Includes bibliographical references (p. 271-284) and index.

From brass instruments to textual supplements -- Financing the aura: distance and the construction of scientific authority -- Replication or monopoly?: the Medicean stars between invention and discovery -- Between risk and credit: picturing objects in the making -- The supplemental economy of Galileo's book of nature -- Unintended differences.

In six short years, Galileo Galilei went from being a somewhat obscure mathematics professor running a student boarding house in Padua to a star in the court of Florence to the recipient of dangerous attention from the Inquisition for his support of Copernicanism. In that brief period, Galileo made a series of astronomical discoveries that reshaped the debate over the physical nature of the heavens: he deeply modified the practices and status of astronomy with the introduction of the telescope and pictorial evidence, proposed a radical reconfiguration of the relationship between theology and a.

Description based on print version record.