Free Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel Page B

Virginia and Livia began to wear the dark brown religious habits of the Franciscan orders. Although both children were still too young to take their vows, mother abbess Suor Ludovica Vinta told the ailing Galileo that she desired to see them appropriately outfitted before she relinquished her elected office.
Young girls received into the monastery before the age required by law shall have their hair cut off round and, their secular dress being laid aside, shall be clothed in religious garb as it shall seem fitting to the Abbess. But when they have reached the age required by law, they shall make their profession clothed after the manner of the others, [RULE OF SAINT CLARE, Chapter II ]
    Meanwhile Galileo’s letter to Castelli continued to circulate, traveling from hand to hand, and eventually falling into the wrong hands. On December 21, 1614, exactly one year to the day after Galileo wrote the letter, he found himself denounced from the pulpit of the Church of Santa Maria Novella, right in the city of Florence, by Tommaso Caccini, a hotheaded young Dominican priest with ties to the “pigeon league.”
Men of Galilee, why do ye stand looking up to heaven? [Acts 1:11]
    Beginning his sermon with this barb, Caccini moved quickly to the biblical text for that Advent Sunday, which happened to come from the Book of Joshua, and included the “Stand still, O sun” command that had sparked Madama Cristina’s original complaint. Caccini wound up branding Galileo, Galileo’s followers, and all mathematicians in general “practitioners of diabolical arts . . . enemies of true religion.”
    The vitriol of the language brought Caccini a reprimand, and Galileo a written apology from the preacher’s Dominican superior. But soon another Florentine Dominican, Niccolo Lorini, submitted a copy of Galileo’s now widely read letter to Castelli—to an inquisitor general in Rome. Hearing this news, Galileo feared that crucial passages might have been altered (as indeed proved to be the case) either by mistakes in copying or through malevolent distortion. He sent a true copy to his friend at the Vatican, Piero Dini, who in turn copied it repeatedly for various cardinals who might help clear Galileo’s name.
    Through the spring and summer of 1615, Galileo sustained yet another long bout of incapacitating illness—aggravated, perhaps, by his recognition of the forces arrayed against him. Indeed he saw himself the focus of a conspiracy. While bedridden, he recast his informal letter to Castelli into a much longer, more referenced treatise addressed to Madama Cristina herself. (Though no printer dared publish the Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina until 1636, in Strasbourg, manuscript copies enjoyed a wide Italian readership.)
    “Some years ago,” he began,
as Your Serene Highness well knows, I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions commonly held among academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors— as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset Nature and overturn the sciences. They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts; not their diminution or destruction.
  Showing a greater fondness for their own opinions than for truth, they . . . hurled various charges and published numerous writings filled with vain arguments, and they made the grave mistake of sprinkling these with passages taken from places in the Bible which they had failed to understand properly, and which were ill suited to their purposes.
    Even though Galileo directed these comments to Madama Cristina, he refrained from accusing her of the same injustices, which she had committed without malice. He reserved his venom for those others who used biblical passages they could not