Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago, U. of Chgo. Press, 1993).

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Response

[At the onset: I have serious doubts about my intellectual ability, in a short paper, to summarize Biagioli’s argument, assess its persuasive power, and consider the applicability of its proposed interpretive framework to other cases despite Biagioli’s suggested “homologies between Galileo’s experience and that of other scientific practitioners who happened to choose similar court- or patronage-based strategies of legitimation”]

Mario Biagioli’s Galileo, Courtier details the process of cognitive legitimation of the “new science” achieved in the context of northern Italian court patronage through Galileo’s acquisition of status within that patronage system. Biagioli argues that the social legitimation achieved by practitioners of the “new science” through the performative act of self-fashioning, facilitated by the munificence of their increasingly singular and powerful patrons, existed in a complex, mutually-reinforcing interplay of knowledge, power, and status. This social legitimation of the intellectual or artistic professional was translatable into the cognitive or aesthetic legitimation of that individual’s profession. Galileo, Courtier is neither a social history nor a biography of Galileo, and thus has no pretense of comprehensiveness (the bibliographic ecosystem of Galileo Studies is already overpopulated). Rather, Biagioli intends this work to establish a new interpretive framework for understanding early modern science. He does not intend to present this interpretative framework of socio-cognitive legitimation as the only avenue of legitimation for the new science. Often, he admits, the technical virtuosity of the mathematical sciences was a sufficient generator of legitimacy. The complex interrelationships between power, knowledge, and codependent individuals necessary for Biagioli’s argument requires a reorientation of our conception of power. According to Biagioli, power in this period of northern Italian courts was not an inanimate resource external to cognitive developments to be extracted, exploited, and accumulated in service to those cognitive pursuits, but rather a process — the logistical flow of goods, status, knowledge. Empowerment is the exercise of influence over this flow. The cognitive legitimation of Galileo’s technical and scientific developments, put simply, is the byproduct of his socioprofessional legitimation as an embedded participant in a culture of clientelism. This socioprofessional legitimation arises out of a process of what might be called socioprofessional actualization, what Biagioli terms “self-fashioning.” This distillate is the most concentrated form of Biagioli’s byzantine argument.

The above is an, admittedly, inadequate condensation of Biagioli’s argument. One could be forgiven for this inadequacy under the current constraints considering Biagioli himself requires a full ten pages of prologue (and several of the initial pages of the first chapter) to summarize his argument. The method via which these claims have been generated is what Biagioli describes as “epistolary anthropology,” a pedantic but entertaining way of describing the reading of other people’s mail.

The motives behind these arguments are more complex than the method, though. Biagioli seeks nothing less than to transcend two epochal historiographies of science. The first, characteristic of an older historical practice in our discipline, under the influence of the mind-body dualism to which Western epistemic practice so frequently falls prey, conceived of scientific evolution as a process of inexorable adoption of a theory on the basis of that theory’s inherent force (derivative from its undeniable truth). Science proper, from the perspective of this historiographic framework, is alienated from sociocultural context. The patronage system Galileo lived in is, from this point of view, seen as an externality only capable of supplying a research program or tainting it with irrational influences.

The more recent historiographic protocol (reductively) ascribed to Mertonion sociology of science and Kuhnian paradigmaticity, though less heuristically-crippling for Biagioli because of its dependence on scientific communities and professionalization, is little applicable Galileo’s system and perpetuates the otherness engendered by the bifurcation of “modern science” from “whatever came before it.” To address these issues, Biagioli has this to say, which, due to its novelty and idiosyncrasy, is difficult to summarize:

The sociological and conceptual dimensions of modern science that the historiography informed by Kuhn or Merton attributes to the professional identity one develops by being socialized into a scientific community or social group must be sought for in the process of self-fashioning that early modern scientists underwent by entering into patronage relationships and networks. I am not claiming that patronage is the early analogue of scientific community. I am suggesting that patronage is the key to understanding processes of identity and status formation that are the keys to understanding both the scientists’ cognitive attitudes and career strategies.

 

Knowing his arguments, method, and aims, let us turn to the first chapter wherein Biagioli details Galileo’s process of self-fashioning.

