Robert Westman on

Galileo and Related

Matters
J. L. Heilbron
University of California Berkeley

Robert Westman’s massive book—The Copernican Question. Prognostica-

tion, Skepticism, and Celestial Order. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2011. xviii ⫹ 681 pp. (double columns), 85 b&w illustrations, 7 ta-
bles, index—presents a novel thesis and a wealth of material. It is certain to
raise questions that go beyond the Copernican. Therefore the Editors are pleased
to be able to offer reviews by two people familiar with the documents to which
the book refers. The ªrst of these, by Noel Swerdlow, examines the evidence for
the book’s central thesis: concern for the defense and improvement of astrology
caused Copernicus to build his system. The other review, by John Heilbron, con-
siders the workmanship behind the book and related matters, particularly as
manifested in its extensive treatment of Galileo.—The editors.
The Copernican Question is the long-awaited life’s work of its author. It is
monumental in size and scope, as beªts an effort to revise all previous ac-
counts of the early-modern war of the world systems. It has already won
many accolades, notably from colleagues whose warm endorsements ªll
the verso of the book’s jacket. With great regret I must say that I do not
share their opinion that it is a “magniªcent scholarly achievement” or that
it demonstrates “profound understanding of [its] subject.”
The question of The Copernican Question is why Copernicus and his few
early followers took the trouble to rework Ptolemy for a heliocentric
world. A subsidiary question is how theories “travel”: how an important
innovation tossed up at a particular place and time becomes widely ac-
cepted. If this subsidiary question is taken literally, its answer in the case
of Copernicus is known owing to work to which Westman has made im-
portant contributions. Copernican ideas traveled by books, by annotations
in books, by ephemerides, correspondence, conversation, disputation, and
publicity by the Roman Catholic Church. Westman wants more than
Perspectives on Science 2012, vol. 20, no. 3
©2012 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

379
380 Robert Westman on Galileo and Related Matters

these social factors, however: he wants to know why individuals accepted a

Copernican theory (it came in various forms, and its acceptance in various
degrees) at the expense of received learning. This is to ask for psychologi-
cal factors, which, for Galileo at least, lie beyond the reach of the materials
that Westman has assembled.
Westman’s answer to the primary Copernican question is that Coperni-
cus himself and the “celestial practitioners” who followed him were con-
cerned to defeat the attacks on astrology launched by Pico della Miran-
dola. (“Celestial practitioner” is Westman’s neologism to avoid “scientist”
and its modernist freight.) Because the Copernican corpus does not men-
tion astrology, Westman has to argue from circumstantial evidence that a
desire to reform the art drove heliocentrism. This evidence, as he has con-
structed it, consists primarily of the activities of astrologers whom Coper-
nicus probably knew or knew of in Bologna around 1500. Westman does
not consider technical procedures coupling prognostication to planetary
order that would be required to sustain his case. Perhaps he is right: early-
modern astronomers were concerned with astrology whether they believed
in it or not. But history is written from documents, not from guesses, and
Westman has not exhibited the key evidence he needs to conªrm his.
According to Westman, the concern to improve astrological technique,
which motivated the ªrst generation of heavenly practitioners exposed to
De revolutionibus, gave way in the third generation to an effort to include
unique celestial events, like the appearance of a comet or nova, within the
system of regular motions of the stars and planets. This is a valuable con-
tribution to the periodization of the subject. Westman identiªes Kepler
and Galileo as the major ªgures among these latter-day Copernicans. I
shall conªne my remarks to the parts that concern Galileo, which, at
115,000 words exclusive of notes, amounts to a book in itself.

