The title is misleading: this is not a review of Galileo’s Daughter. More precisely, it is a review of Alan Lightman’s review of Galileo’s Daughter. I have written up some thoughts about Lightman’s review in order to fulfill the remaining requirement for the Reader badge, as outlined in Volume One of the Rebel Badge Book. This is the first badge I’ve completed–may there be many more! And may one of them be the Writer badge, when I–Deo volente–finish the rough draft of my PhD dissertation this summer.

Alan Lightman’s review of Galileo’s Daughter is in some ways excellent. He eloquently summarizes the historical highlights of Galileo’s life, capturing the personality of the scientist well. That said, I worry he has missed the heart of the book. Lightman writes,

'The daughter's letters reveal little about the father's thoughts, yet they add texture to his world. Where we learn much more about the scientist is in the letters he wrote and received from friends, students, churchmen and other scientists.... Although ''Galileo's Daughter'' focuses on the daughter, its real center of gravity rests with the father and the gripping battle that enveloped him.'

With this appraisal, which comes in the first third of a review that stretches to nearly fifteen hundred words, Lightman dismisses what makes Galileo’s Daughter stand out from the many biographies of Galileo that already exist.

I do not think that I read Maria Celeste’s letters as texture–or if I did, perhaps I have a higher opinion of texture than Lightman does. The emphasis on Maria Celeste is interesting firstly because, at least in my opinion, Sobel does such a remarkable job of drawing out the character of the nun. In the letters, as in Sobel’s commentary on them, we see generosity and concern for others as a driving motivation for the young woman. In the details which Lightman calls ‘texture’, we see sacrifice, asceticism, piety, suffering, and the struggle of daily life. Maria Celeste’s life was difficult. I think one of the few weaknesses of the book was Sobel’s implicit lack of sympathy for Maria Celeste’s sister, Suor Arcangela. Reading between the lines, the chronically ill Arcangela was not cut out for the challenge of life under the Rule of St Clare–a challenge which was imposed upon her, rather than chosen. Did Arcangela resent the father who had hidden her away in a world of hunger, exhaustion, and illness? Sobel never asks. I could not help but reflect, though, that Arcangela might have had some justification for not desiring emotional closeness with the father who consigned her to a life of privation.

In light of Suor Arcangela’s notable silence towards her father, then, the fact that Maria Celeste was able to care so deeply for him is all the more remarkable. She seems to have brought out the best in Galileo the man, in addition to adoring Galileo the legend. Sobel’s note at one point that Maria Celeste bid fair to become the convent’s abbess is a melancholy one. What the ‘texture’ of her letters reveals is that in Maria Celeste the convent, as well as the father, lost someone of great importance too soon.

And it is the religious aspect that I think is secondarily so important about this biography, as opposed to others. In Maria Celeste’s letters we see authentic, persistent, and generous piety. The excerpted correspondence with churchmen, which Lightman suggests is more illuminating, is one which might well lead the reader to anger and frustration with the Roman Catholic Church. At least, it certainly did so for me. The texture of the letters exchanged with cardinals and ambassadors and popes is a texture of power and of nepotism. Between the cardinals and the Medici there is little to choose. Titles and estates are inherited or fought for, in the church just as in secular matters. What Sobel highlights more clearly, through her use of primary sources, than do many write-ups of Galileo, is the extent to which the scientist’s problems with the church were about the authority to interpret Scripture. The problem with the Copernican view was not that it contradicted Scripture per se but that it contradicted the official interpretation of Scripture. And as reading about this conflict reignited old anger in me, it was restorative to have so much ‘texture’ as counterpoint. Because if the Italian church of Galileo’s time had not had its Poor Clares along with its Barberinis, I would have wanted to see it burned to the ground, just as the Protestants did.

In Lightman’s view, then, it seems that reading the book without Maria Celeste’s letters would largely deprive the reader of local flavor. I think however that it is her love, her generosity, and her piety–echoed in Galileo’s affection for her and patronage of the convent–which redeems the story. The view of the Roman Catholic church would otherwise be too brutal, too arrogant, and too frustrating to deal with. As it is, Suor Maria Celeste helps me to understand why, even at the end of his life, Galileo would have been able to remain committed to the church of Rome.