1. This work has actually been in progress for two decades, though as yet its results are not widely known. The pioneering efforts of Carugo and Crombie are described in A. C. Crombie, “Sources of Galileo’s Early Natural Philosophy,” in Bonelli and Shea’s Reason, Experiment, and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, 157–175, 303–305. Related research, reported in fuller detail, is described in Christopher Lewis, The Merton Tradition and Kinematics in Late Sixteenth-and Early Seventeenth-Century Italy, Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1980. The translator’s early investigations are summarized in Galileo’s Early Notebooks: The Physical Questions, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977; subsequent studies are detailed in his Prelude to Galileo and Galileo and His Sources. Edwards’ transcription of the autograph of the logical questions (MS 27) on which the Latin Edition is based has, of course, made the present volume possible.
2. Indici e cataloghi, Nuova serie V. La collezione galileiana della Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, Vol. 1. Florence: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1959, 106–107.
3. See Crombie, “Sources of Galileo’s Early Natural Philosophy,” 304–305, and Drake, “Galileo’s Pre-Paduan Writings: Years, Sources, Motivations,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 17 (1986), 436–437.
4. For a fuller examination of this question see our “Galileo’s Sources: Manuscripts or Printed Works?,” Print and Culture in the Renaissance: Essays on the Advent of Printing in Europe, eds. G. B. Tyson and Sylvia Wagonheim, Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1986, 45–54.
5. A. Carugo and A. C. Crombie, “The Jesuits and Galileo’s Idea of Science and of Nature,” presented at a Convegno Internazionale di Studi Galileiani entitled Novità Celesti e Crisi del Sapere and held at Pisa, Venice, Padua, and Florence on 18–23 March 1983. This statement and the summary that follows are taken from an abstract published in the Sommari degli Interventi, Florence: Banca Toscana, 1983, 7–9. A much expanded version of the paper may be found in the Annali dell’Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze 8.2 (1983), 3–68.