The Nationality of Galileo: A Historical Perspective

[Ken Natton]

Your position is that Galileo was not Italian because Italy was not a nation when he lived. How is that different from saying that the Palestinians are not Palestinians bacause Palestine is not a nation?

It is different because the sense of belonging to a people is not the same as a sense of belonging to a nation. There has never been a Flemish nation but a sense of belonging to a Flemish people has a long history. There are several other prominent examples around the world of difficulties arising from the difference between ethnic or cultural identity and a concept of national identity. Generally the former has a much longer history than the latter. National anthems too are actually a remarkably recent idea. And I remain unconvinced that, before the nineteenth century, the people of Florence or of Genoa felt a stronger sense of common cultural identity with people from Naples than they did with people from Grenoble for example.

 

[arildno]

And I remain unconvinced that, before the nineteenth century, the people of Florence or of Genoa felt a stronger sense of common cultural identity with people from Naples than they did with people from Grenoble for example.

Look at relative marriage patterns and relocation patterns, for example, and you'll find yet more reliable indicators.
Some are seen as more natural marriage partners than others, and statehood distinctions are in those cases irrelevant, but shared sense of ethnicity/nationality is.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

Does this help?
The Private Life of Galileo by Galileo

This book was written by Galileo himself. The word Italy appears 14 times. Here are a couple:

Copies of the " Dialogue " were sent by Galileo to his friends and disciples throughout Italy.

Suddenly, in the beginning of August, in consequence of a report sent into the Inquisition by the Jesuit Inchofer, one of the Consultori, came a stringent order from the Master of the Sacred Palace to sequestrate every copy in the bookseller's shops, not only in the States of the Church, but throughout Italy.

The word Italian appears 8 times. Here is one.

Kepler had declared that Magini's opposition arose from mere envy that any Italian should by his discoveries gain greater renown than himself.

Here is another, in which he paraphrases his contemporary, Magini. He comes quite close to calling himself an Italian. In any case, he implies that Magini called him an Italian and he does not deny it.

In another letter to Kepler he (Magini) declares that he will never concede to that Italian his four planets.

The word Italianissimo appears once. Perhaps you will take heart in it.

But Galileo was not Italianissimo. His life at Padua was to him but an honorable exile. His thoughts turned constantly to his beloved and beautiful Florence ; his country, la patria, was little Tuscany.

However, I take him to mean "I am not very Italian" rather than "I am not Italian". I will allow you to spin this your way. In any case, your argument has been that there was no such thing as Italy or Italians in the mind of Galileo and his contemporaries, and this is not well supported.

 

[arildno]

The problem is, Jimmy, that all Italians prior to Garibaldi were totally deluded in thinking that they were..Italian.
Ken Natton might be helpful, for once, to provide further solid arguments (if necessary), rather than his mere reassertions of his idee fixe.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

Your statement about Beethoven is very problematical. In 1814, the Deutscher Bund was founded. From that time it is no longer feasible to say that the people of Munich found no stronger sense of common cultural identity with people from Berlin than they did with people from Grenoble. Beethoven died in 1827.

 

[arildno]

Not only that. It was L vB's paternal grandfather, who might be called "Flemish", moving to Bonn in 1732, 20 years old. Both his wife and eventual daughter-in-law were Germans, and it is utterly meaningless not to call L.v.B. German, saying he was "Flemish".

 

[SW VandeCarr]

Not only that. It was L vB's paternal grandfather, who might be called "Flemish", moving to Bonn in 1732, 20 years old. Both his wife and eventual daughter-in-law were Germans, and it is utterly meaningless not to call L.v.B. German, saying he was "Flemish".

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Norwegians probably have always considered themselves as such, and not as Danes or Swedes. However, modern Norway as a nation state only came into existence in 1907. Prior to that it was "associated" with either Denmark or Sweden (or both). Apparently there was a medieval Kingdom of Norway, but there was also a medieval Kingdom of Germany before the creation of the German based Holy Roman Empire in about 962.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Germany

EDIT: There was also a medieval Kingdom of Italy after the breakup of Charlemagne's empire. However, it only included the northern part of present day Italy. As was mentioned, Italy had previously been a defined part of the Roman Empire whose boundaries closely corresponded to modern Italy.

