Dialogo

Composed in Naples in the 1530s, Juan de Valdés's Diálogo de la lengua occupies a special place in Spanish humanism, just as its author is widely acknowledged by Renaissance scholars as one of the most important intellectuals of 16th-century Western Europe. This edition reflects on the complex early history of the earliest extant primary text (MS 8629, held in the Spanish National Library), which is unanimously accepted as the most reliable of the three): whether or not it could have been copied in Valdés's lifetime, how and when it reached Spain from Naples (where it was written), its real intended recipients, its circulation amongst a circle of Castilian friends, and how it managed to evade the ubiquitous eyes of the Inquisition.

Diálogo de doctrina cristiana constituye, una de las obras más representativas del influjo erasmiano en España. El contenido del Diálogo es muy parecido a otro libro de Juan de Valdés, el Alfabeto cristiano, escrito unos años después en Nápoles (y publicado también en versión italiana en 1546), donde sostiene la doctrina de la justificación por la fe. Valdés da a su Diálogo de la doctrina cristiana la forma de coloquio, tan difundida en el Renacimiento, y utilizada especialmente por Erasmo en sus escritos, e introduce a tres personajes: Antonio, Eusebio y Fray Pedro de Alba, arzobispo de Granada.

Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in Florence in 1632, was the most proximate cause of his being brought to trial before the Inquisition. Using the dialogue form, a genre common in classical philosophical works, Galileo masterfully demonstrates the truth of the Copernican system over the Ptolemaic one, proving, for the first time, that the earth revolves around the sun. Its influence is incalculable. The Dialogue is not only one of the most important scientific treatises ever written, but a work of supreme clarity and accessibility, remaining as readable now as when it was first published. This edition uses the definitive text established by the University of California Press, in Stillman Drake’s translation, and includes a Foreword by Albert Einstein and a new Introduction by J. L. Heilbron.