Galilean questions
The strength, timing, and possible ºuctuations of Galileo’s commitment
to heliocentrism are standard problems in the literature. Westman re-ex-
amines them in connection with Galileo’s disinclination to correspond
with Kepler and to declare himself publicly a disciple of Copernicus. Here
he parallels or follows Massimo Bucciantini, and so has the merit of sig-
naling Bucciantini’s important work to Anglophone readers (Bucciantini
2003). Westman makes the conundrum of Galileo’s behavior harder than
Bucciantini or anyone else has made it by mistranslation of a phrase in
Galileo’s letter of acknowledgment to Kepler for the gift of the Mysterium
cosmographicum. The relevant passage reads: in Copernici sententiam multis ab-
hinc annis venerim. Westman makes venerim a part of veneror (venerate)
rather than venio (come) and translates, “I have for many years past vener-
 Perspectives on Science 381

ated the opinion of Copernicus” (p. 358a). This rendering of a well-known

passage makes Galileo venerate what he only entertained: “I adopted
[came to] Copernicus’ opinion many years ago.”
The error allows us a glimpse into Westman’s workshop. It was not a
slip. “Venerated” is one of “a number of substantive changes” Westman
says (p. 576, n35) that he made in a translation of Galileo’s letter to Kep-
ler rendered by Willy Hartner. The others consist of “corrupt” for “per-
verse” (as a way of philosophizing), “this century” for “our century,” and
similar slight substitutions. Only one of them brings a clear improve-
ment, “refutations” for “computations” in Hartner’s odd phrase, “compu-
tations of contrary arguments.” It would have been sportsmanlike to con-
sider this substantial change merely the detection of a printer’s error
(“computations” for “confutations”). However that may be, the practice in
Westman’s workshop seems clear: replacing a few words in a published
translation with synonyms, a safe enough procedure if one begins with the
right word in the dictionary. Other examples of the operation, successfully
performed, may be found on pp. 318a, 570n41, and elsewhere.
There were many good reasons that Galileo did not take up the role of
Copernican agent that Kepler assigned him. He was an untenured for-
eigner (a Tuscan in Venice) obliged to teach Ptolemaic astronomy in Cath-
olic Italy. Why should he risk compromising himself by making common
cause with an unknown crackpot Protestant schoolteacher? Westman
traces Galileo’s silence to the continuing threat of the Roman censorship.
No doubt that became palpable later, after Bruno’s horrible death, which
warned prudent astronomers to keep away from heretical celestial practi-
tioners.
Westman remarks that Galileo would have felt the chilling shadow of
the incinerated Bruno all the more after 1604, when he, too, experienced
the Inquisition. In that year Silvestro Pagnoni, who had served Galileo as
a copyist, accused him of casting horoscopes and interpreting them fatalis-
tically. Pagnoni’s disclosures may prove more damaging to Westman than
they were to Galileo. In Westman’s version of the events, Pagnoni deposed
as follows (the brackets are Westman’s): “I have seen him in his room mak-
ing different nativities for different people on which he [then] made his
judgment. And he made these [judgments] one after the other, and said he
had done so for some twenty years in order to make a living. . . .”
As Westman says, Pagnoni’s disclosure if true would push Galileo’s as-
trological practice back to his late teens. Since this precocity would help
the thesis that Copernican practitioners were obsessed with astrology,
Westman advises that we accept Pagnoni’s testimony as he has translated
it. “If one rejects this dating, one needs to explain why, suddenly and ex
nihilo, Galileo began to engage in a new practice for which he had no pre-
382 Robert Westman on Galileo and Related Matters

vious experience” (p. 376b). (Westman likes to awaken his readers with
thought-stretching non-sequiturs.) There is no reason to assume this bur-
den of explanation. The text that produced the teen-age astrologer runs,
“I’ve seen him in his room making different nativities for different people,
upon whom he made his prediction. And he made one [una] for a person
[uno] which told him he had another 20 years to live. . . .”1 The 20 years
that Galileo gave his client to live became 20 years in which Galileo had
practiced astrology for a living!
Westman’s rendering of Pagnoni’s further testimony makes it appear
that Galileo occasionally attended church, perhaps to deºect the interest
of the Inquisition. “Pagnoni said that he and Galileo had once gone to
mass together to observe a holiday” (p. 376b). What Pagnoni said was, “I
also know this, that in the 18 months I lived in his house I saw him go to
mass only once, and that was by accident, when he went to speak to
monsignore Querengo, and I was with him.”2 Westman then has Pagnoni
report seeing Galileo take his mistress to mass. What Pagnoni told the in-
quisitor was, “instead of going to mass he visited his whore Marina.”3
There is no doubt that Galileo cast horoscopes for money during his
Paduan years. Perhaps he did so earlier. But there is no reason to think
that he venerated Copernicus’ opinion because it might improve astrologi-
cal forecasting. Nor does Westman assert such a connection. He rightly
says that Galileo’s astrological practice was old-fashioned. Indeed, the
prognostications that Galileo made about the characters of his infant
daughters came straight from Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos. Galileo therefore
would seem to lie outside Westman’s orbit. The mistakes made by not
leaving him there are quite unnecessary self-inºicted injuries.
The fateful year 1604 saw the appearance of a nova. An upstart student
of Galileo’s, Baldassar Capra, claimed to be the ªrst in Padua to have spot-
ted it. Galileo held his peace until Capra plagiarized his military and geo-
metrical compass (which, despite what Westman says, is not used for
drawing circles). Then Galileo blasted Capra and Capra’s teacher Simon
Mayr. Westman picks out a passage from the blast that, he says, indicates
Galileo’s preference, in astronomy, for “a work of astronomical scholarship
rather than a courtier’s manual” (p. 390b). The text supporting this sound

