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What Galileo saw: imaging the scientific revolution, by Lawrence Lipking, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2014, XVI + 314 pp., $35.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-8014-5297-0

What Galileo saw: imaging the scientific revolution, by Lawrence Lipking, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2014, XVI + 314 pp., $35.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-8014-5297-0This book contains some important lessons for both literary critics and science historians. Through the analysis of the most relevant figures of the so-called century of genius, the author discusses some of the most controversial issues in science studies and literary criticism. Did the emergence of a new form of scientific rationality disparage imagination in Western culture? Is modern science responsible for what T.S. Eliot described as the "dissociation of sensibility" from which we have never recovered? Who destroyed the circle of perfection that characterized Elizabethan poetry? The case of early celestial observations offers the author the opportunity to show how Galileo largely used imagination both in the telescopic observations and in the illustrations published in the Sidereus Nuncius (1609). A comparison between Galileo's preparatory drawings and the published illustrations of the Moon's new morphology confirms that neither perception nor representation were innocent in modern science. Even in Descartes' mechanical world-view, imagination continued to play a decisive role. Cartesian science is hard to conceive without the illustration of mechanical invisible, and therefore imagined, vortices of celestial matter. The ban on imagination that new philosophers such as Pascal and Bacon supported was not on imagination per se, but rather on the old ways of using it. Throughout the book the reader has the feeling that imagination is only an instrument artists use to give sense to the world. Nonetheless, Lipking's arguments account even for the existence of a scientific function of imagination. In other words, there is also a scientific imagination supporting scientists in their struggle with Nature. The new science, in fact, has produced new ways to imagine the world. Scholars have stressed the lamented loss of the correspondence between heaven and Earth in Elizabethan world-view because of Copernicanism and the new science. But it cannot be ignored that the turn from worlds to things in natural history inspired new forms of nature poetry which proved fruitful. Expressing an ecological vision shared by many contemporaries, James Thomson's The Seasons, for instance, conveyed a sense of Nature as a whole, whose parts are well connected and form a superior unity. …