Prologue: the hooded friar -- A most solemn act of justice -- The Nolan philosopher -- "Napoli e tutto il mondo" -- "The world is fine as it is" -- "I have, in effect, harbored doubts" -- "I came into this world to light a fire" -- Footprints in the forest -- A thousand worlds -- Art and astronomy -- Trouble again -- Holy asininity -- The signs of the times -- A lonely sparrow -- Thirty -- The gifts of (...) the Magi -- The song of Circe -- "Go up to Oxford" -- Down risky streets -- The art of magic -- Canticles -- Squaring the circle -- Consolation and valediction -- Infinities -- Return to Italy -- The witness -- The adversary -- Gethsemane -- Hell's purgatory -- The sentence -- The field of flowers -- Epilogue: the four rivers. (shrink)

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), who died at the stake, is one of the best-known symbols of anti-establishment thought. The theme of this volume, which is offered as a collection of essays to honor the distinguished Bruno scholar Hilary Gatti, reflects her constant concern for the principles of cultural freedom and independent thinking. Several essays deal with Bruno himself, including an analysis of the Eroici furori, a study of his reception in relation to the group known as the Novatores, and discussions of (...) several important aspects of his stay in England. The authors and texts discussed here are linked by a relentless interest in the question of authority and originality, and they range from literary figures such as Alberti (1404-72), Vasari (1511-74) and the proponents of quantitative verse in sixteenth-century England to controversial philosophers who, like Bruno, were condemned by the Church, such as Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) and Giulio Cesare Vanini (1585-1619). Taken together, these chapters show how much that was new and revolutionary in early modern culture came from its confrontation with the past. Martin McLaughlin is Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian at Oxford. Elisabetta Tarantino is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Italian at the University of Warwick. (shrink)

Burned at the stake for heresy in Rome in 1600, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was the first modern thinker to propose that the universe contained an infinite number of planetary systems revolving around individual stars. He announced his startling propositions at the moment when European explorers were beginning to reveal the real size and complexity of earth itself (indeed, Bruno also spoke forcefully against the violence and profiteering of Spanish colonial efforts) and when natural philosophers had begun to dispute (...) about the very structure of the universe. It may not be a coincidence that the religious troubles of sixteenth-century Europe arose at a time when humanity's very place in the world and the cosmos no longer seemed certain. In Bruno's case, pursuit of his ideas compelled him to leave behind not only the security of his Dominican convent in Naples, but also, and more radically, the security of a traditional sense of who and where he was. His infinite universe terrified a thinker as unconventional as Johannes Kepler, and still more it terrified the Inquisition. For Bruno himself, the excitement of this infinitely expanded vision of the cosmos was usually enough to overrule any doubt, but when Kepler compared living in Bruno's universe to permanent exile, he captured an essential quality of the Italian philosopher: an intense solitude, a solitude for which his philosophy was only ever a partial cure. (shrink)

The essay discusses the presumption of one's singularity, the uniqueness of one's time, the picturesqueness of one actions, and the capacity of human beings, whether corporately or individually, to begin everything or indeed anything again from scratch. Such presumptions are indeed present in some varieties of contemporary fanaticism, but, more to the point, it is suggested that the feeling of doing something for the first time is the oldest feeling in the world.