 

[Ken Natton]

I am a little defeated as to what it is that I have said that has upset people so much. I have no hidden ace to reveal, I have laid out my case as clearly as I can and have defended myself from some misinterpretations and misrepresentations of what I said and what I meant. Now I’m accused of being the one with a fixed idea. I always hate it when threads are reduced to pointless bickering over minutiae, it doesn’t tend to make very interesting reading for anyone else. I could dig out the references from which I took the information about the language continuum that existed in modern day Italy and France and just how recent, in historical terms that the boundary hardened into a definable homogenous Italian language as distinct from a definable homogenous French language. But I would have to dig it out. I confess I have no knowledge of the events you refer to Jimmy, but what I do know about is Otto Karl Von Bismarck, Prussian Chancellor, generally credited with engineering the unification of Germany by engineering the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 – the Dreyfus affair, the Emms Telegram, and all that jazz. It brought about the acceleration of German industrial output such that it quickly overtook Britain as the world’s leading industrial nation, only to be overtaken itself shortly afterwards by the USA, also riding a wave of confidence in its own identity following the end of the Civil War. The book I happen to have to hand is called ‘Vanished Kingdoms’ by Norman Davies. The following quotes are not directly relevant to the point at the heart of this discussion but do, I think, help to characterise my viewpoint and why, when I hear Galileo described as Italian or Beethoven described as German, it comes across to me a little like when you see on these period drama films or TV programmes, and the writer has one of the characters using a very twentieth – twenty-first century turn of phrase.

This is actually from the blurb about the book:
‘… We habitually think of the European past as the history of countries which exist today – France, Germany, Britain, Russia and so on – but often this actually obstructs our view of the past, and blunts our sensitivity to the ever-changing political landscape.
Europe’s history is littered with kingdoms, duchies empires and republics that have now disappeared but which were once fixtures on the map of their age: ‘the Empire of Aragon’, which once dominated the western Mediterranean; the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, for a time the largest country in Europe; the successive kingdoms (and one duchy) of Burgundy, much of whose history is now half-remembered – or half-forgotten – at best.’

Then from Davies’s own introduction:
‘The Rzeczpospolita of Poland-Lithuania, which at its conception in 1569 was the largest state in Europe (or at least the master of our continent’s largest tract of inhabited lands).Nonetheless, in little more than two decades at the end of the eighteenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian state was destroyed so comprehensively that few people today have even heard of it. And it was not the only casualty. The Republic of Venice was laid low in the same era, as was the Holy Roman Empire.’

And:
'Our mental maps are thus inevitably deformed. Our brains can only form a picture from the data that circulates at any given time; and the available data is created by present-day powers, by prevailing fashions and accepted wisdom.'

 

[arildno]

Your fallacy, Ken Natton, lies in your own flawed idea that nationality cannot exist without a suppporting nation state.
It sure can.
Furthermore, perceptions of national affinities can perfectly well exist without any strong rooted desire that all people of one nationality "ought" to live in a single state.

What happened in the 19th century was a new conception of what legitimized state constructions, namely a trend towards the viewpoint that only those states founded upon the principle of nationality were to be regarded as legitimate states.

Basically, you have inverted the whole issue.

Italians in pre-modern Italy had no problems with the existence of MANY Italian city states, because whatever THEY had within their idea of "Italienness" did not include the desirability of living in a nation states. They hardly had any conceptions that a state only was legitimate by securing individual rights, either (THAT is a state conception flowing from natural rights philosophy, emergent in the 18th century).

 

[Ken Natton]

Your fallacy, Ken Natton, lies in your own flawed idea that nationality cannot exist without a suppporting nation state.
It sure can.
Furthermore, perceptions of national affinities can perfectly well exist without any strong rooted desire that all people of one nationality "ought" to live in a single state.

What happened in the 19th century was a new conception of what legitimized state constructions, namely a trend towards the viewpoint that only those states founded upon the principle of nationality were to be regarded as legitimate states.

Basically, you have inverted the whole issue.

Italians in pre-modern Italy had no problems with the existence of MANY Italian city states, because whatever THEY had within their idea of "Italienness" did not include the desirability of living in a nation states. They hardly had any conceptions that a state only was legitimate by securing individual rights, either (THAT is a state conception flowing from natural rights philosophy, emergent in the 18th century).

