Hilary Gatti

Giordano Bruno’s visit to Elizabethan England in the 1580s left its imprint on many fields of contemporary culture, ranging from the newly-developing science, the philosophy of knowledge and language, to the extraordinary flowering of Elizabethan poetry and drama. This book explores Bruno's influence on English figures as different as the ninth Earl of Northumberland, Thomas Harriot, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Originally published in 1989, it is of interest to students and teachers of history of ideas, cultural history, European drama and renaissance England. Bruno's work had particular power and emphasis in the modern world due to his response to the cultural crisis which had developed - his impulse towards a new ‘faculty of knowing’ had a disruptive effect on existing orthodoxies – religious, scientific, philosophical, and political.

The letters Giordano Bruno wrote to Sir Philip Sidney, prefacing his Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante (1584) and the Eroici furori (1585), are well known to Bruno scholars and have occasionally been studied also by those concerned with Sidney. They are, however, rarely read closely in the light of what was a daring choice on Bruno’s part, given the social chasm that separated him (a mere gentleman attendant on the French Ambassador in London, Michel de Mauvissière) from the illustrious English courtier. Nevertheless, neither letter is couched in the traditional terms of courtly flattery. Rather, Bruno is involved in a complicated balancing act aimed at bringing into agreement a choice of Sidney as his ideal English reader with a clear statement of his own philosophy in its irreconcilable distance from Sidney’s militantly Protestant Christianity. The following essay considers the reasons for Bruno’s choice of Sidney as his dedicatee, underlining the importance of recent studies that are placing a new emphasis on Sidney’s parliamentary and legal activities in the years of Bruno’s stay in London (1583–1585) as preparation for his future as a European magistrate: a prospect that would be curtailed by his untimely death in the Netherlands in 1586. Giordano Bruno’s letters to Sir Philip Sidney raise a number of issues relevant to the works and concerns of Letizia Panizza, such as liberty of thought in an early modern world of newly plural religious beliefs, and the role of women and the Petrarchan tradition in such a world.

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.

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The paper considers the Copernicanism of Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) as a central moment of his philosophy of nature, concentrating on his two principal cosmological works, La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper), written and published in London in 1584, and the Latin De immenso, published in Frankfurt in 1591. The principal characteristic of Bruno’s reading of Copernicus which is underlined is his physical realism, which was particularly complex due to his extension of the still finite Copernican cosmology to infinite dimensions. The paper shows how Bruno’s use of diagrams was essential in defining the terms of his new infinite, post-Copernican cosmology, which constitutes an essential if much debated link between Copernicus himself and the great astronomers of the early seventeenth century such as Kepler and Galileo