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kuglar 's review for:
I enjoyed this immensely. It’s really a biography about Galileo with snippets of his daughters’ lives via the eldest one’s letters. What a fascinating person he was! He accomplished so much and could have accomplished even more had it not been for the foolishness of the Catholic Church. What a waste of his valuable time and intellect the trial was. There are transcripts of the trial here, which were quite interesting, bits of his letters, passages from his books, explanations of his experiments, etc. It all flows nicely and is eminently readable.
I felt so bad for the daughters! To be forced into a convent and *such* a convent. (Galileo deemed them unmarriageable because they were illegitimate so he sent them to a Poor Clares convent. (He though scholars should be single and their mother was also of lower social status. Ugh.)) The whole idea of not owning anything so you have to beg for food, etc. makes no sense to me. Instead of being able to take care of yourself, you end up being a burden on your relatives and your local society. Suor Maria Celeste’s letters are often pitiful - they’re starving, she has no set room, she’s in poor health most of the time, she has to pull her own teeth(!), she has to ask for money from her father often. Under the religious claptrap and the almost worship of her father (maybe that was the writing style then?), she seemed to have a great deal of administrative ability. What a waste. And damn that convent for not saving Galileo’s letters to his daughter - what a loss to history.
I’m not sure if the younger sister, Suor Arcangela, ever wrote letters to her father or if they just weren’t preserved. His “strange, silent second daughter” just might have hated him for forcing her into the convent. If she didn’t want to be socked away in a convent, hungry and cold, with no freedom or family of her own, she must have gone through hell. One of the other poor nuns mentioned tried to commit suicide by banging her head and face on the floor and then stabbed herself 13 times with a pocket knife. What a horrible fate these convents were for anyone not very specifically suited to that life. In addition to the above listed hardships, the nuns couldn’t ever leave the convent. Ever. They visited with their father through a grill in a window between two rooms. The daughters were interred there at ages 13 and 12.
Towards the end of the credits, the author notes that “All biblical passages are rendered from the King James Version and from the New American Catholic Edition of the Holy Bible.” I’m curious about why, in a book about an ardent Catholic, she used a Protestant bible and an American bible instead of the version Galileo’s contemporaries would have used.
I felt so bad for the daughters! To be forced into a convent and *such* a convent. (Galileo deemed them unmarriageable because they were illegitimate so he sent them to a Poor Clares convent. (He though scholars should be single and their mother was also of lower social status. Ugh.)) The whole idea of not owning anything so you have to beg for food, etc. makes no sense to me. Instead of being able to take care of yourself, you end up being a burden on your relatives and your local society. Suor Maria Celeste’s letters are often pitiful - they’re starving, she has no set room, she’s in poor health most of the time, she has to pull her own teeth(!), she has to ask for money from her father often. Under the religious claptrap and the almost worship of her father (maybe that was the writing style then?), she seemed to have a great deal of administrative ability. What a waste. And damn that convent for not saving Galileo’s letters to his daughter - what a loss to history.
I’m not sure if the younger sister, Suor Arcangela, ever wrote letters to her father or if they just weren’t preserved. His “strange, silent second daughter” just might have hated him for forcing her into the convent. If she didn’t want to be socked away in a convent, hungry and cold, with no freedom or family of her own, she must have gone through hell. One of the other poor nuns mentioned tried to commit suicide by banging her head and face on the floor and then stabbed herself 13 times with a pocket knife. What a horrible fate these convents were for anyone not very specifically suited to that life. In addition to the above listed hardships, the nuns couldn’t ever leave the convent. Ever. They visited with their father through a grill in a window between two rooms. The daughters were interred there at ages 13 and 12.
Towards the end of the credits, the author notes that “All biblical passages are rendered from the King James Version and from the New American Catholic Edition of the Holy Bible.” I’m curious about why, in a book about an ardent Catholic, she used a Protestant bible and an American bible instead of the version Galileo’s contemporaries would have used.