Galileo’s Daughter
By Dava Sobel
I was looking for a book on Galileo and found out that Dava Sobel had written one. Well, this had me expecting great things, because I read her brilliant book on longitude a couple of years ago.
This book is a little bit different to standard fare though. Galileo had two daughters. Both were born out of wedlock, so he sent them to a convent. One of them, the elder, Virginia, went by the convent name Suor Maria Celeste, and wrote frequent letters to her father throughout their lives, sometimes as many as two a week.
The author intersperses her narrative with letters from Maria Celeste throughout the book.
I find it a little uncomfortable how subservient she was to him, referring to him as Sire mid-sentence and writing in a generally grovelling way. If he were so good a father, he wouldn’t have cast her and Livia (Suor Arcangela) off to a convent, for a start.
This book is a little lengthy for my needs. Fortunately, it contains the bit that I was after: A rendition of his trial under the Inquisition. I had heard and admired the myth that he went along with everything they were saying but threw in rebelliously “Eppur si muove!” (Yet it moves!) at the end. I should’ve known it was too good to be true 
Galileo had something in common with Charles Darwin of which I wasn’t aware until I read his book too: At the time of conducting their research, both men were devout in their native faiths and tried to reconcile their discoveries with what they believed. Of course, both men were pariah’d for their insight.
I was genuinely upset to read that Suor Maria Celeste died before her father, succumbing to a rogue strand of plague; the letters really convey her admiration for him and, creepy though I find them, it seems wrong that a woman about whom nothing negative is recorded died a sad, drawn-out death
Not to be outdone, a morose Galileo then goes and loses his sight, quite ironic for the man who saw further than anyone else had done.
The usual standard for Dava Sobel, meticulously researched. Just a little too long and in too much detail for what I wanted, which is essentially a Wikipedia article 
Tags: Dava Sobel