Description
"Re-creates for the first time the full drama of Galileo's ill-starred encounter with the Inquisition. Publication of Galileo's monumental treatise, Dialogue on the Great World Systems, aroused a bitter controversy between the old science of Ptolemy and the radical teachings of Copernicus in seventeenth-century Italy, a controversy of profound religious and political import. Before its course was run, impassioned factions were created within the Vatican itself; and Galileo, brought to trial for heresy was condemned to perpetual house arrest on his farm in the Florentine countryside ... In telling his story, derived in large part from little-known documents, Giorgio de Santillana sets forth with striking clarity and artistry the events which preceded and followed Galileo's trial. By revealing grave irregularities in the procedures themselves he achieves a very different version of the cause célèbre than that commonly accepted and unearths a conspiracy as its moving force. Although he shows that Galileo was not persecuted by the Church itself but by a powerful faction within it, he recognizes also the ominous meaning that Galileo's ordeal possesses for our own age"--
