Galileo and His Sources? A Different Methodological Approach to Galileo’s Juvenilia

It seems to be an ascertained fact that Galileo’s Juvenilia were copied from Roman College sources. In this paper I consider only a little portion of the Juvenilia hitherto directly linked to Benedictus Pererius’s (1536-1610) De communibus omnium rerum naturalium principijs et affectionibus. I then try to understand to what extent a direct connection between the two texts can be established, bearing in mind that the study of their textual similarities has been often spoiled by methodological issues. I suggest approaching their textual relationship (a) by taking into consideration both texts and contents from a wider array of similar contemporary philosophical works; and (b) by identifying typical writing practices still present in the late Renaissance, such as the so-called ‘textual bricolage’. By means of these approaches, one can notice in the Juvenilia the presence of common sets of arguments and passages usually referred to in Renaissance natural philosophy literature with respect to specific philosophical questions. As a methodological precaution, when levels and practices of dissemination of particular information are largely ignored, it is unwise to assert a strictly dyadic interconnection between texts. More generally, in the search for the sources of peculiar texts written in the late Renaissance, one should consider a number of works, and then try to understand how they were usually read, assimilated, and recorded in other works of the time.