best understood in the context of "patronage dynamics." I say that this contextualisation tells us virtually nothing that is not commonsensically obvious already. By way of illustration, let us look at the purported insights of the chapter on Galileo's dispute with Grassi on comets. Biagioli's conclusion is immodest:

"I hope to have shown that, when placed in the context of court culture and patronage, the Assayer ceases to be a puzzling text and begins to appear as a remarkable courtly artifact." (p. 309)

First, Biagioli claims that both Galileo's and Grassi's involvement in the issue were "patronage-driven" (p. 274) from the outset. Grassi published first, but not, according to Biagioli, because he was interested in comets, but in order to further "the Jesuits' agenda" (p. 277):

"The Jesuits kept pursuing ... court-oriented cultural politics with great determination. In fact, the [Jesuit] Collegio Romano was trying to compete with the many Roman academies to establish itself not only as an elite university but also as a center of culture and edifying entertainment." (p. 271)

Apparently it is inconceivable to Biagioli that people might pursue "edifying entertainment" for its own sake; whence such a pursuit is unequivocal proof of a "court-oriented agenda."

Biagioli commits the same folly again when he writes that "neither Galileo nor the Jesuits seemed to have been particularly interested in comets until important patrons asked their opinions about them", after which "Grassi and Galileo _had_ to speak and write about them" (p. 274). Since it is hardly surprising that Galileo, the self-proclaimed world-leading astronomer whose fame rested on the telescope, took an interest in comets, this piece of contextualisation is not very enlightening.

And why did patrons suddenly become interested in comets anyway? Could we not just as well say that *patrons* (rather than Galileo and the Jesuits) do not seem to have been particularly interested in comets until 1618? As Biagioli notes, "following the appearance of three comets in the second half of 1618, European mathematicians and astrologers received many inquiries about [them]" (p. 269). Thus Biagioli insinuates that these prominent comet-sightings sparked the interest of patrons but not of scientists, and all his inflated claims about the issue being "patronage-driven" rests on this unsubstantiated and implausible assumption.

It is the same again when Galileo praises himself as one of the few who can "extract any jewel of quality from so rich a treasury [the cosmos]" (p. 280). Here, you see, Galileo is "relying on the courtly taste for 'gems'" (p. 279); it being inconceivable, again, that Galileo could be interested in the jewels of the cosmos independently of the courts.

Biagioli also has an extremely far-fetched "explanation" for the fact that Galileo's Assayer contains a number of rambling and irrelevant digressions. For this "reflected the patronage and courtly framework in which the debate developed" (p. 298) and was "made possible by his [Galileo's] reliance on courtly aesthetics" (p. 299). Decide for yourself whether to laugh or cry at this strained connection, which is established thus: "In a patronage context, disputes not only tended to avoid closure because of the patrons' reluctance to pass final judgement; they also proliferated in all directions making it difficult to decide even the grounds on which to designate a winner or loser. Obviously, this dynamic fit the patrons' interest very well." (p. 299)

By now we see the pattern in Biagioli's argumentation: Galileo has a certain (commonsensical) attitude; the courts are said to have the same attitude; whence it is inferred that Galileo's actions must have been were "court-oriented" and "patronage-driven." Biagioli's opportunism in taking any attitude of Galileo's and calling it "courtly" is rather blatant in such phrases as "courtly (that is controversial, original, and creative)" (p. 279).

In conclusion, the actions of Galileo that Biagioli call "court-oriented" and "patronage-driven" are things such as taking an interest in comets and trying to look clever and original and creative. Since there is no reason to think that the courts and patrons were more interested in these things than Galileo himself, all this talk of patronage is entirely incidental and serves no explanatory purpose whatever.

To put my conclusion differently, suppose blue ink had just been discovered in Galileo's day and was found to be the best ink available. Suppose further that the courts were excited about using blue ink, and that Galileo wrote several treatises in blue ink. Does it then follow that Galileo's writings were "court-oriented" and "patronage-driven"? Biagioli's inflated thesis assumes so, but of course this would be quite a ridiculous way of "explaining" Galileo's use of blue ink since using blue ink is just plain common sense.

Needless to say, this book is yet another predictable result of the dogmatic hegemony of "science studies." If any "agendas" are being illuminated in this book, it is those of Biagioli and his Harvard colleagues rather than those of Galileo and his contemporaries.

Before believing what Biagioli writes read Michael Shank's review (Shank, Michael H. 1994. Galileo's Day in Court. Journal for the History of Astronomy 25:236-242.) and Biagioli and Shank's later exchange on the book in Early science and medicine Vol 1, 1996.

Shank concludes, and I agree, that Biagioli manipulates the evidence and does not "behave in the way in which good, honest, historians behave".