In brief, the patronage system of northern Italian courts at this time was not a simple hierarchical orientation between the grand duke or prince and everyone else. The system of patronage penetrate deeply into society through successively lower-status quanta of society as a recursive tree structure. Ascent in status, for Galileo as others, what Biagioli calls self-fashioning, was a process of acquiring, testing, and renegotiating patronage relationships with increasingly influential patrons whose influence, or patronage-potency, was inversely correlated to their relational distance from the epicenter of the influence network — the grand duke or prince. The lynchpin of Biagioli’s demonstration of this self-fashioning process is Marcel Mauss’s (and later Pierre Clastres’s) gift economy developed ethnographically (good thing Biagioli described his method as epistolary anthropology in the prologue). My, albeit amateur, understanding of this anthropological device causes notice of several important ingredients of the gift economy absent from and even contradictory to Galileo’s socio-cultural environment as described by Biagioli. Most essentially of all, in many of the indigenous non-Western cultures who use the gift economy, it is a powerful socio-economic device for preserving an egalitarian network of social relationships — it serves to flatten hierarchies; Biagioli is using it to explain the maintenance of a highly stratified hierarchy of inequality natural and necessary to clientelism. The gift economy is the essential theoretical framework Biagioli uses to substantiate the process of self fashioning. And though Biagioli amply demonstrates the process of self-fashioning in his 90 page first “chapter,” I see as much evidence for a different interpretive framework — a market economy in which status is the medium of exchange. Though Biagioli more than establishes the marginality of money and in part uses this to deemphasize the market nature of the economy of clientelism, I believe market economics has as much explanatory power as the gift economy if status, rather than financial remuneration, is repositioned as the primary currency.

It seems like, though the clients were incapable of returning equally monetarily-valued gifts to their patrons as they received, the gifts they provided, in terms of works of art, scientific discoveries, etc., had a status-value comparable to the stipends and titles the patrons could dole out. The art and science the patrons received substantiated their magnificence and provided them with a quality of status which distinguished them from other wealthy individuals incapable of patronizing the arts and sciences. In my estimation there is a kind of market economy of supply and demand dynamics at work here in which the client received that which the patron had in excess (material remuneration) and the patron received that which the client had in excess, but which the patron could not produce for himself (intellectual produce of the new science), all the while it was a mutually beneficial exchange that increased the “wealth” (status) of both, satisfying all of the fundamental criteria of proto-capitalistic systems. The interpretive framework would reorient the social-contextual focus onto the patron. The Medici, through this lens, would be understood as transmogrifying their financial acumen as bankers of financial value into bankers of social value. Our understanding of clientelism would be reconfigured, rather than as a gift economy, as a proto-capitalist exchange in which both clients and patrons invest in one another as assets in the hope of accumulating interest on social capital in the form of enhanced status. This conception is as thoroughly evidenced in the first chapter of Galileo, Courtier as the gift economy.

 

[as for the applicability of Biagioli’s interpretative framework to other cases, I am incapable of assessing that]

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Notes

• [PROLOGUE: COURT CULTURE AND THE LEGITIMATION OF SCIENCE]
• 2 – In particular, the court contributed to the cognitive legitimation of the new science by providing venues for the social legitimation of its practitioners, and this, in turn, boosted the epistemological status of their discipline.”
• “In Galileo Courtier, power is treated neither as limited to its more material forms nor as a ‘thing’ external to the process of knowledge-making.”
• “This view of the relationship between power, knowledge, and self-fashioning applies well to an analysis of Galileo’s scientific career. In many ways, I am presenting a study of a scientist’s self-fashioning.”
• 3 – “In a sense, Galileo reinvented himself around 1610 by becoming the grand duke’s philosopher and mathematician. Although in doing so he borrowed from and renegotiated existing social roles and cultural codes, the socioprofessional identity he constructed for himself was definitely original. Galileo was a bricoleur.”
• “This book traces Galileo’s court-based articulation of the new socioprofessional identity of the ‘new philosopher’ or ‘philosophical astronomer’ and analyzes the relationship between this identity and Galileo’s work. It does so by reconstructing hte culture and codes of courtly behavior that framed Galileo’s everyday practices, his texts, his presentation of himself and his discoveries, and his interaction with other courtiers, patrons, mathematicians, and philosophers.”

 

• Galileo Courtier is neither a biography nor a social history of Galileo’s career. Although I follow Galileo through several nonconsecutive years and scientific disputes, and analyze several of his texts, my chief aim is to provide a detailed, sometimes microscopic, study of the structures of his daily activities and concerns and to show how these framed his scientific activities.”

 

• “The bibliography of works on Galileo comprises several volumes already and its growth rate is not yet declining. Consequently, coverage has not been a priority of this work. Rather, I have tried to provide a new interpretive framework through a few case studies based on scientific disputes and episodes from Galileo’s career.”
• 4 – “Also, I do not wish to claim that the point of view adopted here can make sense of Galileo’s entire career and texts.”

 

• “Similarly, I do not want to argue that the strategies of social and cognitive legitimation I analyze in the case of Galileo were the only ones available for the legitimation of the new science and cosmology.”

