British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

BA PDF Symposium 2005

26 April 2005

Abstracts

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Dr Nick Wilding

Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Nature

When Galileo Galilei came to write his controversial Dialogue of the Two Main World Systems (1632), the book that tried to show how the revolutionary heliocentric thesis might be compatible with everyday experience, he deployed the characters of two dead friends, Filippo Salviati and Gianfrancesco Sagredo, to dismantle the Aristotelian cosmology of their opponent Simplicio. This literary fictionalisation was just one of many such virtual characterisations of Sagredo. During his life as a Venetian patrician and libertine, he also adopted various guises: an aging dowager incriminating corrupt Jesuits with her letters; a virtuoso natural philosopher exploiting Jesuit missionaries in India; a spy intercepting sensitive correspondence for the services of the Republic of Venice. The same political loyalties and techniques of information management governed his behaviour in natural philosophical matters: his interventions in Galileo's debates on the nature of sunspots with a Jesuit astronomer explicitly compare the latter's position with other Jesuit anti-Venetian polemicists. In this paper, I shall argue that the early modern stress on securing of credit in natural philosophy was dependent on techniques for the evaluation and transfer of credit in other fields, such as politics, religion and authorship.

Dr Wilding read English at New College, Oxford, then took a Master's in Renaissance Studies at Warwick. During his PhD in the Department of History at the European University Institute at Fiesole, Italy, he coedited the online edition of the correspondence of Athanasius Kircher. He has held post doctoral fellowships at Stanford and Florence and is currently a member of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge. His research interests include the history of the book and history of science in early modern Europe.