Preface
1: Galileo's Europe
2: Stuart Religions
3: The King and his Lawyer
4: Cultural Threads
5: Heavens Above
6: Medicine and Melancholy
7: The Painter
8: Oxford at War
9: The Image
Postscript
Bibliography
John Heilbron is Professor of History and the Vice Chancellor
Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an
Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. He writes about the
history of the physical sciences and their wider cultural context
from the 17th to the 20th centuries, and has published the
definitive biography of Galileo (OUP, 2010), as well as The History
of Physics: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2018), and Niels Bohr:
A
Very Short Introduction, (OUP, 2020) . Heilbron's work has won
several prizes and brought him honorary doctorates from multiple
universities.
The Ghost of Galileo is... a work of serious scholarship... it is
brilliant, and unlike anything I expect to read all year.
*Tim Smith-Laing, Daily Telegraph*
... insightful and unusual... A massive amount of information is
conveyed in a lively style, with a nice line in deadpan humour... a
generous and original book.
*Joe Moshenska, Times Literary Supplement*
If ever a book has defied summary, this is it. Mr. Heilbron takes
his readers on an exhilarating, 500-page ride through the first
half of the 17th century, beginning with the tangled web of
political and intellectual relations between the English and the
Italians, specifically the quarrel between worldly, pleasure-loving
Venice and authoritarian, stuck-up Rome...
*Christoph Irmscher, Wall Street Journal*
Beginning with the painting itself and following a number of
threads in weaving together - in a way that truly shows the
humanities at their best - the history of science, art history, the
history of religion, and political history of the early modern
period, Prof. Heilbron explores the social, religious, artistic,
and scientific landscapes of that time.
*The Well-Bred Naturalist*
This is a strikingly unusual book. In 2010, the year in which the
author's definitive biography of Galileo and his work was
published, the author chanced upon an unusual double portrait by a
now unjustly little-known artist, in the dark upper corridor of a
house in Dorset belonging to the National Trust ... It is a puzzle
without a definitive solution, but the search for one is utterly
absorbing.
*Alastair Laing, Art Historian, former Curator of Pictures and
Sculpture, National Trust*
This splendid study reanimates a portrait of an English scholar and
his student, taking as its focal point a copy of Galileo's recent
Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems. The relationship
of this curious foreground detail to the big picture will captivate
historians of early modern science, art, literature, politics, and
religion.
*Professor Eileen Reeves, author of Galileo's Glassworks: The
Telescope and the Mirror*
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