English translations of primary documents.

This unique reader allows students to examine Galileo's trial as a legal event and, in so doing, to learn about seventeenth-century European religion, politics, diplomacy, bureaucracy, culture, and science. Noted scholar of the trial Thomas F. Mayer has translated correspondence, legal documents, transcripts, and excerpts from Galileo's work to give students the opportunity to critically analyze primary sources relating to Galileo's trial. To help contextualize the trial, Mayer provides an introduction that details Galileo's life and work, the Council of Trent, the role of the papacy, and the Roman Inquisition, and gives a clear explanation of how a trial before the Inquisition would have been conducted. Each primary source begins with a headnote, questions to guide students through each source, and suggested readings. The book includes a comprehensive cast of characters, a map of Galileo's Rome, a chronology of Galileo's life, and a list of secondary readings.

Examines Galileo's trial as a legal event. Includes correspondence, legal documents, transcripts and excerpts from Galileo's work for critical analysis of primary sources. Includes an introduction detailing Galileo's life and work, the Council of Trent, the role of the papacy and the Roman Inquisition and gives a clear explanation of how a trial before the Inquisition would have been conducted. Each primary source begins with a headnote, questions to guide students through each source and suggested readings.

In 1600, the Catholic Inquisition condemned the philosopher and cosmologist Giordano Bruno for heresy, and he was then burned alive in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome. Historians, scientists, and philosophical scholars have traditionally held that Bruno’s theological beliefs led to his execution, denying any link between his study of the nature of the universe and his trial. But in Burned Alive, Alberto A. Martínez draws on new evidence to claim that Bruno’s cosmological beliefs—that the stars are suns surrounded by planetary worlds like our own, and that the Earth moves because it has a soul—were indeed the primary factor in his condemnation. Linking Bruno’s trial to later confrontations between the Inquisition and Galileo in 1616 and 1633, Martínez shows how some of the same Inquisitors who judged Bruno challenged Galileo. In particular, one clergyman who authored the most critical reports used by the Inquisition to condemn Galileo in 1633 immediately thereafter wrote an unpublished manuscript in which he denounced Galileo and other followers of Copernicus for their beliefs about the universe: that many worlds exist and that the Earth moves because it has a soul. Challenging the accepted history of astronomy to reveal Bruno as a true innovator whose contributions to the science predate those of Galileo, this book shows that is was cosmology, not theology, that led Bruno to his death.

Drawing on the Roman Inquisition's own records, diplomatic correspondence, local documents, newsletters, and other sources, Thomas F. Mayer provides an intricately detailed account of the ways the Inquisition operated to serve the papacy's long-standing political aims in Naples, Venice, and Florence between 1590 and 1640.

Finocchiaro's new and revised translations have done what the Inquisition could not: they have captured an exceptional range of Galileo's career while also letting him speak--in clear English. No other volume offers more convenient or more reliable access to Galileo's own words, whether on the telescope, the Dialogue, the trial, or the mature theory of motion. --Michael H. Shank, Professor of the History of Science, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in Florence in 1632, was the most proximate cause of his being brought to trial before the Inquisition. Using the dialogue form, a genre common in classical philosophical works, Galileo masterfully demonstrates the truth of the Copernican system over the Ptolemaic one, proving, for the first time, that the earth revolves around the sun. Its influence is incalculable. The Dialogue is not only one of the most important scientific treatises ever written, but a work of supreme clarity and accessibility, remaining as readable now as when it was first published. This edition uses the definitive text established by the University of California Press, in Stillman Drake’s translation, and includes a Foreword by Albert Einstein and a new Introduction by J. L. Heilbron.