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Letters to Father: Suor Maria Celeste to Galieo
Letters to Father Suor Maria Celeste to Galieo Author:Dava Sobel When she was thirteen, Virginia Galilei, eldest daughter of the great scientist Galileo, was placed by her father in a convent in Florence and took the name Suor Maria Celeste. Unable to see him except on his occasional visits, she wrote him continually, as her 124 surviving letters (which Galileo kept) attest. Now, for the first time, all of th... more »ese letters are reproduced in English, translated by Dava Sobel, and in their original Italian, and Ms. Sobel has also written an introduction and annotations placing the letters in historical context. The 124 letters span only a decade of Maria Celeste's thirty-three years. In that dramatic period, a pope came to power who battled the Protestant Reformation; the Thirty Years' War embroiled all of Europe; the bubonic plague erupted across Italy; and a new philosophy of science, promulgated most forcefully by Galileo himself, threatened to overturn the order of the universe. Maria Celeste's evocative, beautifully written letters touch on all of these situations, but they dwell in the small details of everyday life: descriptions of the latest confections she regularly sent her father; news of the managment of his estate, which she took on while he was on trial; an appeal for him to intercede with religious authorities on the convent's behalf; poignant details of the plague's progress as she followed it from behind the convent's walls; a request for him to fix the convent clock that she was unable to repair herself. Although Galileo's letters to her have not survived, it is clear from hers that he answered every one she wrote. Especially for those who have read Sobel's Galileo's Daughter, but even for those who haven't, Maria Celeste's letters recapture from history an extraordinary woman, highly intelligent and remarkably open-minded and informed despite her cloistered existence. Her words provide an indelible chronicle of convent life in the early seventeenth century, a memorable portrait of a deep affection between a father and his daughter, and fascinating insight into Galileo himself.« less