Learning that Galileo had two daughters who were cloistered nuns made me question everything I thought I knew about him. What if the legendary father of modern science and notorious enemy of the church was at heart a believing Catholic? Did his unorthodox notions about the heavens threaten his girls, who were only twelve and thirteen when he placed them in the convent? How did they react decades later when the Roman Inquisition tried Galileo for heresy?

“She was a woman of exquisite mind,” Galileo said of his older daughter, the one he confided in through constant correspondence, “singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me.”

Galileo’s Daughter won the 1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography. The paperback spent five consecutive weeks as the #1 New York Times bestseller. A two-hour documentary inspired by the book, called “Galileo’s Battle for the Heavens,” aired on public television in 2002 and won an Emmy in the category of historical programming. 

Reviews

“Sobel is a master storyteller…What she has done, with her choice of excerpts and her strong sense of story, is bring a great scientists to life. Reading Galileo’s Daughter, we hear Galileo’s voice, we sense his pain and share his excitement, and once again we marvel at how the human mind, and heart, can lift so much.”—The New York Times

“Sobel is a most original writer, with a reverence for history and storytelling.”—USA Today

“Galileo’s Daughter is innovative history and a wonderfully told tale.”—Newsweek

“Galileo’s Daughter draws together these fragments into a glittering Florentine mosaic. In the foreground, a nail-biting courtroom drama is played out; in the middle ground, the threads of 17th Century natural philosophy are effortlessly unravelled; in the background, a Tuscan sun falls on olive-green hills and russet roofs.”—The Mail on Sunday (UK)