Detour: To 17th Century Italy

One of the books I read this summer was Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love, by Dava Sobel.  It is a book that is part history and part biography of Galileo and his daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, a cloistered nun.  Maria Celeste wrote letters to her father throughout her short life and those letters are translated and included in this well-researched historical account.  The letters help tell the story of Galileo, his career and his times, but they also help to tell Marie Celeste's story and another story that is not well known--what 17th century Italy was like for women, especially women who served the Church.

From Galileo's Daughter I learned an enormous amount about Galileo. Before reading this book I had a general knowledge of Galileo and his contribution to science, but I knew next to nothing about his life and career.  And I certainly didn't know he had five children, all illegitimate, and that two of his daughters became cloistered nuns.

In reading the book I became aware of how very complicated his situation was, and that it wasn't just a matter of the Vatican's punishing him for daring to say that the earth revolved around the sun.  There was much more to it than that; in fact, his problems with the Vatican were more or less minor until late in his career. 

I also learned that Galileo was no rebel in the pure sense. Throughout his career, he tried to address the concerns of the Popes as each came along and to comply with the Vatican's wishes with respect to his published writing. When he had a friend in the Vatican, things worked out pretty well and he was able to carry on his work. But when the political situation changed, he found himself in trouble.

I think what I found most surprising was that Italy (that is, the Vatican) was one of the last holdouts in refusing to accept the Copernican view of the universe.  In other words, Galileo was not telling the world something they didn't know; he was, however, helping to prove what was until then only a theory. What he saw and showed the world through his telescopes made the truth about our solar system hard to deny.  And the fact that his works were available outside of Italy made it possible for everyone to learn of his discoveries and discuss them in learned circles, despite the Vatican's official denial of their validity.

Everything I learned about Galileo was very interesting.  But what I learned about his daughter was even more interesting, because it gave me a window on women of the time.  In her letters, Sister Marie Celeste talks about her life in the monastery, a home she never left, not even for an hour or two, until her death. This was the cloistered life, shut away from the world, spent working and praying. But though the cloister was separated from the world, still the world's concerns were allowed to filter in, through letters, primarily, but also word of mouth. 

Marie Celeste was a pious woman, but she knew what was happening with her father, and she conveyed her opinions about it, however covertly, through her letters.  And though it would seem that a woman in such a situation would be meek and subject to the dictates of her mother superior or the priest in charge, Marie Celeste suggests through her letters that she had some power over her circumscribed world, power she seemed to relish.  Though forced into the convent at a young age because of the circumstances of her birth, she nonetheless made the best of it.  No doubt many other women of her time did the same, but not many of them were able to write of their experiences. We're lucky to have Marie Celeste's letters to give us a glimpse of her times.

Dava Sobel published another book, Letters to Father, which contains all of Marie Celeste's 124 surviving letters covering a ten-year period.  They are translated and edited by Dava Sobel, who also wrote the introduction.  Sometime I'd like to read them all, and if you get the chance, I recommend them along with Galileo's Daughter, a book I enjoyed very much.