Fame and Credibility: The Case of Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642

From the beginning of Galileo’s career, well before the publication of the Sidereus Nuncius, his contemporaries took pains to shape his reputation and fame. They were fully aware that their efforts would shape the course of his career; they also knew that they would profit from helping him. With this book, Anna-Luna Post offers a welcome new perspective on the volatile dynamic between early modern fame and science in Italy, shifting the focus from the recipient of fame to its brokers. Galileo’s contemporaries knew his rise to fame was not a matter of course. Not only were his discoveries highly contested, he also was not the first to observe Jupiter’s four largest moons. Yet, of the three men who did so between the summer of 1609 and the winter of 1610, Galileo is the only one who achieved both widespread fame and posthumous glory. Post convincingly argues that fame is, rather than the direct result of merit or extraordinary achievements, shaped through human intervention.

Anna-Luna Post is a historian of knowledge, culture, and the environment based at Utrecht University. She is interested in all facets of the world of scholarship and learning in the early modern period: trained as a cultural historian and Italianist, she is also fascinated by the intersections between early capitalism and environmental history, especially in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Post has held fellowships at the University of Southern California, Cambridge University, the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, and the Medici Archive Project and the Netherlands Institute for Art History in Florence. She studied in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Bologna.