Galileo and the Stain of Time

Author(s): Wilding, Nick | Abstract: The future is usually conceived of spatially only as metaphor. However, in Aristotelian physics, the zone beyond the moon was supposed to be comprised of a different matter, the quintessence, to that comprising the Earth. This was incorruptible and unchanging, and obeyed different laws of physics. Galileo’s observations of random, changing, and unpredictable marks on the surface of the Sun in 1611 were understood by his adversaries and him as fundamentally destroying the Aristotelian division between sub- and supra-lunary matter and physics. He offered a version of the cosmos where mutability, generation and corruption were omnipresent, where the future was everywhere.

[1]  J. North.  God's Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time , 2004 .

[2]  D. Hoke,et al.  History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders , 1996 .

[3]  Patrick Curry.  Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England , 1989 .

[4]  M. Camerota,et al.  Once more about Galileo and astrology. A neglected testimony , 2005 .

[5]  Eric W. Cochrane,et al.  Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice , 1983 .

[6]  A. Brady,et al.  The Uses of the Future in Early Modern Europe , 2009 .

[7]  Michael Cole.  Cellini's Blood , 1999 .

[8]  M. Lavin.  The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in Italian Churches, 431-1600 , 1992 .

[9]  T. Kuhn,et al.  The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought , 1958 .

[10]  G. Pomata,et al.  Historia : empiricism and erudition in early modern Europe , 2015 .

[11]  L. Mumford.  Technics and Civilization , 1934, Nature.

[12]  E. Garin.  Astrology in the Renaissance : the zodiac of life , 1983 .

[13]  E. Reeves.  Speaking of Sunspots: Oral Culture in an Early Modern Scientific Exchange , 2007 .

[14]  Michel-Pierre Lerner.  The Origin and Meaning of “World System” , 2005 .

[15]  E. Zilsel,et al.  The Genesis of the Concept of Scientific Progress , 1945 .

[16]  G. Ruggiero.  Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance , 1993 .

[17]  Lucien Auvray.  Fra Paolo Sarpi. Lettere ai protestanti. Prima edizione critica, a cura di Manlio Duilio Busnelli. Bari, Laterza, 1931. (Collection des Scrittori d'Italia.) , 1932 .

[18]  G. Stabile.  Linguaggio della natura e linguaggio della scrittura in Galilei. Dalla Istoria sulle macchie solari alle Lettere Copernicane , 1994 .

[19]  B. Dooley.  Morandi's Last Prophecy and the End of Renaissance Politics , 2002 .

[20]  Silvio A. Bedini.  The pulse of time : Galileo Galilei, the determination of longitude, and the pendulum clock , 1991 .

[21]  M. Trachtenberg.  Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence , 2002 .

[22]  K. Pomian.  L'ordre du temps , 1984 .

[23]  R. Bautier.  Pierre SARDELLA. Nouvelles et spéculations à Venise au début du XVIe siècle. Paris, A. Colin, s. d. [1948]. (Cahiers des Annales, I.) , 1951 .

[24]  David Wootton.  Accuracy and Galileo: A Case Study in Quantification and the Scientific Revolution , 2010 .

[25]  F. Baumgartner.  Sunspots or Sun's Planets: Jean Tarde and the Sunspot Controversy of the Early Seventeenth Century , 1987 .

[26]  J. Koerner,et al.  The moment of self-portraiture in German renaissance art , 1993 .

[27]  N. Kollerstrom.  Galileo's astrology , 2001 .

[28]  N. Swerdlow.  Galileo's Horoscopes , 2004 .

[29]  M. Camerota.  Galileo Galilei e la cultura scientifica nell’età della Controriforma , 2004 .

[30]  P. Sohm.  Maniera and the Absent Hand: Avoiding the Etymology of Style , 1999, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics.

[31]  Arthur Goldhammer,et al.  Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages , 1980 .

[32]  R. Quinones.  The Renaissance discovery of time , 1972 .

[33]  Marcella Grendler,et al.  The Italian Renaissance of mathematics : studies on humanists and mathematicians from Petrarch to Galileo , 1977 .

[34]  E. Mcmullin.  Galileo on science and Scripture , 1998 .

[35]  T. Mayer.  The censoring of Galileo’s Sunspot Letters and the first phase of his trial , 2011 .

[36]  W. Shea.  Galileo, Scheiner, and the Interpretation of Sunspots , 1970, Isis.

[37]  R. Herr.  Solar Rotation Determined from Thomas Harriot's Sunspot Observations of 1611 to 1613 , 1978, Science.

[38]  Francesco Guicciardini,et al.  I Guicciardini e le scienze occulte : l'oroscopo di Francesco Guicciardini : lettere di alchimia, astrologia e cabala a Luigi Guicciardini , 1990 .

[39]  Peter W. Parshall.  IMAGO CONTRAFACTA: IMAGES AND FACTS IN THE NORTHERN RENAISSANCE , 1993 .

[40]  I. Rowland.  The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery , 2004 .

[41]  Daniel Rosenberg,et al.  Cartographies of time , 2010 .

[42]  Arthur Goldhammer,et al.  Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages , 1981 .

[43]  G. Davies.,et al.  Preaching in the Spanish Golden Age: A Study of Some Preachers of the Reign of Philip III , 1980 .