Galileo's Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy (review)

There seem to be two overlapping or alternating projects at work here, each with different styles and tones. On the one hand, the most interesting and exciting aspect of Biagioli's book is the history of how Galileo engaged with his various patrons and then sparred with the Inquisition to try to avoid the accusation of heresy with all the consequences. In this side to the project, the author writes in a clear, straightforward manner and argues cautiously, explaining very well how seventeenth-century scientists created a new space for themselves, gained credit for their work, and developed a language of words and images to allow for progressive and cooperative advances.

On the other hand, the most annoying and confusing aspect of Galileo's Instruments of Credit is an argument only announced – and then almost offhandedly – in the final pages of the book: finding a 'useful corrective to Derrida's exclusive association of the play of difference with writing and inscriptions' (pp. 262-63). In this dark side to the project, which sometimes seems as though written by a completely different author, Biagioli falls into the mire of post-modernist jargon and neologisms, with sentences becoming turgid and unreadable. Here the analogies and metaphors of credit, accountancy, power and instrumentality overtake the argument and fudge the issues: how and why did Galileo quickly move from being a rather humble teacher and instrument-maker to a major astronomical discoverer, court intellectual, and target of the Holy Office's campaign against Copernicus and those who challenged the theological structure of the universe.

On the whole, Biagioli has produced a better book than some of its more bizarre pages (and they are thankfully few) would lead one to expect. He moves along the understanding necessary to place Galileo's famous inquisitorial trial in context of its time, both in regard to the discursive strategies arrayed on both sides of the debate — though this is not really the apt word for the trial itself, but rather for the ongoing conflict over how far, on the one side, the Church traduced its own commitments to reason and scholarly differences, and on the other, the awkward and miscalculated slips of Galileo, as well as his well-intentioned patrons and scientific supporters, in trying to argue a case that should probably have never come up. Through all this Derrida and the post-modernist thinkers do little more than muddy the waters.