In 1633 the Roman Inquisition concluded the trial of Galileo
Galilei with a condemnation for heresy. The trial was itself the
climax of a series of events which began two decades earlier (in
1613) and included another series of Inquisition proceedings in
1615-1616. Besides marking the end of the controversy that defines
the original episode, the condemnation of 1633 also marks the
beginning of another classic controversy-about the Galileo affair,
its causes, its implications, and its lessons; about whether, for
example, John Milton was right when in the Areopagitica he
commented on his visit to Galileo in Florence by saying: "There it
was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old a
prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise
than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought." I happen to
be extremely interested in this second story and second
controversy, and a critical interpretation of the affair remains
one of my ultimate goals. But that is not the subject of the
present work, which is rather concerned with something more
fundamental, namely with the documentation of the original episode.
To be more exact, the aim of this book is to provide a documentary
history of the series of developments which began in 1613 and
culminated in 1633 with the trial and condemnation of Galileo. That
is, it aims to provide a collection of the essential texts and
documents containing information about both the key events and the
key issues. The documents have been translated into English from
the original languages, primarily Italian and partly Latin; they
have been selected, are arranged, annotated, introduced, and
otherwise edited with the following guiding principles in mind: to
make the book as self-contained as possible and to minimize
contentious interpretation and evaluation. The Galileo affair is
such a controversial and important topic that one needs a
sourcebook from which to learn firsthand about the events and the
issues; since no adequate volume of the kind exists, this work
attempts to fill the lacuna. The originals of the documents
translated and collected here can all be found in printed sources.
In fact, with one exception they are all contained in the twenty
volumes of the National Edition of Galileo's works, edited by
Antonio Favaro and first published in 1890-1909. The exception is
the recently discovered "Anonymous Complaint About The Assayer,"
whose original was discovered and first published in 1983 by Pietro
Redondi; this document is also contained in the critical edition of
the Inquisition proceedings edited by Sergio M. Pagano and
published in 1984 by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. My
selection was affected partly by the criterion of importance
insofar as I chose documents that I felt to be (more or less)
essential. Since I was also influenced by the double focus of this
documentary history on events and issues, I therefore included two
types of documents: the first consists of relatively short
documents which are mostly either Inquisition proceedings (Chapters
V and IX) or letters (Chapters I, VII, and VIII) and which
primarily (though not exclusively) record various occurrences; the
second type consists of longer essays by Galileo (Chapters II, Ill,
IV, and VI) which discuss many of the central scientific and
philosophical issues and have intrinsic importance independent of
the affair. Finally, my goal of maximizing the autonomy of this
volume suggested another reason for including some of these longer
informative essays on the scientific issues (Chapters IV and VI).
General
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