History of Science Literature Wiki

[this is a legacy page from the 2021 iteration of the Historiography Clinic]

The full proper and true bibliographic citation: Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

Main field/subfields and interlocutors:

Astronomy and mathematics; court culture; patronage

“Power”-Foucault; Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu (cultural theory and anthropology); Stephen Greenblatt, Randolph Starn, Steven Shapin (on self-fashioning); Richard Westfall (on Galileo in general); works well with Paula Findlen (Possessing Natures published a year later); somewhat critical of Kuhn and Feyerabend

Periodization: 1610-1633 (Galileo at Medici court to trial)

Especially major people/places: Florence; Rome

Main sources/archives:

Mainly Galileo's published writings and his correspondence; Medici paintings and architecture (see Shank)

Main argument(s):

1. Galileo's move to the Medici court resulted in him refashioning himself “as an unusual type of philosopher, a type of identity for which there were no well-established social roles or images,” and the “socioprofessional identity he constructed for himself was definitely original” (3)

Structure of book:

1. Broadly chronological, but keen to avoid a coming-of-intellectual-age story

Useful book reviews (include link / DOI if possible) and key points from these:

Michael H. Shank, ‘How Shall We Practice History? The Case of Mario Biagioli’s Galileo, Courtier’, Early Science and Medicine 1, no. 1 (1996): 106–50, https://doi.org/10.1163/157338296X00132.

1. A scathing reply to a reply (Mario Biagioli, ‘Playing With the Evidence’, in the same volume) to a review (M. Shank, ‘Essay Review: Galileo’s Day in Court: Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism’, Journal for the History of Astronomy 25, (1994), 236-45.
2. Shank repeats his assertion that Biagioli in his book is “playing with the evidence” he presents for some of the courtly influences on Galileo, while maintaining that he does not question “the relation of scientific claims and sociocultural parameters - I take it as given that they are intimately intertwined” (109)
3. Shanks criticisms include Biagioli presenting a tenuous link between the mythical and allegorical Jupiter and the Medici dynasty; a misinterpretation of the fable of the Assayer in Galileo's works; and skewing how Galileo saw the role of his Medici patron as a “Shield of Truth”(145)

Nicholas Jardine, ‘A Trial of Galileos’, Isis 85, no. 2 (1994): 279–83, https://www.jstor.org/stable/236494.

1. Presenting Biagioli's book alongside other, then recent, works on Galileo (Moss, Pitt, Wallace) and calling it “a stunning performance”
2. While the other reviewed works have a more internalist (Pitt) or literary critical (Pitt, Wallace) stance, Jardine says that Biagioli focuses on “not on texts per se, but on the actions that gave rise to them, the processes of which their production was a part.” (281)
3. Jardine also uses the review to defend some use of present-day categories for past actors, as Biagioli does (though not without “local lapses”(283)

Key points or interventions or sub-arguments by chapter:

Ch 1 “Galileo's Self-fashioning”

1. B centres patronage as an analytical tool for examining EM science historically, not just to an economic end and as a “mere set of rational strategies and relations through which a scientist makes a career”(14)
2. The key concept for Biagioli is the identity which allows us to understand the historical actor's “cognitive attitudes and career strategies” (14)
3. B finds this a more useful frame of analysis than Kuhnian paradigms (13)

Ch 2 “Discovery and Etiquette”

1. The transition from “mere” mathematician to philosopher was possible because of the social institution of the court. This transition “would give him the standing to argue legitimately for the philosophical significance of the Copernican theory and for the mathematical analysis of natural phenomena” (106)
2. Key to this was the Cosimo II/Jupiter connection (see Shank's criticism)

Ch 3 “Anatomy of a Court dispute”

1. Examining a dispute at the Medici court between Galileo and Aristotelian philosophers (e.g. delle Colombe) on buoyancy
2. Contrasting this dispute within the system of courtly patronage with research on other scientific disputes (e.g. by Harry Collins, Schaffer, Galison, Latour), and saying that unlike those “the historical actors we have encountered [Galileo, delle Colombe] were not as interdependent as, say, the members of a modern scientific community. The only sense in which they were 'connected' was by virtue of being dependent on a common patron.” (208)

Ch 4 “The Anthropology of Incommensurability”

1. Addresses the problem posed by Feyerabend and Kuhn about the incommensurability of different scientific paradigms which makes scientific communication problematic, but instead of relegating this to a linguistical problem it “quite to the contrary, … plays an important role in the process of scientific change” (211)
2. Biagioli rejects the notion that communication difficulties (e.g. between Aristotelians and “new philosophers”) were mere rhetorical strategy, but also rejects the Strong programme's relativism (mentioning Bloor 212)
3. Instead he proposes that incommensurability is the result of a “diachronic articulation of a new socioprofessional identity” (244), analyses the role of bilingualism and noncommunicative behaviours and in the end sees incommensurability as a “cost” of scientific change worth paying

Intermezzo

1. Introduces the cultural and academic environment of Rome

Ch 5 “Courtly Comets”

1. Analysing Galileo's Assayer as an example of where Galileo was not primarily deliberately disruptive or opportunistic, nor was can the text be seen as a modern methodology, but rather it shows Galileo as a “competent courtier” (268)
2. The clash between the Jesuits and Galileo was one between “two different cultures” in Rome (religious orders and court), as well as of different intellectual traditions

Ch 6 “Framing Galileo's Trial”

Reinterpreting the trial of 1633 as fitting within the courtly dynamic, rather than a theological, cosmological or methodological clash. The dynamics resembled those of the “fall of the favourite” (313) at a princely court