4 August 2016 – When astronomer Galileo Galilei was a rising star, he corresponded with the formidable Margherita Sarrocchi — a salon host, epic poet and polymath versed in geometry, natural philosophy and logic. Meredith Ray’s new book Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo is a rich analysis of the exchange. She shows how the pair found common ground in assessing each other’s work, whether the discovery of Jupiter’s satellites or the crafting of poetic nuance. It is an illuminating explication of the dynamics in early-modern arts and sciences, complemented by the first full English translation of the letters.
And it is a wonderful complement to Ray’s book Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. In that book she tried to recover women’s scientific knowledge by examining women’s poetry, letters, recipe collections, literary debates and alchemy. In early modern Europe, alchemy was pursued as both a branch of natural philosophy and a body of craft knowledge. This practical, vernacular dimension made it accessible to sixteenth- and seventeenth- century women at all levels of society.
She noted in that book that Renaissance Italy had no female Galileo, but it did have Margherita Sarrocchi, a poet and avid student of mathematics, hailed by her contemporaries as a “marvel of the female sex”.
Both books are great reads.