John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought (review)
observational evidence and vows of obedience. Forced to write circumspectly, he thus became the butt of Galileo’s unnecessarily violent attacks over the priority of the discovery and the nature of sunspots. The unkindest cut of all was that Galileo had appropriated Scheiner’s discovery of variation in the angle of rotation of the sun and used it in the Dialogue as a principal argument in favor of Copernicanism. So in 1633 Scheiner wrote his Prodromus pro sole mobile (published only in 1651, after the author’s death) to expose both Galileo’s plagiarism of his discovery and to disprove the conclusion he had drawn from it. In appendices, Blackwell has included translations of relevant extracts from the Jesuits’ Ratio studiorum, the letters of the Jesuit General Claudio Aquaviva on adherence to Aristotle and Aquinas, and the opening chapter of Scheiner’s Prodromus. Though the conduct of Galileo’s trial was probably less sinister than Blackwell has suggested, with these two defenses of the Church’s condemnation of Copernicanism we have a new, intriguing glimpse behind the scenes. W. R. LAIRD Carleton University