The Crime of Galileo

Front Cover
University of Chicago Press, 1955 - Biography & Autobiography - 338 pages
"Re-creates for the first time the full drama of Galileo's ill-starred encounter with the Inquisition. Publication of Galileo's monumental treatise, Dialogue on the Great World Systems, aroused a bitter controversy between the old science of Ptolemy and the radical teachings of Copernicus in seventeenth-century Italy, a controversy of profound religious and political import. Before its course was run, impassioned factions were created within the Vatican itself; and Galileo, brought to trial for heresy was condemned to perpetual house arrest on his farm in the Florentine countryside ... In telling his story, derived in large part from little-known documents, Giorgio de Santillana sets forth with striking clarity and artistry the events which preceded and followed Galileo's trial. By revealing grave irregularities in the procedures themselves he achieves a very different version of the cause célèbre than that commonly accepted and unearths a conspiracy as its moving force. Although he shows that Galileo was not persecuted by the Church itself but by a powerful faction within it, he recognizes also the ominous meaning that Galileo's ordeal possesses for our own age"--

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Contents

Introduction
1
I The Days of Discovery
5
II Domini Canes
27
III Philosophical Intermezzo
56
IV Saint Robert Bellarmine
74
V The Decree
110
VI Bellarmines Audience
125
VII The Years of Silence
145
X The Summons
187
XI The Inquisitors Plight
225
XII The Trial
237
XIII The Problem of the False Injunction
261
XIV Change of Course
275
XV The Sentence
292
XVI Aftermath
322
Index
331

VIII Urban VIII
160
IX The Dialogue
174

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