{"product_id":"reading-galileo","title":"Reading Galileo","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eHow did early modern scientists interpret Galileo’s influential \u003ci\u003eTwo New Sciences\u003c\/i\u003e?\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 1638, Galileo was over seventy years old, blind, and confined to house arrest outside of Florence. With the help of friends and family, he managed to complete and smuggle to the Netherlands a manuscript that became his final published work, \u003ci\u003eTwo New Sciences\u003c\/i\u003e. Treating diverse subjects that became the foundations of mechanical engineering and physics, this book is often depicted as the definitive expression of Galileo’s purportedly modern scientific agenda. In \u003ci\u003eReading Galileo\u003c\/i\u003e, Renée Raphael offers a new interpretation of \u003ci\u003eTwo New Sciences\u003c\/i\u003e which argues instead that the work embodied no such coherent canonical vision. Raphael alleges that it was written—and originally read—as the eclectic product of the types of discursive textual analysis and meandering descriptive practices Galileo professed to reject in favor of more qualitative scholarship. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFocusing on annotations period readers left in the margins of extant copies and on the notes and teaching materials of seventeenth-century university professors whose lessons were influenced by Galileo’s text, Raphael explores the ways in which a range of early-modern readers, from ordinary natural philosophers to well-known savants, responded to Galileo. She highlights the contrast between the practices of Galileo’s actual readers, who followed more traditional, “bookish” scholarly methods, and their image, constructed by Galileo and later historians, as “modern” mathematical experimenters. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eTwo New Sciences \u003c\/i\u003ehas not previously been the subject of such rigorous attention and analysis. \u003ci\u003eReading Galileo\u003c\/i\u003e considerably changes our understanding of Galileo’s important work while offering a well-executed case study in the reception of an early-modern scientific classic. This important text will be of interest to a wide range of historians—of science, of scholarly practices and the book, and of early-modern intellectual and cultural history.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"MediaPlace","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57310081712510,"sku":"NW9781421421773","price":39.23,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1379\/1261\/files\/9781421421773.jpg?v=1778581215","url":"https:\/\/mediaplace.com\/products\/reading-galileo","provider":"MediaPlace","version":"1.0","type":"link"}