ABSTRACT
The story of Galileo and the church is a much richer story about the tragedies of certitude, conflicting methodologies, contested boundaries, shifting intellectual territories, and the interpretive work of historians. "The Church" in Galileo's day has often been understood as a monolithic entity because its leaders or leader could make unequivocal, formal, official, legal, and binding pronouncements on a great range of subjects. Early in 1633 Galileo arrived in Rome where he was housed in comfortable quarters, but forbidden social contacts without approval of the Inquisition. There is extensive variability in historical treatments of the Galileo affair, perhaps as much variability as in treatments of the American Civil War. Galileo assembled his first telescope in 1609, but many years prior to that, possibly as early as 1590 he was beginning to favor the Copernican worldview. His early observations through the telescope raised both epistemological and substantive questions.
