ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Polishing the Lens at Last: New Evidence on Galileo’s Telescope Construction from Ignacio Muñoz, O.P. (c. 1608/1612–1686)

• In Event: Early Modern Intersections of Knowledge

English Abstract

In 1630, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) sent one of his telescopes to Philip IV of Spain (1605–1665) as part of his well-known patronage strategies. In 1666, a little-known Dominican friar named Ignacio Muñoz (c. 1608/1612–1686) ‘dissected’ that same telescope in Mexico City, at the request of the powerful viceroy Antonio Sebastián de Toledo Molina y Salazar (1608–1715). The result of this operation—a brief, hitherto unpublished report entitled De Tellescopiis Stellarum—finally reveals the most minute and closely guarded details of Galileo’s telescope construction.
This remarkable document, however, represents only a small portion of Muñoz’s magnum opus, the Observations of Diverse Arts [Observationes Diversarum Artium]—itself an ode to the intersections of knowledge in the early modern period. In this nearly thousand-page manuscript, Muñoz reflects on what he regarded as the most significant developments across seventeenth-century branches of mathematical knowledge, from astronomy and astrology to kinematics, geometry, and mechanics. As will be shown, Muñoz’s self-conscious display of a quasi-universal erudition à la Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) was instrumental in securing access to powerful political circles and ultimately gain access to a telescope fabricated by Galileo.
Finally, this episode also illustrates how knowledge can intersect across time and space in unexpected ways, highlighting the deeply human character of processes of knowledge-acquisition and circulation. In the end, we are not learning the details of Galileo’s telescopes from Galileo himself, but through a document produced thirty-six years later, half a world away, by an obscure Dominican friar born in an unremarkable village in the Spanish countryside.

Author

• José María Moreno Madrid, University of Limerick