And again, I do not recognise any of the arguments that you attribute to me. Clearly your perception and mine differ quite strongly.

 

[arildno]

Furthermore, as to the language continuum:
Dialects can still be recognized as NORWEGIAN, rather than anything else, even though I as a Norwegian can't understand a word of it (typically, dialects in the deepest dales of Telemark, and outlying islans in Northern Norway).
The whole melody and sentence structuring is in tune with other Norwegian dialects, without being helpful in terms of comprehensibility.

That is, dialects can perfectly well exist within a given language without being mutually comprehensible.

 

[ImaLooser]

'Our mental maps are thus inevitably deformed. Our brains can only form a picture from the data that circulates at any given time; and the available data is created by present-day powers, by prevailing fashions and accepted wisdom.'

I don't know about inevitable. That to me is the most interesting thing, trying to put oneself into the mind set of those days. It isn't easy.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

What was written in the blurb:

‘… We habitually think of the European past as the history of countries which exist today – France, Germany, Britain, Russia and so on – but often this actually obstructs our view of the past, and blunts our sensitivity to the ever-changing political landscape.

How Ken understood it:

‘… We habitually think of the European past as the history of people who exist today – French, Germans, British, Russians and so on – but often this actually obstructs our view of the past, and blunts our sensitivity to the ever-changing cultural, linguistic, ethnic and social landscape.

This whole thread could have been avoided if the blurb were read more carefully. By the way, hopefully no one here denies that the political entities called Italy and Germany did not exist at the dawn of the 19th century.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

I confess I have no knowledge of the events you refer to Jimmy

The German Confederation (German: Deutscher Bund) was the loose association of Central European states created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to coordinate the economies of separate German-speaking countries.

Wiki, and therefore unreliable.

The German Confederation was not a country. However, it served to define a group of people who felt a stronger sense of common cultural identity with each other than with outsiders. The cultural conditions to make this Bund possible did not appear out of nowhere on the day the Congress of Vienna was convened. Rather the Congress put a stamp on a reality that already existed.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

Ken, I would really like to have you respond to my post #33 because it has the words Italy and Italian coming directly from Galileo's own mouth. By not responding to it, you leave in my mind the strong impression that you do indeed have an idee fixe. Please do what you can to impress me otherwise.

 

[Ken Natton]

Ken, I would really like to have you respond to my post #33 because it has the words Italy and Italian coming directly from Galileo's own mouth. By not responding to it, you leave in my mind the strong impression that you do indeed have an idee fixe. Please do what you can to impress me otherwise.

Dear oh dear Jimmy, it does not seem to me that we are likely to be making conversation of much interest to any third party when it comes to demands for specific responses to specific points. The post you refer to seems to me like another post where you want to tell me what it is that I meant and what I intended to say, and what you are telling me I meant to say does not align with my sense of what I wanted to say. My case was only that there is a certain parallax error when we impose our modern sense of nationality on a past that pre-dates the development of that idea. I always understood that identification with a people and yes even with a specific landscape goes back much further in human history. But that is not the same thing as nationalism. That, I believe, is historically a much more recent idea.

 

[arildno]

1. "when we impose our modern sense of nationality "
No one on this thread has done so. Except you, who have asserted that that is what everyone else is doing.
2. "But that is not the same thing as nationalism."
And again, this is the first time you suddenly bring up the concept of "nationalism", rather than concepts of national affinity/identy.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

It is different because the sense of belonging to a people is not the same as a sense of belonging to a nation.

But, of course, he(Galileo) was not Italian. Neither was Leonardo Da Vinci, or the composer Vivaldi, all of whom are sometimes described as having been Italian. But, though they were born and lived their lives on that particular peninsular of modern Europe that we call Italy, all of them died before the nineteenth century, when the concept of a nation called Italy came into being.

In that first quote you were explaining why you think that Palestinians exist even though they don't have a nation. Yet you insist that Italians did not exist until they had a nation. In order to make sense, you need to argue that the Italians didn't have a sense of belonging to a people. In post #33 I gave direct evidence that they did have such a sense. Galileo himself spoke of Italy and Italians. You need to respond to that.

