The Galileo affair: a meeting of faith and science

Since the end of the nineteenth century it has been suspected that two of Galileo's early Latin manuscripts, one containing questions on logic (MS 27) and the other questions on the heavens and the elements, plus some memoranda on motion (MS 46), were derived and possibly copied from other sources. The editor of the National Edition of Galileo's works that began to appear in 1890, Antonio Favaro, speculated then that both were student notebooks - the first written by Galileo while he was at the Monastery of Vallombrosa in che late 1570s and the second while he was studying at the University of Pisa in 1584. Favaro transcribed the second manuscript and published its transcription under the title Juvenilia in the first volume of the National Edition. The first manuscript he regarded as so rnsignificant that he excluded it from the edition, merely, transcribing a few excerpts as "samples of some scholastic exercises of Galileo" and putting these in the ninth volume with other data pertinent to Galileo's youth....