This book addresses a topic that I just covered in an essay: I pointed out the problem of biographers repeating the earliest biographies on a historic figure without checking the accuracy of the original, and frequently adding new myths or fantasies regarding what a given individual must have done, which are repeated by later biographers as if they are established facts. These problems add up until authors such as Daniel Defoe have over 550 erroneous attributions to books they could not have possibly read, and a story of the events of their lives is built that is likely to only have a few sentences in common with the initial individual’s experiences. The final thick biography is thus a fiction that has been repeated so many times, its author might not be aware who invented these fictitious elements. Lives were barely documented in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries; even a hundred years ago, few people celebrated birthdays or even knew exactly when they were born. It is especially easy with the quantity we all share on social media today to imagine that these ancient lives can be recreated with enough research, but there might only be a couple of documents and a handful of letters remaining with genuine attributing qualities for either Defoe or Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). Inserting “maybe’s” or other indicators of uncertainty would make biographies of these characters truer, but it might be difficult for average readers to read a text layered with constant uncertainty-interruptions. I mentioned Galileo in this research because he self-published the book about our solar system that knocked Earth from the central position in the system, inviting future scholars to re-analyze the night sky, birthing the ideas that have since developed about astronomy. Galileo was prosecuted by the Inquisition in response to this scandalous self-publication. Defoe was also imprisoned for sedition (a similar charge to heresy in Galileo’s time): both of these men’s crimes were objecting to the errors of their time and demanding modernization via a scientific or truthful interpretation of the universe or our societies. In this context, I am very curious to learn how biased Galileo’s first biographers were, as this would indicate if the biography of Galileo popularized today holds truths or echoes these early biases.
The cover advertises this project as: “The first collection and translation into English of the earliest biographical accounts of Galileo’s life.” It presents a “firsthand picture of Galileo” with “insights into the construction of his public image and the complex intertwining of science, religion, and politics in seventeenth-century Italy.” The texts include Vincenzo Viviani’s Historical Account (1654) “by his last and most devoted pupil” with his “Letter to Prince Leopoldo de’ Medici on the Application of Pendulum to Clocks” (1659), “his 1674 description of Galileo’s later works, and the long inscriptions on the façade of Viviani’s Florentine palace (1702). The collection also includes the ‘Adulatio perniciosa,’ a Latin poem written in 1620 by Cardinal Maffeo Barberini—who, as Pope Urban VIII, would become Galileo’s prosecutor—as well as descriptive accounts that emerged from the Roman court and contemporary European biographers./ Featuring the original texts in Italian, Latin, and French with their English translations on facing pages, this invaluable book shows how Galileo’s pupils, friends, and critics shaped the Galileo myth for centuries to come, and brings together in one volume the primary sources needed to understand the legendary scientist in his time.” These promise to be useful sources indeed, and the original texts in the languages they were first written in should help scholars avoid any errors that might result from slight shifts in modern translations.
The “Contents” list includes several other authors and texts, all covering Galileo from different perspectives. The texts are organized by their publication date from 1654 to 1702, so from a few years before Galileo’s death and into a few decades after it. The “Introduction” offers biographies and textual context explanations for the authors of these primary texts. One of these on Leo Allatius is particularly telling regarding how the political biases of the time skewed all of these biographies: “the trial of 1633 could not but change the situation completely, forcing Allatius to substantially revise the text he had written before the trial and transform the entry on Galileo from a standard entry about a very eminent personality into quite an ambiguous one, with a rather understated tone. The contrast between the totally inadequate entry on Galileo—which dryly reports some of his achievements and lists some of his works up to The Assayer, published d then years before Allatius’s book was compiled—and Galileo’s eminence as one of the foremost scientists of his time—the Chief Mathematician and Philosopher of the Grand Duke of Tuscan, and a personal friend of Pope Urban VIII’s…” (xxx). World history has been written by politicians with power-hungry agendas, and this trend towards bias continues through the present; this continuation makes it very difficult to point out inaccuracies in current biographies that are being misinterpreted and twisted by propaganda and rival-politics, but it can be spotted and explained when one is looking back hundreds of years to events that do not directly impinge on any active politicians, as has been done in this book.
Each of these biographies is accompanied by extremely detailed notes, which explain if the biographies are substantiated or lacking in proof and which sources might be reviewed in support or in contrast with the potentially biased information presented (72-3). Some of these biographies are much longer than others: Girolamo Ghilini’s piece is perhaps the shortest of the bunch, but it is telling since it compresses his life’s discoveries and concludes thus: “As these most learned works are of the highest value to scholars and teachers in that science, they are very highly praised and offer me the opportunity to honor Galileo’s precious merits by giving him a central place in my Theatre” (99). This type of positive criticism explains how Galileo’s name survived the attacks from courts and propagandists against him: there were too many intellectuals that believed in his findings in talent, and these were more influential on the perspectives of future generations than the smaller politicians and theologians who would have wished Galileo might have faded from history.
If I ever return to studying Galileo, his writing, his research, and his publishing, I would definitely begin by closely reading these biographies and the supporting research presented in this collection. It is a valuable addition to my library. I recommend it for all public and academic libraries, and for researchers at all levels from undergraduate students curious about science to established scholars who have published on Galileo. These biographies offer inspiration for the curious general readers, and intricate proof of the impact of bias on history for those who read below the surface.