Galileo's Fame

There is a story that fame was created in the Enlightenment. But long before that, Galileo Galilei became the famous father of the theory of planetary movements. His defense of his radical ideas and the international debates over science made him one of Europe’s first famous people. In Anna-Luna Post’s brilliantly crafted work, we see not only the origins of modern fame, but just how important it was to the legitimacy and the maintenance of scientific authority. Post’s historical lessons seem very pertinent in our own turbulent times. This is a must read for anyone interested in the history of science and media.–Jacob Soll, University of Southern California

Anna-Luna Post is a historian of knowledge, culture, and the environment at Utrecht University. She is interested in all facets of the world of scholarship and learning in the early modern period. Trained as a cultural historian and Italianist, she is also fascinated by the intersections between early capitalism and environmental history, especially in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

Post has held fellowships at the University of Southern California, Cambridge University, the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, and the Medici Archive Project and the Netherlands Institute for Art History in Florence. She studied in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Bologna.