 

• “In several instances, the credibility of the mathematical sciences resulted from their success in solving technical problems. That these scenarios are not discussed in this book does not mean that I underestimate their importance, but simply that I have decided to concentrate on those processes of legitimation that relied on the representation of the new science as something fitting the culture of princes, patrons, and courtiers.”

 

• “I will provide evidence that concerns for patronage and social climbing were not external to Galileo’s work. Court patronage was not simply a ‘resource’ to be used by shrewd, clearheaded operators. Patronage was part and parcel of the process of self-fashioning of all courtiers.”

• 4-5 – “As I argue in Chapter 1, patronage was an institution without walls, an elaborate and comprehensive system that constituted the social world of Galileo’s science. In short, Galileo is presented not only as a rational manipulator of the patronage machinery but also as somebody whose discourse, motivations, and intellectual choices were informed by the patronage culture in which he operated throughout his life. Not only was Galileo’s style embedded in court culture, but, as I hope to make clear by the end of the book, his increasing commitment to Copernicanism and his self-fashioning as a successful court client fed on each other.”

 

• 5 – “If Galileo’s science was not external to court culture and patronage concerns, neither was it determined by these concerns.”

 

• “By emphasizing the process of self-fashioning, I do not assume either an already existing ‘Galileo’ who deploys different tactics in different environments and yet remains always ‘true to himself,’ nor a Galileo who is passively shaped by the context that envelops him. Rather, I want to emphasize how he used the resources he perceived in the surrounding environment to construct a new socioprofessional identity for himself, to put forward a new natural philosophy, and to develop a courtly audience for it.”

 

• • [This will be the most difficult claim to establish, and it seems to portray Galileo as master of his destiny. It places him as the subject of his life’s story, perhaps delimiting environmental influences]
• [CHAPTER 1: GALILEO’S SELF-FASHIONING]
• 11 – opening quote, sets tone, perhaps galileo is being dramatic as a form of speech and when he says “the whole of my status and being” this is not a remark on his socioprofessional identity but a matter of courtesy
• 12 – “Reproducing the mind/body dualism, idealistic readings of the scientific revolution have tended to introduce a distinction between science (or the ‘scientific mind’) and flesh-and-blood scientists. Little attention has been paid by this historiography to the social dimensions of science which were occasionally called upon only to account for the scientists’ apparent deviations from assumed rational norms. Although a number of fascinating studies were produced by historians operating within this framework, the demarcation it introduced between theory-based, internal, rational, essential features of science, and its society-influenced, external, irrational, accidental dimensions reflected a problematic inversion . . ..”

 

• 12-3 – “In a fashion that bears a striking resemblance to Aristotelian essentialism, the emergence of a scientist’s belief in a given theory was not explained contextually but was taken for granted as the ‘natural’ result of the ‘force of that theory.’ Then, the ‘natural’ belief in a theory was assumed to produce an equally ‘natural’ commitment to it. When seen through these lenses, patronage became a means toward the fullfilment [sic] of rational goals (like securing support for a scientist’s rational research program) or, alternatively, as some sort of ‘thing of the flesh’ which causes the scientist’s body to deviate from the correct path established by his mind’s rational commitment to a good theory.”

 

• 13 – “More recent historians, broadly influenced by Mertonian sociology of science and the Kuhnian notion of ‘paradigm’ and related categories such as ‘scientific community’ and ‘professionalization,’ have seen the development of scientific societies (and the related establishment of scientific communities) toward the end of the scientific revolution as marking the beginning of ‘paradigmatic’ science. Although I find the distinction between paradigmatic and pre-paradigmatic less heuristically crippling than the one between modern rationality and whatever preceded it, it is still problematic in that it represents much of earlier science in terms of what it is not.”
• 13-4 – “To summarize, if idealistic historiography discourage historians from analyzing the social dimensions of scientific change (or limited the extent of their contextualizations) because of the distinction it drew between the scientist’s mind and body, more recent historiographical categories introduced to integrate social and intellectual dimensions (‘paradigm,’ scientific community,’ ‘scientific institutions’) do not seem to apply to most of early science. In short, the idealists present this period as populated by disembodied minds while the institution-minded historians may see it as a chaotic pattern of interacting bodies.”

 

• 14 – “The sociological and conceptual dimensions of modern science that the historiography informed by Kuhn or Merton attributes to the professional identity one develops by being socialized into a scientific community or social group must be sought for in the process of self-fashioning that early modern scientists underwent by entering into patronage relationships and networks. I am not claiming that patronage is the early analogue of scientific community. I am suggesting that patronage is the key to understanding processes of identity and status formation that are the keys to understanding both the scientists’ cognitive attitudes and career strategies.”