1. “Io gli ho veduto in camera sua fare diverse natività per diverse persone, sopra le
quali fece il suo giudicio. Et glie ne fece una a uno, che gli disse che haveva da viver ancora
20 anni . . .”
2. “Io so anche questo, che io son stato 18 mesi in casa sua et non l’ho mai visto andare
alla messa altro che una volta, con occasione che lui andò per accidente, per parlare a
monsignore Querengo, che io fui con lui.”
3. “In cambio de andare alla messa andava da quella sua putana Marina.” Texts in Poppi
1993, pp. 51, 53.
 Perspectives on Science 383

doctrine does not appear to have anything to do with it. But it has its in-
terest. It reads, in Westman’s translation and brackets, “both of them, the
author himself and his teacher, would have learned modesty from him
[Tycho] that they would have wished to insert into their writings, includ-
ing some things written by their friend [Tycho] while he lived [che ancora
viveva] . . .” It is true that Tycho wrote what he wrote while he lived, but
this important insight is not what Galileo had in mind. The text reads,
“both of them, as students of the same teacher [Tycho], could have learned
decorum from him; for, when he wanted to publish some things written
by a friend of his while the friend was still living . . .”4 Tycho had asked
permission from his friend; Capra took without asking from Galileo.
One of the better sections in The Copernican Question describes the recep-
tion of Kepler’s book on the nova in England. The inscribed presentation
copy that Kepler sent King James I has survived. In one of the many good
illustrations in the book, Westman reproduces its dedication. In it Kepler
represents himself as the cantankerous philosopher Diogenes (he of the
barrel) begging his bread in Prague from another Alexander, “an oblique
reference to his chronically hopeless ªnancial woes,” and, perhaps, to the
obstacles that the demand of imperial employment put in the way of his
work. Did not the ancient Diogenes reply to his prince, when Alexander
asked him what he might do to help him, reply, stand out of the way, you
are blocking my sun? Somehow Westman makes James “Diogenes hold-
ing together the Britains” (p. 407a). He asks in one of his arresting non-
sequiturs, “having failed abysmally, thus far, with Galileo, how could
Kepler hope for the king’s public endorsement?” (p. 405b). How, indeed,
if his dedication put the king in or over a barrel?5 There was no need for
Westman to attempt this lèse-majesté against James and grammar.
Whether James was Diogenes or the Devil has nothing to do with the as-
trological origins of heliocentrism.
A ªnal example returns to the point that Westman’s book, big as it is,
does not contain the sort of information he needs to elucidate Galileo’s re-
lationships with his contemporaries. The case concerns Martin Horky, a
one-time protégé of Kepler who served brieºy as an assistant to the profes-
sor of mathematics at the University of Bologna. Horky’s tedious and cap-

