Reading Galileo: Scribal Technologies and the New Science

Location: Philips Wing, Magill Library, Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania

Tea at 4:15 p.m.

Talk at 4:30 p.m.

Galileo was an outspoken critic of the textual methods his contemporaries used to study the natural world, arguing that mathematics and experiment were the only appropriate ways to gain a true knowledge of nature. In this talk, Raphael examines how Galileo’s own readers approached his 1638 Two New Sciences, today considered a canonical text in the development of modern physics. Galileo’s readers, she shows, applied to his text the same scribal technologies and approaches Galileo so vehemently criticized, an observation which speaks to important questions about the nature of scientific change and transformations in scientific practice.

Renée Raphael is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California Irvine whose research lies at the intersection of early modern history of science and book history. She is currently completing a book entitled Mechanics in the Margins about the reception of Galileo’s 1638 Two New Sciences in the seventeenth century.

Co-sponsored by the Libraries and the History Department of Haverford College.