Illuminating Seventeenth-Century Italy with Meredith Ray

Perhaps the best-known figure of seventeenth-century Italy is Galileo Galilei. What is not as widely known, though, is that Galileo exchanged letters with natural philosopher and poet Margherita Sarrocchi. In Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in Seventeenth-Century Italy, Professor Meredith Ray of the University of Delaware presents for the first time an in-depth study and complete English translation of the correspondence, arguing that it can reveal much about scientific culture and the existing networks of communication in seventeenth-century Italy. An interview by Luca Politi, Ph.D. student at Harvard University.