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Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)*

Albert Van Helden

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Giordano Bruno

Figure 1: Christian Bartholméss, Jordano Bruno (Paris: Libaririe Philosophique de Ladrange, 1846),frontispiece.

Filippo Bruno was born in Nola, near Naples, the son of Giovanni Bruno, a soldier, and Fraulissa Savolino.He took the name Giordano upon entering the Dominican order. In the great Dominican monastery in Naples(where Thomas Aquinas had taught), Bruno was instructed in Aristotelian philosophy. His exceptional ex-pertise in the art of memory brought him to the attention of patrons, and he was brought to Rome todemonstrate his abilities to the Pope. During this period he may also have come under the in�uence ofGiovanni Battista Della Porta, a Neapolitan polymath who published an important book on natural magic.Bruno was attracted to new streams of thought, among which were the works of Plato and Hermes Tris-megistus, both resurrected in Florence by Marsilio Ficino in the late �fteenth century. Hermes Trismegistuswas thought to be a gentile prophet who was a contemporary of Moses. The works attributed to him in factdate from the turn of the Christian era.

Because of his heterodox tendencies, Bruno came to the attention of the Inquisition in Naples and in1576 he left the city to escape prosecution. When the same happened in Rome, he �ed again, this time

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abandoning his Dominican habit. For the next seven years he lived in France, lecturing on various subjectsand attracting the attention of powerful patrons. From 1583 to 1585 he lived at the house of the Frenchambassador in London. During this period he published the books that are most important for our purposes,Cena de le Ceneri ("The Ash Wednesday Supper") and De l'In�nito, Universo e Mondi ("On the In�niteUniverse and Worlds"), both published in 1584. In Cena de le Ceneri, Bruno defended the heliocentric theoryof Copernicus . It appears that he did not understand astronomy very well, for his theory is confused onseveral points. In De l'In�nito , Universo e Mondi, he argued that the universe was in�nite, that it containedan in�nite number of worlds, and that these are all inhabited by intelligent beings.

Wherever he went, Bruno's passionate utterings led to opposition. During his English period he outragedthe Oxford faculty in a lecture at the university; upon his return to France, in 1585, he got into a violentquarrel about a scienti�c instrument. He �ed Paris for Germany in 1586, where he lived in Wittenberg,Prague, Helmstedt, and Frankfurt. As he had in France and England, he lived o� the muni�cence ofpatrons, whom after some time he invariably outraged. In 1591 he accepted an invitation to live in Venice.Here he was arrested by the Inquisition and tried. After he had recanted, Bruno was sent to Rome, in 1592,for another trial. For eight years he was kept imprisoned and interrogated periodically. When, in the end,he refused to recant, he was declared a heretic and burned at the stake.

It is often maintained that Bruno was executed because of his Copernicanism and his belief in the in�nityof inhabited worlds. In fact, we do not know the exact grounds on which he was declared a heretic becausehis �le is missing from the records. Scientists such as Galileo and Johannes Kepler were not sympathetic toBruno in their writings.

Glossary

De�nition 1: polymath

A person of great learning in several �elds of study.

References

[1] Angus Armitage. The cosmology of giordano bruno. Annals of Science, 6:24�31, 1948.

[2] Giordano Bruno. The Ash Wednesday. The Hague:Mouton, 1975.

[3] Sidney Greenberg. The In�nite in Giordano Bruno, with a Translation of his Dialogue Concerning the

Cause, Principle, and One. New York: King's Crown Press, 1950.

[4] Jack Lindsay. Cause, Principle, and Unity; Five Dialogues. New York: International Publishers, 1964.

[5] Walter Pagel. Giordano bruno: The philosophy of circles and the circular movement of the blood. Journalof the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 6:116�125, 1951.

[6] Dorothea Waley Singer. Giordano Bruno, his Life and Thought. With Annotated Translation of his Work,

On the In�nite Universe and Worlds. New York: Schuman, 1900.

[7] Frances Yates. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.

[8] Frances Yates. No title given. Dictionary of Scienti�c Biography, No Year Given.

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