A brief overview of the publishing history of the National Edition of Galileo's works was previously provided in my review of volume 2 of this four-part appendix (Renaissance Quarterly 70.4 (2017): 1523–25). Volume 3, “Texts,” includes five Galileo works, which, for various reasons, were either omitted from Antonio Favaro's original 1890–1909 National Edition and its 1929–39 expansion, or were inadequately edited there. They are: Questions de praecognitionibus et praecognitis; Tractatio de demonstratione; Astrologica nonnulla; Mecaniche (short version); Discorso del flusso e reflusso del mare; and “Notes on Petrarch.” All have been previously published in some form or another: this is a volume of completion, correction, and standardization, rather than discovery.
First up are two commentaries on parts of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, contained in the mangled autographs in the National Library of Florence's (BNCF) MS Gal. 27. These texts were sidelined by Favaro and only partially reproduced in the posthumous expanded edition as derivative or amanuensing juvenilia (4:279–82, 291–92); they were subsequently championed by William Edwards and William Wallace, who published them in 1988 alongside studies showing the importance of the works as evidence of Galileo's deep debt to Aristotelian logic as taught by the Jesuits. Mario Helbing corrects Edwards's haplographies and mistranscriptions of these manuscripts (themselves miscopied by Galileo); the textual transformation is slight, but cumulatively these corrections gracefully guide this disowned early work back into the fold of the corpus.
The final, posthumous contribution of Germana Ernst to the world of Galilaeana is her edition of Galileo's astrological works (mainly in MS Gal. 81), drawn up for students, friends, family members, newborns, patrons, and himself (his initialed identity later concealed under the lousy codename Georg[ius] Giacomi[us]). This is a vast improvement over Favaro's brief register, squirreled away in “Documents” (19:205–06). Ernst has reorganized the messy assemblage of papers and provided nice images of the original manuscript, a guide to symbols and abbreviations, a list of named stars, and a generous glossary. The horoscope of Cosimo II de’ Medici, central to the dedication of the Sidereus Nuncius and part of the autograph dossier, is also included, textually reintegrating Galileo's astrology and his astronomy.
Fourth up is Romano Gatto's edition of the short version of the Mechanics (1592–93), a manuscript of which was only revealed to Favaro after his own edition of the long version (1598–99) had already been published in 1891. Favaro then printed an edition of this manuscript in 1899 (the appendix here unfortunately twice says 1889), but this was ignored by the National Edition's editors in the 1930s. Three other contemporary manuscript copies have since emerged over the last century, and the text presented here is that collated and edited by Gatto in 2002.
Next is the tidal tract, edited by Michele Camerota and Patrizia Ruffo, tireless custodians of all things Galileian. This text follows a similar story to the Mechanics: Favaro's edition soon flushed out an autograph, this time in the Vatican, which forms the basis for the text presented here.
We end, somewhat problematically, with Andrea Battistini's edition of Galileo's notes on Petrarch, located in a copy of the 1582 Basel edition discovered just before Favaro's death in 1922. To my mind, too little makes sense in the copy (BNCF Rari Postillati 60) for it to be included in the National Edition. Most obviously, the signature looks too much like other nineteenth-century forgeries, and the notes are simply too tedious to be Galileo's. Perhaps fittingly, the reader is sent to the Museo Galileo's website for transcriptions of the notes and a full critical apparatus, but these are currently missing. This is the only minor blemish to what is otherwise an exemplary piece of scholarship, maintaining the highest editorial standards, and a fitting tribute to both Galileo and Antonio Favaro.