 

• 17-8 – “As initially suggested by Robert Westman, the low disciplinary status of status of mixed mathematics like astronomy, optics, and mechanics (especially in relationshio to philosophy and theology) was probably the most important obstacle in the way of the epistemological legitimation of Copernican astornomy. Unless these disciplinary hierarchies were redrawn, the mathematician’s new worldviews could be dismissed almost a priori by philosophers and theologians, who could simply rely on commonly accepted distinctions of subject matter, methodology, and discplinary sociogognitive status.”
• 18 – “In short, the legitimation of the new science involved much more than an epistemological debate. The acceptance of the new worldview depended also on the sociocognitive legitimation of the disciplines and practitioners upholding it.”

 

• “Mixed mathematics had to gain the epistemological status of philosophy. Given the nexus between social status and credibility, high social status was the password to cognitive legitimation, patronage was the institution through which social status and credibility could be gained, and the court was the space in which the most powerful patronage relationships could be established.”

 

• 19 – “The following reading of the apparatus of epistolary rituals characteristic of Galielo’s correspondence treats them as homologous to the forms of interaction that clients and patrons assumed when dealing with each other in person. Through this sort of ‘epistolary anthropology,’ I will try to reconstruct the etiquette of patronage interactions.”
• “Power is not a thing but a process, and a patron is somebody who can do things for the client.”
  • But things are translatable into power; their excess accumulation allows them to be given (something to be done for someone)
• 25 – “Patronage did not simply reward clients a posteriori, but also stimulated and accelerated the toward not always happy endings.”

 

• 28 – “These considerations indicate that patronage was not a chaotic set of personal and voluntary relationships, but that it had specific structural features and a logic that bound patrons, brokers, and clients trhough their need to circulate power in order to obtain or maintain it. Appropriate boundaries and related rites of passage controlled that circulation while specific rituals allowed patrons, clients, and brokers to tes in nondisruptive ways the perceptions of each other’s status and interest in entering into a patronage relationship.”

• 29 – “By developing an exclusive and full-time relationship with a great patron one participated in ‘nobility’ — a high status that could be transferred from one’s social identity to one’s discipline or activity. And, as mentioned earlier, high social status was instrumental in securing the episemological status of a discipline and method like Galileo’s, whose legitimacy was undermined by the existing disciplinary hierarchy.”

• 33 – “Cosimo’s enthronement in 1609 was particularly advantageous for Galileo’s career because new and controversial ideas are better supported by young patrons seeking an image for themselves.”

• This seems to be an important and yet very difficult to establish claim essential to the thesis

• 34 – “Pop Gregory’s was the third providential death in Galileo’s career. As with Cosimo II thirteen years before, a new patron (one Galileo had been cultivating for a number of years, as he had Cosimo) suddenly reaches an important status and is willing to support Galileo’s provocative views in order to develop a necessarily new image for himself.”

• Same again – it seems like the self-fashioning of his patrons was as important to Galileo’s success as his own

 

• 37 – “Therefore, the stipend was a public gesture. If the Medici had been stingy with Galileo, they would have automatically belittled the significance of the Medicean Stars in the public eye.”
• [Rather than the gift economy of Mauss/Castres, is it possible that this is better described as a kind of market economy in which status is the medium of exchange? It seems like, though the clients were incapable of returning as much monetarily-valued gifts to their patrons as they received, the gifts they provided, in terms of works of art, scientific discoveries, etc, had a status-value comparable to the stipends and titles the patrons could dole out. The art and science the patrons received substantiated their magnificence and provided them with a quality of status which distinguished them from other wealthy individuals incapable of patronizing the arts and sciences. In my estimation there is a kind of market economy of supply and demand dynamics at work here in which the client received that which the patron had in excess (material remuneration) and the patron received that which the client had in excess, but which the patron could not produce for himself (intellectual produce of the new science), all the while it was a mutually beneficial exchange that increased the “wealth” (status) of both, satisfying all of the fundamental criteria of proto-capitalistic systems.

 

• 41 – “Consequently, patronage and gift-giving represented more than economic exchange: the produced status, identity, and credibility.”

 

• 42 – “Galileo was not shy in pressing Sagredo to lobby for his salary increase at Paduoa. Nor was Sagred backward in asking to have his instruments fixed or manufactured gratis by Galileo’s artisans, or in enlisting Galileo to fetch water from the spring of the Virgin of Monte Artone and send it to him in Venice . . ..”