A Defense of Galileo, the Mathematician from Florence by Thomas Campanella, O.P. (review)

726book reviews A Defense of Galileo, the Mathematician from Florence. By Thomas CampaneUa , O.E Translated with an introduction and notes by Richard J. BlackweU . (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 1994. Pp. xü, 157. $27.95.) This translation of Tommaso CampaneUa's Apologia pro Galileo, mathematico florentino (Frankfurt, 1622), whose fuU subtitle reads ubi disquiritur, utrum ratiophilosophandi, quant Galileus célébrât, faveat sacris scripturis, an adversetur, is the latest volume in Richard J. BlackweU's long Ust of contributions on GaUleo and the science-reUgion controversy. It is a most welcome addition, offering an introduction based on scrupulous research into the document and its background, a reader-friendly translation of the Latin text, extensive notes that wUl satisfy the most demanding scholar, and a comprehensive bibUography. One cannot faU to be impressed by the picture BlackweU paints of this unfortunate Dominican,like GaUleo much persecuted and yet faithful to his Order and the Church to the end, whose genius and erudition were totaUy unappreciated by those he most wanted to help. CampaneUa's is the last important treatise relating to the "GaUleo Affair"to be made avaflable in accurate EngUsh translation and with full scholarly apparatus. (A notoriously unreUable EngUsh translation was pubUshed by Grant McCoUey in 1937, and two ItaUan translations have appeared since then, one by Luigi Firpoin 1968, the other by Salvatore Femiano in 1971.) In his history ofthat "affair " Maurice Finocchiaro gave us in English the essential Latin and Italian texts (The GalileoAffair:A Documentary History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), and George Coyne, S.J., has supplemented these with his translation ofAnnibale FantoU's Galileo:For Copernicanism andfor the Church (Vatican Observatory PubUcations/Notre Dame Press, L994), which presents in EngUsh large amounts of correspondence and other documents perforce left out of Finocchiaro's work. What BlackweU now contributes is more than the defense of GaUleo made by the famous renegade Dominican priest. He brings to Ught a prescient and quite unexpected plea for LnteUectual freedom offered from within the Church at the height of the GalUeo controversy, which, had it been heeded,would have saved the Church from "enormous embarrassment" in the centuries to come (p. 30). CampaneUa's defense is actuaUy a theological treatise soUcited from him by Cardinal Boniface Caetani (1567-1617), ostensibly to aid the Church in deciding whether the philosophical view advocated by GaUleo was in agreement with, or opposed to, Sacred Scripture. It is composed of five chapters, the first chapter giving detaUed arguments against GaUleo's heUocentrism and the second , counter-arguments in favor of it. The third chapter then sets out a series of assumptions, what CampaneUa caUs "hypotheses," which serve to define, for him, the characteristics one should have to be a competent judge of the issue. In light of these, the fourth chapter evaluates and answers each of the arguments presented in the first chapter, and in the fifth chapter does the same for those offered in the second. With hindsight we can now see that the advice BOOK REVIEWS727 CampaneUa insinuates in his third chapter was capable ofheading off,at its very inception, the long controversy over science and Scripture that was provoked by GaUleo's advocacy of Copernicanism over the then-prevailing AristoteUanPtolemaic world view. William A.Wallace, O.E The Catholic University ofAmerica The Burdens ofSisterMargaret. By Craig Harline. (NewYork: Doubleday. 1994. Pp. xx, 359. $24.00.) This book teUs a wonderfuUy rich story. Margaret Smulders seems to have been a woman who persisted where others might have acquiesced—she was not liked by her peers among the Franciscan Grey Sisters of Leuven—and her determination to maintain an honorable place in her convent, despite charges that she had been possessed by the devU, yielded in the end the kind of documentation that means a rare opportunity for the historian who can recognize it. When Harline draws inferences about matters the parties were reluctant to discuss directly—for example, that Sister Margaret's problems with the confessor assigned to her convent began with his making sexual advances to her—the argument carries conviction. He is also a shrewd observer of the personal detaUs which the authors...