| This dissertation uses the material history of Galileo Galilei's library to investigate the use of epic poems in Galileo's presentation of himself as both reader and author. Considering Galileo's self-representations as carefully wrought personae, in his private and public writing, permits an exploration of the linguistic nuances of the author that Calvino called the father of Italian prose. Based on archival research, Galileo's personal letters, and citations from his writing, Paladin Philosophy first constructs an inventory of his library, including the manuscripts, notes, and printed volumes owned, borrowed, lent, and otherwise distributed by Galileo. Second, it recreates and restores the image of Galileo as a reader, a figure independent from the historical-biographical person that developed the library collection, through an analysis of his readings of Scripture, of his interpretation of the book of Nature (both as topos and historical reality), and of multiple volumes authored by scholars and annotated by Galileo. For the first time, Galileo's notes on Tasso, Ariosto, and Petrarch appear alongside his criticism of astronomers, mathematicians, and philosophers. Third, this identity of Galileo, the reader, expresses itself in the poetic identity of Galileo, the self-conscious voice that narrates throughout the writings, a voice that incorporates the language of the epic poem. Such epic self-representations are most evident in Galileo's letters, but the language of poetry further asserts itself as the Galilean characters in the philosophical dialogues interact as stylized readers who identify with figures from popular literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The final image of Galileo appears in two epic foundational poems of the seventeenth century, the Fiesole distrutta by Giandomenico Peri (Florence,1621) and Giulio Strozzi's Venetia edificata (Venice, 1624), both of which were owned by Galileo. This study ultimately reveals the centrality of the language of epic poetry to a history of one man's collecting, to the reading strategies of Galileo, to his language of the new science, and to the development of a mythic Galilean character that persists independently of the historical-biographical personage. |
