Galileo’s Daughter

Galileo Galilei (1524-1642) was the foremost scientist of his day, the man Albert Einstein was to call “the father of modern physics – indeed of modern science altogether.” Although he never left the Italy of his birth, his inventions and discoveries were heralded around the world. His telescopes allowed him to reveal a new reality in the heavens and to publicly propound the astounding argument that the Earth actually moves around the Sun. For this belief, he was brought before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, tried for heresy, and threatened with torture.

In contrast, his daughter, Virginia, became a cloistered nun. Born in 1600, she was thirteen when Galileo placed her in a convent near him in Florence, where she took the most appropriate name of Suor Maria Celeste. Galileo later said of her that she had an exquisite mind, and her intelligence and loving support proved to be her father’s greatest source of strength through his most difficult years.

Inspired by her long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable letters of his daughter, which she has translated into English for the first time, Dava Sobel has written a book that brings Galileo to life as never before. A man who was compelled to explain the truths he discovered, he was a faithful Catholic devoted to family and, especially, to his daughter. Their voices and those of others who touched their lives, echo down the centuries through letters and writings, which Sobel masterfully weaves into her narrative, building towards the crescendo of history’s most dramatic collision between science and religion. In the process, Dava Sobel illuminates an entire era, when the flamboyant Medici Gran Dukes became Galileo’s patrons, when the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and prayer was the most effective medicine, when the Thirty Years’ War tipped fortunes across Europe, and when one man fought, through his trial and betrayal by his former friend, Pope Urban VIII, to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed through his telescope.