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.
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Galileo's Fame: Science, Credibility, and Memory in the Seventeenth Century, and shared the following:
Readers opening my book on page 99 will be met by a black-and-white portrait of Galileo smiling at them. The portrait, made by Francesco Villamena, appeared in his 1613 work Letters on Sunspots, a polemical work flowing out of a dispute between Galileo and a German Jesuit, Christoph Scheiner, over the nature of dark spots that could be observed on (or near, according to Scheiner) the sun’s surface. Villamena’s portrait captures Galileo, dressed in a fur-lined robe, below two putti holding the instruments of his scholarly fame: his geometrical compass, the telescope, and the books he had published thus far. Most of the page is taken up by the portrait and caption, leaving space for just five lines of text. These lines let readers know that this was the first of Galileo’s works to include an author portrait, and convey the idea that an author’s portrait often served to capture readers’ attention and establish a sense of familiarity. The last line tells readers that the Accademia dei Lincei “paid for the design and worked—”, but then the page cuts off…Learn more about Galileo's Fame at the University of Pittsburgh Press website.
Alas, I don’t think the Page 99 Test works too well for my book, as it may give readers the wrongful impression that the book consists of 80% images and 20% text. Still, page 99, which appears in the middle of the third chapter, does showcase my book’s approach and thematic focus.
Galileo’s Fame recounts how a remarkable cast of characters, including artists, poets, philosophers, popes, lower clergymen, cardinals, courtiers, and, yes, the members of the Accademia dei Lincei, shaped Galileo’s fame through a variety of media. The book consequently embraces a wide variety of sources, pays careful attention to the visual culture of the time, and is not afraid to pursue in-depth analysis of poems written in Galileo’s honor: page 99 lies in the middle of a chapter that focuses especially on such poems and the visual artefacts of Galileo’s fame. I use these sources to show how people with different relationships to Galileo could try to latch onto his fame, in order to advance some of their own career goals, and argue that this could be beneficial (the poems meant attention!) but also detrimental (the poems did not always give him full credit) to Galileo.
That said, within the book, chapter 3 (“Admiration and Appropriation”) stands out as it discusses a full cast of characters for whom fame was a good thing. The other four chapters, meanwhile, show that for many seventeenth-century observers fame usually elicited some form of suspicion as well, as they associated it with gossip, the unreliable and unruly opinion of crowds, and with pride. In this way, the book captures the highly ambiguous nature of scholarly fame in this period, showing that fame was at once a highly coveted, and a controversial asset.
--Marshal Zeringue
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