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Chapter 12 A Miscarriage of Justice? The Documentation of Impropriety (1867–1879) 241 We have seen that in 1755 Church officials created a special file of proceedings of Galileo’s trial by removing the relevant documents from one of the regular volumes of the Inquisition archives. We have also learned that Napoleon was the first to have made a serious plan (between 1810 and 1814) to publish that file of trial documents. After the dossier was returned to Rome in 1843, the prefect of the Vatican secret archives (Marini) was expected to publish it, but instead in 1850 published his own interpretive account. There is evidence that many other people tried unsuccessfully to publish it, or at least to consult it. Albèri tried in connection with his critical edition of Galileo’s works (1842–1856); he was dealing with Marini, but when the latter died in 1855 Albèri lost the opportunity.1 In 1864, the German scholar Moritz Cantor complained in print that he had been refused permission to examine the Galilean file.2 In 1878, the Polish-Italian scholar Arturo Wolynski reported that he too had been refused access.3 However, from the late 1860s to the late 1870s, four scholars were allowed to consult and publish the file. The first was the Frenchman Henri de L’Epinois, who published a large selection in 1867; but besides being incomplete, this edition was full of errors and other imperfections, and so ten years later he published a complete and improved edition.4 The second scholar was an Italian, Domenico Berti, who published his first edition in 1876 and his second, improved and complete edition in 1878.5 The third one was an Italian priest, Sante Pieralisi, who was the director of the Barberini Library in Rome; he did not publish his own edition but compared the manuscripts with the editions of L’Epinois and Berti and published corrections to them.6 The fourth scholar was the Austrian Karl von Gebler, who was granted permission after publishing an interpretive account based on L’Epinois’s first edition; then from his own personal consultation and with the benefit of L’Epinois’s second edition, Gebler published his own com- plete edition in 1877.7 Thus, by 1878 there existed three essentially complete editions of the Galilean file: L’Epinois (1877), Gebler (1877), and Berti (1878).8 12.1 A Legal Impropriety: Wohlwill’s Radical Revisionism (1870) L’Epinois’s first edition contained a selection of the most important documents in the Galilean file (twenty-five pages of small print), and was preceded by a comprehensive account (seventy-eight pages of larger print).9 The latter may be summarized as follows. According to L’Epinois, the con- flict was primarily between science and Aristotelianism. Galileo’s main opponents were Aristotelian philosophers, who at one point advanced the biblical objection. He defended himself by advancing novel interpretations of Scripture. On the physical doctrine (of the earth’s motion), Galileo was right and the Inquisition wrong, but in his time most scientists thought the reverse (Inquisition right and Galileo wrong). Both sides were imprudent, Galileo for wanting to go too far too fast, the Inquisition for showing itself to be too circumspect. The Inquisition was right to be concerned about Galileo’s novel interpretations of Scripture, but wrong to give its decisions an absolute value and an aura of finality, permanence, and definitiveness. The emphasis on the split within natural philosophy was relatively novel; it had some plausibility, at least as long as the emphasis was not too excessive, too one-sided, too reductionist, or too exclusivist. In saying that Galileo answered the biblical objection by reinterpreting Scripture, L’Epinois was missing the main point, which was to deny the philosophical (i.e., scientific) authority of the Bible; to that extent, he was echoing Mallet ’s bad-theologian thesis. L’Epinois was giving an interesting twist to the imprudence thesis when he pointed out that the Church was being too conservative , too slow, and too cautious; it would follow that the Inquisition was also acting imprudently, recalling that prudence can mean wisdom or judiciousness as well as caution or carefulness (as L’Epinois presupposed). However, although L’Epinois’s account had some originality, plausibility, and appeal, it was the sort of thing one could have thought of without the newly published documents. In this regard, one could say that L’Epinois was merely confirming some of the allegations...

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