Reading Galileo’s Discorsi in the Early Modern University*
Abstract This article examines the scholarly practices with which readers at three universities read select passages from Galileo’s 1638 Discorsi, a work depicted by Galileo as one that eschewed the goals and methods of Aristotelian natural philosophy in favor of the quantitative and experimental ones characteristic of modern science. The article reveals that a group of readers — diverse in terms of institutional affiliation, disciplinary identity, geography, and attitude toward Galileo — approached Galileo’s text using the tools of what Ann Blair has termed “bookish” natural philosophy. It argues that, contrary to Galileo’s rhetoric, these readers saw old and new methods as interchangeable.