 

[arildno]

Besides, there never existed a sense of Palestinianness prior to the 1960's. Before that, they were...Arabs, happening to live in a district that for merely historical reasons were called..Palestine.

This, of course, does not have much validity in, for example denying the genuineness of a current feeling of Palestinianness.

 

[rootX]

Ahh that damnable topic of Palestine existence again!

In that first quote you were explaining why you think that Palestinians exist even though they don't have a nation.

Besides, there never existed a sense of Palestinianness prior to the 1960's. Before that, they were...Arabs, happening to live in a district that for merely historical reasons were called..Palestine.

This, of course, does not have much validity in, for example denying the genuineness of a current feeling of Palestinianness.

Try telling that to a Palestine person.

 

[arildno]

Ahh that damnable topic of Palestine existence again!


Try telling that to a Palestine person.

Well, they would be dead wrong, there does not exist any conceptions among Arabs in the palestine region up to the second world war or up to the sixties that there are some sort of national distinctness between themselvs and other Arabs.
The Palestinian national identity, undoubtedly existing TODAY is one of the most recent national identities in the world.
But that is in itself no reason to argue it doesn¨t exist or isn't genuine

 

[rootX]

Well, they would be dead wrong, there does not exist any conceptions among Arabs in the palestine region up to the second world war or up to the sixties that there are some sort of national distinctness between themselvs and other Arabs.
The Palestinian national identity, undoubtedly existing TODAY is one of the most recent national identities in the world.
But that is in itself no reason to argue it doesn¨t exist or isn't genuine

People already argued in circles in PW&A without proving or disapproving anything before, for gods sake, the topic was banned. You can go dig those threads again, you wouldn't find a single thread ending with conclusion of yours.

Bringing this emotional topic again is just wrong.

 

[arildno]

It wasn't me who brought the topic up in the first place, that was JS, and I just made a short comment. Then you started harping on it.

 

[Evo]

Ok, no more emotionally charged topics.

 

[Borek]

Ok, no more emotionally charged topics.

You mean we are closing relationship forum?

 

[Evo]

you mean we are closing relationship forum?

lol.

 

[arildno]

Ok, no more emotionally charged topics.

Ok:
Let's discuss:
Is American patriotism anything else than mere gobbledeegook about a flag and the constit
ooootion, or is it founded upon something less superficial than that?

 

[Ken Natton]

Okay. One last attempt to defend myself against what I have been subjected to here. But let me start by owning one thing, you are right arildno, ‘nationalism’ was the wrong choice of word – it has associations of extremist politics, often of racism, it is not what this discussion was about, and not actually what I intended. However, it was an honest error, not what you wish to present it as.

But I did not make any assertions about what you do and do not think. I stand by my assertion that to describe Galileo as Italian or Beethoven as German is to impose a modern sense of nationality on a past that pre-dates it, but at that point, arildno, it is a case of – if the cap fits then wear it. I get it – you don’t agree with me, and I am perfectly comfortable with that. I am baffled as to why you are quite so offended by it.

And Jimmy, the perceived relevance of the Palestinian people to this discussion is a function of your logic train, not mine. That is not, and never was, what I was talking about.

So, since this has long since passed the point of being a discussion of interest to anyone else, and I am as guilty as you of perpetuating it, I have to decide to bow out of it now. If you wish to continue, that is your right, but can I suggest that you stick to asserting what your opinion is and what you mean and what you intend, and cease to tell me what I think and what I mean and what I intend, because you have yet to get that right.

 

[arildno]

"But I did not make any assertions about what you do and do not think. I stand by my assertion that to describe Galileo as Italian or Beethoven as German is to impose a modern sense of nationality on a past that pre-dates it, but at that point, arildno, it is a case of – if the cap fits then wear it. I get it – you don’t agree with me, and I am perfectly comfortable with that. I am baffled as to why you are quite so offended by it.2

Finishing off on my side:
I don't see why it "imposes" a MODERN sense of Italianness on Galileo to regard him as an "Italian" when he, amply proved by jimmy Snyder, regarded himself as an "Italian".

An Italian of the 17th century is evidently something else than an Italian of the 21st century. But, nonetheless, an..Italian, because he himself ascribes to that particular idea.