4. “ambidue, come studiosi del medesimo autore, potevano avere appresa la modestia
da quello, il quale, volendo inserir ne’ suoi scritti alcune cose di un amico suo, che ancora
viva . . .” (583n53).
5. “Regi Philosophanti, Philosophus serviens/ Platoni Diogenes/ Britannias tenenti,
Pragae/ stipen[dium] mendicans ab Alexandro/ e dolio conductitio/ hoc suum
philsophema/misit et commendavit,” “To the philosopher king/ to him who holds the
British isles/ The philosopher servant/ to Plato, Diogenes of Prague/ He who begs his pay
from Alexander/ from a rented barrel/ sent and entrusted this his philosophical treatise.”
384 Robert Westman on Galileo and Related Matters

tious complaints about the reliability of Galileo and the telescope include
the sentence, vidi nihil, quod veri planetae redoleat, “I did not see anything
that has the smell of a true planet.” Westman explains: “Horky’s objection
was that the alleged entities were not planets because they lacked a neces-
sary (albeit unusual) astrological property—emitting a scent” (p. 476b).
Order by odor? But this by the way: Horky describes for Kepler Galileo’s
appearance in April 1610 when he passed through Bologna to demon-
strate his telescopic discoveries. Things went badly. No one could make
out Jupiter’s moons. Here is what Westman makes of Horky’s description:
“His hair falling out; in his weak replies, his skin covered with the pim-
ples of the French disease; his skull attacked; his ravings ªnding lodging
in his brain . . . ,” suffering from gout and palpitations of the heart, “his
guts producing an unnatural tumor because he exercises no more charm
by contrast with learned men and notables . . .” (pp. 471b–472ba).
Although the nonsensical phrases, “in his weak replies” and “exercises
no more charm by contrast with learned men,” signal trouble in transla-
tion,6 most readers will gather from the rest of the passage that Galileo
was not feeling or looking well in Bologna. That, however, is not the way
Westman reads it. For him the sick party is Horky. “Horky’s elemental,
bodily idiom of emotion gave voice to the fear of novelty—of looking too
closely. Here, once again, was the familiar, if unusually vivid, trope of the
disorderly monster” (p. 472a). In fact, Horky reported what he saw. Gali-
leo did suffer from most if not all the ills mentioned, and others besides,
which periodically sent him to bed unable to read, write, or walk. There is
no reason to think that Horky feared novelty. Rather, he sought reputa-
tion. Destroying the apparently weak Galileo would have been a quick
and easy way to get it. If the episode has a lesson, it is not that Horky
spoke for frightened conservatives. They hounded him back to Prague,
where he learned authoritatively from Kepler that he had made an ass of
himself.
It would be idle and unfair to suggest that in a book of 375,000 words,
90 double-column pages of notes, and a bibliography of thousands of
items, there is little of value. On the contrary, there is much in the way of
books, articles, facts, ideas, suggestions, leads, and insights, recoverable
through an immense index, which could be followed up with proªt. On
the level of scholarly apparatus, it is excellent: the citations lead to the
6. Horky to Kepler, 27 April 1610: tota cutis et cuticula ºore Gallico scatet, “his entire
skin has broken out with the ornaments of syphilis;” intestina tumorem praeter naturam
deponunt, quia ulterius apud studiosos et viros illustres non titillat, which means something like
“his bowels are contained in a tremendous tumor because among scholars and gentlemen a
further protrusion would not be amusing.” That is a cruel joke: Galileo had a huge
peritoneal hernia.
 Perspectives on Science 385

sources, the texts in languages other than English are sound apart from in-
evitable typos, and the names in the large cast of characters are spelled cor-
rectly and consistently: in short, the book has its uses. The great misfor-
tune, the sad misfortune, is that nothing substantial taken from the
original texts can be trusted.

