Eileen Reeves, professor of comparative literature, transferred to emeritus status on January 16, 2023, after thirty years at the University. During those three decades she enlivened and broadened the department’s offerings with courses ranging from traditional literary subjects of all periods in multiple languages to more interdisciplinary topics spanning the humanities, the fine arts, and the natural sciences. As one of the world’s most recognized experts on the career of Galileo Galilei, her special field of research includes European Renaissance humanistic studies, art history, and the history of science. Generations of the department’s students were enriched by the philosopher’s stone produced in Eileen’s unique alembic of scholarly interests, while being entertained by her characteristic wit. Her irreverent and irrepressible sense of humor has drawn inspiration from every subject on which she has ever spoken, from early modern optics to the minutiae of departmental administration.

Eileen grew up in New Orleans in a large Catholic family of seven children. Her parents were both professors, and her scholarship combines their academic interests: her father was an English professor and her mother a scientist who taught physics, biology, math, and chemistry at several colleges and high schools. Eileen attended La Grange High School, and then earned double Bachelor of Arts degrees from Whitman College in 1979, in both French literature and English and American literature. She went on to concentrate instead on Italian literature in her graduate studies at Stanford University, which granted her a Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1987. While residing in a tower pursuing her studies in Italy, she was struck by lightning and survived. She became famous among the local residents, who referred to her thenceforth in hushed tones of awe as “La Fulminata.” Soon after receiving her doctoral degree, she was hired by the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant professor of Romance languages, where she taught for four years before coming to Princeton.

In the course of her career so far, Eileen has published extensively in the diverse areas brought together in her teaching as well. Her first book, Painting the Heavens: Art and Astronomy in the Age of Galileo, was published by Princeton University Press in 1997. This was the work that inspired Princeton to abduct her from its sister Ivy to join the faculty. Eileen made her readers see Renaissance Madonnas all over Europe as they never had been able to see them before: pure virgins engaged in space travel to an impure, cratered Moon, while bathed in the chiaroscuro of newly discovered earthshine.

Painting the Heavens was followed by Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror, published by Harvard University Press in 2008. This book again tells a remarkable story about scientific discovery that could not have been told without Eileen’s ability to illuminate it with reflections from art history and literary history. Galileo understood the function of the telescope invented in The Hague in 1608 in the terms that any well-read person of his time would have done: in those of medieval romance. Romances in a dozen languages had for centuries described a magical mirror capable of making distant things visible, an invention attributed to Virgil or Merlin or Prester John, and one so important to military defense that its loss had contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. Without the reflected light of rarefied humanistic scholarship,
the most important events in the history of science, Eileen shows us, remain misunderstood.

Shortly after Galileo’s Glassworks, Eileen in collaboration with Albert van Helden collected and translated into English for the first time the correspondence by Galileo and the Jesuit mathematician Christoph Scheiner constituting their public debate on the nature of the sunspots, which had recently been made observable by the new telescopes. Galileo and Scheiner on Sunspots 1611-1613 was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010. Supplemented by substantial introductions, extensive notes, and a bibliography, this work has become the standard book on the early modern debate on sunspots, essential for students and historians of astronomy, the telescope, and early modern Catholicism.

The year 2014 saw the publication of Evening News: Optics, Astronomy and Journalism in Early Modern Europe by the University of Pennsylvania Press. This book again exemplifies Eileen’s rare ability to practice comparative literature at its interdisciplinary best, reading literary sources both canonical and ephemeral by earthshine borrowed from the visual arts, and from the history of what in Galileo’s time was called natural philosophy. Who knew that newspapers, an invention roughly contemporaneous with the telescope and made possible by the technology of the printing press, were conceived of in similar terms, as devices that bring the reflections of distant things close? Eileen knew, and she shares that intelligence in this book. The surprising echoes found in standard newspaper titles like the Daily Mirror are not mere striking historical curiosities. They are imbued with the political struggles and religious debates of the first information age.

These are only Eileen’s book-length publications, as space does not allow discussion of her many important articles, of which she published one or more a year from 1985 through 2021 — and counting.

Eileen’s achievements in scholarship have been acknowledged by prestigious honors and awards. Most recently she was Dibner Distinguished Fellow in the History of Science and Technology in residence at the Huntington Library, a favorite haunt to whose rare books and rarer gardens she returned after a previous residence a quarter of a century earlier. Her CV is littered with coveted fellowships declined to permit her to accept still more coveted fellowships. The NEH-sponsored first residence at the Huntington Library in 1996 was taken at the expense of another offer from the American Academy in Rome. She took a fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library in the summer of 1991, and another at the Italian Academy of Columbia University for the 2003-04 academic year. She was further honored with research fellowships from Harvard’s I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence and the Leopold Schepp Foundation in New York.

Even as she garnered so many accolades for her scholarship, while at the same time delighting throngs of students with her instruction, Eileen also served the University as chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and director of the Program in European Cultural Studies. Even as she gave always too much of herself, she managed to do it with kindness and patience. La Fulminata was never given to fulmination.

As Eileen detests nothing more than “vile verbiage” (her phrase), her colleagues now put a stop to this with just a few especially vile verses in the form of a heartfelt envoi:
Eileen! Too soon you’ve left our hollow’d ranks!
Here you kept calm, ate cupcakes, carried on—
For all you gave us then, we here give thanks.
But where now are the cupcakes d’antan?
Where the school-closing snows of yesteryear?
Stored on the Moon, with mad Orlando’s mind?
Flourless, now wash them down with gluten-free beer,
May all that’s lost you on your healing journey find.

Written by members of the Department of Comparative Literature faculty.