Book and Manuscript Identification

Note: links will become active once my book, Galileo’s Library, has been published

This page provides an overview of the data that supports the visualizations and analytics in Galileo’s Library: Data, Methods, and the Humanities (under review). There are several sources for identifying the books and manuscripts that were in the Galilei households:

  • Books annotated by Galileo (see the list, with comments on misattributions and forgeries, periodically updated: Galileo’s Marginalia)
  • Books cited by Galileo
  • Letters in which Galileo, family members, friends, colleagues, and fans discuss sending books
  • An inventory of books in the Galilei home at the death of his son in 1649
  • An inventory of books in the Galilei home at the death of his daughter-in-law in 1669
  • The 232-page list of books owned by Galileo’s final student in 1702 (transcription link)
  • The late 19th-century research completed by the editor of the national edition of Galileo’s works
  • Michele Camerota’s review of the letters that discuss manuscripts specifically
  • My earlier work to revisit these sources
  • Other modern scholars who have identified connections between Galileo and other authors

The complete data set used for Galileo’s Library can be found in Bowdoin’s Digital Commons: (link). Note: all column headings are explained in the first tab, labeled “ColumnGuide.” Data was last updated in April 2025.

Subsets of the data for different chapters can be recreated using the following steps:

  • Introduction:
    • Books by Galileo: see the tab in the data set “BooksByGalileo”
    • Census of extant copies of books authored by Galileo: see the tab in the data set “GGBookCensus”
  • Chapter 1: in the tab “AllBooksMssDataApril2025” use filters in the “CnxnToGG” column for “SentBy” and “SentTo”
  • Chapter 2: in the tab “AllBooksMssDataApril2025” use filters in the “CnxnToGG” column for “CitedBy,” “Requested,” and “Annotated”
  • Chapter 3: in the tab “AllBooksMssDataApril2025” remove blank rows from the “ArchivioTitle” column
  • Chapter 4: in the tab “AllBooksMssDataApril2025” remove blank rows from the “MSGal308Title” column
  • Chapter 6:
    • see the tab “Favs537” for the data for figures 6.2 through 6.8
    • see the tab “Berni” for the data for figure 6.9
  • Chapter 7: see the tab “Isotopes” for possible editions of many of the titles in the library
  • Chapter 8: see the tab “AllComedyData” for the data used in figures 8.2 and 8.3