Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic
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Giordano Bruno is one of the great figures of early modern Europe, and one of the least understood. Ingrid D. Rowland’s pathbreaking life of Bruno establishes him once and for all as a peer of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Galileo, a thinker whose vision of the world prefigures ours. By the time Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600 on Rome’s Campo dei Fiori, he had taught in Naples, Rome, Venice, Geneva, France, England, Germany, and the “magic Prague” of Emperor Rudolph II. His powers of memory and his provocative ideas about the infinity of the universe had attracted the attention of the pope, Queen Elizabeth—and the Inquisition, which condemned him to death in Rome as part of a yearlong jubilee. Writing with great verve and sympathy for her protagonist, Rowland traces Bruno’s wanderings through a sixteenth-century Europe where every certainty of religion and philosophy had been called into question and shows him valiantly defending his ideas (and his right to maintain them) to the very end. An incisive, independent thinker just when natural philosophy was transformed into modern science, he was also a writer of sublime talent. His eloquence and his courage inspired thinkers across Europe, finding expression in the work of Shakespeare and Galileo. Giordano Bruno allows us to encounter a legendary European figure as if for the first time. The Washington Post - Marc Kaufman Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic gives some support to the view of Bruno as a visionary of and martyr to science, but Rowland, who teaches in Notre Dame's school of architecture in Rome and writes about Italian cultural history, knows too much about him and his times to accept that simple picture. Rather, she tells the story of a bright, thin-skinned, rebellious and inquisitive young man from outside Naples who became a precocious Dominican priest, had some original thoughts, wrote some interesting treatises and long poems, and pretty quickly got in trouble with the authorities.
Prologue: The Hooded Friar 31 A Most Solemn Act of Justice 92 The Nolan Philosopher 143 "Napoli e tutto il mondo" 194 "The world is fine as it is" 255 "I have, in effect, harbored doubts" 296 "I came into this world to light a fire" 387 Footprints in the Forest 458 A Thousand Worlds 539 Art and Astronomy 6210 Trouble Again 7011 Holy Asininity 7712 The Signs of the Times 8713 A Lonely Sparrow 9614 Thirty 10415 The Gifts of the Magi 11616 The Song of Circe 13217 "Go up to Oxford" 13918 Down Risky Streets 14919 The Art of Magic 16020 Canticles 17321 Squaring the Circle 18822 Consolation and Valediction 19923 Infinities 21424 Return to Italy 22325 The Witness 24426 The Adversary 25127 Gethsemane 26328 Hell's Purgatory 26729 The Sentence 27230 The Field of Flowers 278Epilogue: The Four Rivers 279App Bruno's Sentence 287Notes 291Bibliography 307Acknowledgments 317Index 319