Other questions
The foregoing remarks were written without pleasure in fulªllment of the
obligation of a reviewer. Had readers of Westman’s work voiced similar
reservations earlier, he might have been made aware of the weaknesses that
produced the disasters of The Copernican Question. There have been many
opportunities. The garbled version of Pagnoni’s testimony ªrst appeared
in a book review in Isis in 1996 (cf. Westman 1996). Did no one, not even
the author of the book reviewed, point out the errors? Westman thanks
twenty colleagues and students for careful reading of drafts of The Coperni-
can Question and perceptive comments on them. He mentions further that
he has tested his ideas in lectures and seminars all over Europe and the
United States, some twenty-one times between 1993 and 2010 (pp. xvib–
xviia). Did no one raise serious objections or did he not listen? Did the ref-
erees of the University of California Press not do their duty or were they
ignored? The endorsements quoted at the outset of this review indicate
that their authors would not have been likely to furnish the criticism that
might have saved the book.
The late Joseph Ben-David once told me that the day after he handed
in his doctoral thesis he found his professor in the library checking the
footnotes. We have fallen far from this level of oversight. We are often lax
about the extent and quality of the evidence we require to underpin his-
torical arguments. The summary of Westman’s argument that Peter Dear
published in Science last year is exemplary here: it is an excellent summary,
clear and economical, but omits to mention that the suppositious astro-
logical motivation of Copernicus’ work has no known documentary basis
(Dear 2011). As we know, what Dear praises as “a hefty and enormously
erudite treatment of Copernicanism” rests on a shaky guess and acquires
its heft largely from material irrelevant to it.
Since The Copernican Question is an accretion of ideas and materials as-
sembled over many years, it can be read, apart from the historical narra-
tive, as an historiographical essay. Westman’s judgments are not always
gentle. For example, although he allows that Stillman Drake’s timing of
the onset of Galileo’s Copernicanism, a crucial event in Westman’s history,
is “not without merit,” on closer inspection it is “forced [and] ad hoc”
(p. 579n102), “disabling, contrarian . . . unnecessary, even perverse”
(pp. 365b–366a). Westman is more lenient and more correct in rejecting
386 Robert Westman on Galileo and Related Matters

Drake’s identiªcation of Galileo as the sole author of the famous attack on

philosophers by “Cecco di Ronchetti” published in Padua during the con-
troversy over the nova of 1604 (pp. 387b, 583n36). No doubt Westman is
also right in thinking that Drake’s hostility to philosophers and sympathy
with Galileo assisted the identiªcation. Then, in another of his gratuitous
hostages to fortune, Westman claims Cecco’s work as “Brunonian” in form
(p. 380ab) when it plainly copies the style and dialect of Galileo’s favorite
comic playwright Ruzzante.
We learn more from Westman’s dialogue with Mario Biagioli’s Galileo
courtier (1993). Biagioli’s main thesis, which attributes much of Galileo’s
science after 1609 to choices he made, or had to make, to maintain himself
as a favorite of Cosimo II, conºicts with the wider range of sociabilities
Westman assigns to heavenly practitioners. He is right that the restriction
of motives to considerations of court dynamics not only leaves too little
room for historical explanation but also demotes “heavenly practitioners
to the subsidiary role of socially anxious performers and entertainers”
(p. 438a). But it is one thing to challenge an interpretation and another to
accuse the interpreter of having “overlooked or misread historical sources
both crucial and inconvenient to his argument” (p. 591, n26).
Since this accusation, which might almost be leveled at the accuser, al-
lows a further glimpse into Westman’s workshop, it may deserve a few
more words here. The footnote with the accusation continues: “Most tell-
ingly, [Michael] Shank demonstrated that Jupiter was neither astrologi-
cally nor mythologically central to the motifs in . . . [certain] rooms in the
Palazzo Vecchio.” In fact, as the long exchange between Biagioli and
Shank made clear, Shank’s demonstration was neither secure nor relevant;
what counted was whether, when Galileo dedicated Sidereus nuncius to
Cosimo II, anyone remembered or cared about the iconography of the old
palace.7 (In any case, comparing a ruling prince to Jupiter scarcely needed
the elaborate justiªcation that identiªcation with, say, Diogenes, would
have required.) It was not correct to use Shank’s evaluation of Biagioli’s
merit as an iconographer to insinuate that he “overlooked and misread his-
torical sources” as a biographer of Galileo. Westman seems to have swept
into his unfriendly note of 2011 a judgment made in a different context in
1994 (Westman 1994, p. 103). To make good the charge that Biagioli dis-
torted or ignored documents important for his interpretation of Galileo’s
work under the Medici, Westman would have to present specimens of
documents Biagioli misread and neglected. And this he has not done.

7. The controversy, which occupies 70 pages in Early Science and Medicine, 1:1 (Feb
1996), takes up some matters of greater historiographical interest than Vasari’s redecora-
tion of the Medici palace.
 Perspectives on Science 387

Westman’s main historiographical antagonist is Thomas Kuhn. Like

many who entered the profession in the 1960s, Westman felt the inºuence
of Kuhn’s Structure of scientiªc revolutions, which gave him his “problem-
atic.” How and why do theories change? Kuhn presented the Copernican
revolution as the result of a slow accumulation of anomalies that inspired a
fundamental innovation (not in itself a revolution), which, with the help
of Tycho, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton, ended by overturning the world
system (p. 510b). Westman inclined toward this “big-picture” approach.
Later he saw some merit in the micro-history of discovery, and resolved to
sail “a treacherous middle course between the Scylla of internalist concep-
tualism and the Charybdis of the local turn” (p. 4a). Parochialism could
not explain the spread of novelty among celestial practitioners and the
internalist big picture missed, among other things, the importance of as-
trology in the Copernican story (p. 9b). This last omission was the more
striking to a close reader of Structure because, according to Westman, as-
trology was “the Kuhnian ‘normal science’ of its day.” To provide for
change, however, astrology could be practiced “un-Kuhnianly on the
foundations of Copernican, Platonic or Tychonic planetary theory”
(p. 435a).
Proceeding un-Kuhnianly, Westman recognized that his disparate band
of Copernican followers and fellow travelers did not make a community
sufªciently coherent to sustain a scientiªc revolution (p. 14b). Their di-
versity kept them from “dramatic discontinuist gestures;” their history is
“suspicious of disjunctions” (p. 20b). This important assertion, which is
fundamental to Westman’s approach, gave him the strength to go to the
mat with Kuhn. The point at issue was the “heavenly novelties” of the
1570s, which, in The Copernican revolution, Kuhn had “struggled to accom-
modate . . . within a narrative organized around the gradual ascendancy of
Copernicus’ theory.” He had lost the struggle, forced by the facts to con-
cede that the novelties had nothing to do with the Copernican theory. To
extract himself from this difªculty, Kuhn had appealed to “climate of
opinion”—the sort of “open-ended phrasing for which he was famous”—
which only made more evident “the narrational and logical difªculties of
making ‘Copernicanism’ the driving explanation of his story” (p. 225ab).
(The connection Kuhn had in mind was collaboration in the demolition of
the Aristotelian cosmos.)
In The Structure of Scientiªc Revolutions (still according to Westman)
Kuhn played the philosopher and made the comet of 1577 the instrument
of “epistemic rupture,” that is, of scientiªc revolution. “[The evidence] no
more sustains this sort of reading than it does the totalizing account of so-
cial, logical, and linguistic rupture to which it was supposed to lend sup-
port.” There was no Copernican revolution in the sixteenth century. In-
388 Robert Westman on Galileo and Related Matters

stead, “the divination-driven science of the stars continued to organize the

central classiªcatory matrix within which authors of heavenly tracts ad-
vanced claims, tested proposals, set up new projects, and argued about the
whole enterprise. And it was within this prognosticating framework that
the emergent group of authors began to put forward proposals to improve
the technologies for interpreting heavenly signs and making annual pre-
dictions” (pp. 225b–226a).
These last passages, combined with Westman’s frequent recurrence to
“Kuhnian” themes, suggests that the guess-thesis of The Copernican Ques-
tion originated in his ruminations over Kuhn’s writings on revolutions. It
appears that the engagement of most of our discipline with big problems
ªfty years ago framed Westman’s big question, and that the laxer and less
critical profession of recent years abetted the publication of his answer.

References
Bucciantini, Massimo. 2003. Galileo e Keplero. Turin: G. Einaudi.
Dear, Peter. 2011. “Copernicus and the Science of the Stars.” Science 334:
598–9.
Poppi, Antonino. 1993. Cremonini, Galilei e gli inquisitori del Santo a
Padova. Padova: Antenore.
Westman, Robert. 1994. “Two Cultures or One: A Second Look at Kuhn’s
The Copernican Revolution.” Isis 85: 79–115.
Westman, Robert. 1996. “Review of Antonino Poppi, Cremonini e Galilei.”
Isis, 87: 166–7.
Westman, Robert. 2011. The Copernican Question. Prognostication, Skepticism,
and Celestial Order. Berkeley: University of California Press.