Giovanni Alfonso Borelli’s Last Will (1679, December 31st)

Abstract

The paper provides an annotated edition of the original copy of the last will by the mathematician, physicist, and astronomer Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679), discovered among the papers of the Curia of the Cardinal Vicary, kept in the State Archives of Rome. Up until now, the document was known only through the incomplete copy guarded in the General Archives of the Piarists religious Order—Borelli’s sole heir—at the General House of San Pantaleo in Rome. The testament was found during the implementation of the Horizon 2020 Borelli Galaxy project (2018–2021, www.borgal.eu), aimed at editing a unified electronic catalogue of Borelli’s correspondence and to use his letters as a source of data suitable to map and chart Borelli’s overlapping intellectual, social, and political networks. The will is treated here as a “socio-text,” that is, as a freeze-frame of Borelli’s networks in his last years in Rome. By coding and processing—through the web infrastructure Nodegoat and the relational modes of analysis it provides—the interactions between Borelli and his heirs and legatees, as well as the interactions that occurred among his legatees outside this scope, the paper tries to reconstruct and visualize the social structure of this network, to single out Borelli’s place within that complex system, as well as to figure out its genesis. Compared with Borelli’s contemporary correspondence, this data also offers a glimpse into his later editorial choices.