Galileo’s Daughter: A Drama of Science, Faith and Love. Dava Sobel

for his longevity, for the fulfilment of his ‘every just desire’. As the convent’s apothecary, she concocted elixirs and pills to strengthen him for his studies and protect him from epidemic diseases. Her letters, animated by her belief in Galileo’s innocence of any heretical depravity, carried him through the ordeal of his ultimate confrontation with Urban and the Inquisition in 1633.

      No detectable strife ever disturbed the affectionate relationship between Galileo and his daughter. Theirs is not a tale of abuse or rejection or intentional stifling of abilities. Rather, it is a love story, a tragedy and a mystery.

      Most of Suor Maria Celeste’s letters travelled in the pocket of a messenger, or in a basket laden with laundry, sweetmeats or herbal medicines, across the short distance from the Convent of San Matteo, on a hillside just south of Florence, to Galileo in the city or at his suburban home. Following the angry papal summons to Rome in 1632, however, the letters rode on horseback some two hundred miles and were frequently delayed by quarantines imposed as the Black Plague spread death and dread across Italy. Gaps of months’ duration disrupt the continuity of the reportage in places, but every page is redolent of daily life, down to the pain of toothache and the smell of vinegar.

      Galileo held on to his daughter’s missives indiscriminately, collecting her requests for fruits or sewing supplies alongside her outbursts on ecclesiastical politics. Similarly, Suor Maria Celeste saved all of Galileo’s letters, as rereading them, she often reminded him, gave her great pleasure. By the time she received the last rites, the letters she had gathered over her lifetime in the convent constituted the bulk of her earthly possessions. But then the mother abbess, who would have discovered Galileo’s letters while emptying Suor Maria Celeste’s cell, apparently buried or burned them out of fear. After the celebrated trial at Rome, a convent dared not harbour the writings of a ‘vehemently suspected’ heretic. In this fashion, the correspondence between father and daughter was long ago reduced to a monologue.

      Standing in now for all the thoughts he once expressed to her are only those he chanced to offer others about her. ‘A woman of exquisite mind,’ Galileo described her to a colleague in another country, ‘singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me.’

      On first learning of Suor Maria Celeste’s letters, people generally assume that Galileo’s replies must lie concealed somewhere in the recesses of the Vatican Library, and that if only an enterprising outsider could gain access, the missing half of the dialogue would be found. But, alas, the archives have been combed, several times, by religious authorities and authorised researchers all desperate to hear the paternal tone of Galileo’s voice. These seekers have come to accept the account of the mother abbess’s destruction of the documents as the most reasonable explanation for their disappearance. The historical importance of any paper signed by Galileo, not to mention the prices such articles have commanded for the past two centuries, leaves few conceivable places where whole packets of his letters could hide.

      Although numerous commentaries, plays, poems, early lectures and manuscripts of Galileo’s have also disappeared (known only by specific mentions in more than two thousand preserved letters from his contemporary correspondents), his enormous legacy includes his five most important books, two of his original handmade telescopes, various portraits and busts he sat for during his lifetime, even parts of his body preserved after death. (The middle finger of his right hand can be seen, encased in a gilded glass egg atop an inscribed marble pedestal at the Museum of the History of Science in Florence.)

      Of Suor Maria Celeste, however, only her letters remain. Bound into a single volume with cardboard and leather covers, the frayed, deckle-edged pages now reside among the rare manuscripts at Florence’s National Central Library. The handwriting throughout is still legible, though the once-black ink has turned brown. Some letters bear annotations in Galileo’s own hand, for he occasionally jotted notes in the margins about the things she said and at other times made seemingly unrelated calculations or geometric diagrams in the blank spaces around his address on the verso. Several of the sheets are marred by tiny holes, torn, darkened by acid or mildew, smeared with spilled oil. Of those that are water-blurred, some obviously ventured through the rain, while others look more likely tear-stained, either during the writing or the reading of them. After nearly four hundred years, the red sealing wax still sticks to the folded corners of the paper.

      These letters, which have never been published in translation, recast Galileo’s story. They recolour the personality and conflict of a mythic figure, whose seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion. For although science has soared beyond his quaint instruments, it is still caught in his struggle, still burdened by an impression of Galileo as a renegade who scoffed at the Bible and drew fire from a Church blind to reason.

      This pervasive, divisive power of the name Galileo is what Pope John Paul II tried to tame in 1992 by reinvoking his torment so long after the fact. ‘A tragic mutual incomprehension’, His Holiness observed of the 350-year Galileo affair, ‘has been interpreted as the reflection of a fundamental opposition between science and faith.’

      Yet the Galileo of Suor Maria Celeste’s letters recognised no such division during his lifetime. He remained a good Catholic who believed in the power of prayer and endeavoured always to conform his duty as a scientist with the destiny of his soul. ‘Whatever the course of our lives,’ Galileo wrote, ‘we should receive them as the highest gift from the hand of God, in which equally reposed the power to do nothing whatever for us. Indeed, we should accept misfortune not only in thanks, but in infinite gratitude to Providence, which by such means detaches us from an excessive love for Earthly things and elevates our minds to the celestial and divine.’

       [II] This grand book the universe

      THE RECENTLY DECEASED RELATIVE Suor Maria Celeste mourned in her first extant letter was Virginia Galilei Landucci, the aunt she’d been named after. At the Convent of San Matteo, she shared her grief with her natural sister, Suor Arcangela (originally the namesake of Galileo’s other sister, Livia), and also with her cousin Suor Chiara – the departed Virginia’s own daughter Virginia.

      A repetition of recollected identities echoed through the Galilei family like the sound of chanting, with its most melodic expression in the poetic rhythm of the great scientist’s full name. By accepted practice among established Tuscan families in the mid-sixteenth

      century, when Galileo was born, the eldest son might well receive a Christian name derived from his parents’ surname. Accordingly, Vincenzio Galilei and his new wife, Giulia Ammannati Galilei, attracted no special attention when they gave the name Galileo to their first child, born at Pisa on the 15th day of February in the year of Our Lord 1564. (The year was actually recorded as 1563 in the chronicles of that period, however, when New Year’s Day fell on 25 March – the feast of the Annunciation.)

      The family name Galilei, ironically, had itself been created from the first name of one of its foremost favourite sons. This was the renowned doctor Galileo Buonaiuti, who taught and practised medicine during the early 1400s in Florence, where he also served the government loyally. His descendants redubbed themselves the Galilei family in his honour and wrote ‘Galileo Galilei’ on his tombstone, but retained the coat of arms that had belonged to the ancestral Buonaiutis since the thirteenth century – a red step-ladder on a gold shield, forming a pictograph of the word buonaiuti, which literally means ‘good help’. The meaning of the name Galileo, or Galilei, harks back to the land of Galilee, although, as Galileo explained on this score, he was not at all a Jew.

      Galileo Galilei took a few tentative steps along his famous forebear’s path, studying medicine for two years at the University of Pisa, before he gave himself over to the pursuit of mathematics and physics, his true passion. ‘Philosophy is written in this grand book the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze,’ Galileo believed. ‘But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and to read the alphabet in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible