Galileo Courtier

“This brilliantly original reexamination of Galileo” (New Yorker) is a cultural and social history revealing the relationship between patronage and science.

In the court of the Medicis and the Vatican, Galileo fashioned both his career and his science to the demands of patronage and its complex systems of wealth, power, and prestige. Science historian Mario Biagioli argues that Galileo's courtly role was integral to his science—the questions he chose to examine, his methods, even his conclusions.

Informed by currents in sociology, cultural anthropology, and literary theory, Galileo, Courtier is neither a biography nor a conventional history of science, focused on examining the workings of power, patronage, and credibility in the development of science.

“One achievement of this important book is that historians will no longer be able to sustain the traditional view of 'science speaking truth to power.'” —American Historical Review

“Every society has its own system of benevolent or despotic patronage. It needed someone as gifted and knowledgeable as Mario Biagioli to explore the relationships between science and government in seventeenth-century Italy.” —Nature

“An especially striking example of the new historiography. . . . The delineation of this court life is so graphic and detailed that, after a while, the reader has a sense of being there.” —Science