Similarities Between Scientific Language and the Language of Literary Criticism in Two of Galileo’s Works.

Abstract

The Assayer (Il saggiatore, 1623) is considered one of galileo’s major works. He wrote it in order to confute the scientific theories expounded by the Jesuit scientist and philosopher Orazio grassi in his Libra astronomica. Considerazioni al Tasso, on the other hand, is one of Galileo’s minor works, written at least twelve years prior to The Assayer. Considerazioni al Tasso is a penetrating critical analysis of Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered. The manuscript, which was initially lost by Galileo, was subsequently found by chance about two centuries after his death and published for the first time in 1793. Though chronological and substantial stylistic differences obviously separate the two works, the structure of Galileo’s attack in Considerazioni al Tasso on Jerusalem Delivered is, in important respects, similar to the one he adopted in The Assayer against Orazio grassi. This article will consider how these two different genres, the critical essay (Considerazioni al Tasso) and the scientific treatise (The Assayer), present surprisingly consanguineous linguistic and expressive criteria. The fundamental novelty in Galilean writing is that mimesis becomes an essential part of the ‘essay’. The aim of this article is to show how, in addition to the technical and objective analysis of two phenomena (‘poetico-linguistic’ in Considerazioni al Tasso and ‘philosophico-scientific’ in The Assayer), Galileo attempts to persuade the reader by enlisting dialectics alongside specific rhetorical devices.