Favaro’s Representation of Galileo’s Library

Abstract

This chapter introduces the data set about Galileo’s library inherited from the nineteenth century combined with early twenty-first-century technologies for parsing it. The analyses address the first aggregated list of 537 books in Galileo’s library, made in the period 1886–95, contextualized here against the representations of the library in the earlier sources and the backdrop of Italian unification and national identity building. Antonio Favaro’s foundational work adds information about book subjects, authors, publication locations, and chronology to the understanding of what volumes were in the Galilei family homes. At the same time, the chapter offers a critique of the approach with attention to missing data.