1. Although Bruno had been excommunicated, he was still referred to in official documents as Fr. Bruno.
2. Vatican Archives, Doc. Rom. xxvi. Some of these archives and the documents from the Venetian Inquisition were first published in Vincenzo Spampanato, Vita di Giordano Bruno (Messina, 1921), pp.599–786. These were later used by Giovanni Gentile in Documenti della vita di Giordano Bruno (Florence, 1933). These documents were supplemented by Mercati’s findings published in 1942 as Il sommario del processo di Giordano Bruno (Vatican City, 1942).
3. Doc. Rom. xxxiii. In almost all ways this was a ritual with the sole purpose of demeaning and humiliating Bruno ceremonially because he had been excommunicated and therefore cast out of the Church many years earlier. It must be assumed that Bruno had been dressed in priest’s robes specifically for this ritualistic disrobing.
4. It has been argued that the prior had threatened Bruno with the local Inquisitor merely to scare him, simply in an attempt to steer him toward righteousness before he went too far with his heretical ideas (Richard Westfall, Galileo@ rice.edu, Albert Van Helden, 1995). If this is true, Bruno may have overreacted by fleeing the monastery when he did—an act that did spark the anger of the Church. However, Bruno’s ideologies would never have allowed him to settle into the role of the conventional priest and his unorthodox views marked him out as someone who would forever clash with official doctrine, so if he had not left then he would have done so some time later.
1. Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature.
2. In reference to this clash of ideologies, Edward Gibbon, the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (one of the titles in the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum), wrote with unguarded cynicism that at Nicaea, Christianity had been split over a single iota.
3. The sect of Arianism survived long after the Catholic Church tried to obliterate it. One of the most famous of Arius’s followers was Sir Isaac Newton.
4. Yet such was Erasmus’s popularity that the Church failed initially to suppress his masterpiece, Moriae encomium. However, at the height of the Counter Reformation the Inquisition began collecting material that might incriminate the great humanist author, an effort that continued even after he was dead. In 1544, eight years after Erasmus had died, the zealous Pope Paul IV took the extraordinary step of excommunicating him posthumously and then consigned all his works to the Index Expurgatorius.
5. The original verse is innocent enough. Luke declared, “And the Lord said unto the servant, go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.”
6. The most important of the manuals was The Practice of Inquisition, completed by Gui in 1324.
7. It has long been believed that the witch trials and the murder of so many innocents was only superficially a matter of the righteous believing they were fighting an evil force disguised as scores of thousands of witches. It is now believed this horrendous process was an example of unparalleled misogyny energized by a few powerful men within the Church hierarchy.
8. Such an infamous act was made worse by the fact that at the time of his arrest, Servetus was on the verge of discovering the method by which blood circulates through the body, work that was some seventy-five years ahead of William Harvey’s breakthrough research published in On the Motions of the Heart and Blood (1628).
1. Incredibly, Rome had three popes between the death of Sixtus V in August 1590 and the accession of Clement VIII in February 1592. Urban VII reigned for just twelve days in September 1590; Gregory XIV for ten months, from December 1590 to October 1591; and Innocent IX for sixty-two days, from October to December of the same year. Each was elderly and found the strain of office too much.
2. Letter dated January 21, 1592, from Havekenthal of Brandenburg to Michael Forgacz of Bavaria, recorded in Acidalius, Valens; Epistle. A fratre editum (Frankfurt, 1606), p.10.
3. Mocenigo’s primary area of interest was the “art of memory” or mnemonics, which was the subject of his letters to Bruno in Frankfurt. I will deal with this arcane discipline in the following chapter.
4. Doc. vii.
5. Doc. v.
6. Doc. vi.
1. Some readers may wonder why three parallel paths of human intellectual development—natural philosophy, the occult tradition, and Christianity—are not listed here. The last has been ignored for one important reason. Christian doctrine does not evolve; it is based upon cast-in-stone tenets and therefore cannot develop or offer anything radical or original. Of course, both the occult avenue and the Christian heritage share the encumbrance of being faith-based thought systems, but what differentiates them markedly is that Christian theology violently rejects change or innovation, whereas the occult tradition thrived upon these things. If nothing else, this willingness to embrace intuition and inventiveness could unite the natural philosopher (or protoscientist) with the mystic or occultist, so that each eventually found that they were almost totally incompatible with theology, yet shared some fundamental concerns.
2. Aristotle was not the only ancient to propose the idea of a geocentric universe. This misconception was also offered by a contemporary of Aristotle’s, Eudoxus, and again, nearly two centuries after Aristotle, by the Alexandrian Hipparchus.
3. Lucretius, “The Persistence of Atoms,” from The Nature of Things (c.60 b.c.).
4. Charles Mackay, “The Alchemysts,” in Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, by Richard Bentley (London, 1841), pp.105–7.
5. And there it was to have good company. Revolutions was removed from the list in 1835, but the 1948 list (the last to be published) still included the entire works of Boyle, Hume, Hobbes, Voltaire, Zola, and, of course, Bruno. Contemporaries of Bruno’s also found themselves on the list: Campanella’s City of the Sun and Telesio’s De natura rerum iuxta propria principia were both included from their date of publication. These were accompanied by The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Madame Bovary, works by Locke, Kant, Descartes, Fludd, Mill, and Bergson, and many of the most important literary treasures of modern civilization.
6. See E. McMullin, “Bruno and Copernicus,” Isis 78(1987), pp.55–74.
7. Giordano Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper, Dialogue I.
8. This was revealed by the historian Isaac Casaubon in 1614.
9. Astrology has been perceived by many intellectuals as unworthy of serious consideration. Leonardo despised the court astrologer, Ambrogio Varese da Rosate, with whom he was obliged to work when under the patronage of the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola wrote scathing attacks on the art in his De astrologia.
10. In one of his most important books, Sigillus sigillorum (Seal of Seals), Bruno writes with astonishing vision that the alchemists will not succeed in their interminable search for the philosophers’ stone, but on their journey will stumble upon much that will be helpful to the natural philosopher. This proved to be quite true, because the alchemists achieved nothing of lasting theoretical value but were responsible for the invention of many valued laboratory techniques and the earliest designs of equipment still used today.
11. Giordano Bruno, De la causa, principio et uno (On Cause, Principle and the One) (London, 1584).
12. Ernst Cassirer, Essay on Man: Introduction to the Philosophy of Human Culture (Berlin, 1944).
13. Bruno’s books on the art of memory are De umbris idearum (The Shadow of Ideas, 1582), Cantus Circaeus ad eam memoriae praxim ordinatus quam ipse ludiciarum appellat (The Chant of Circe, 1582), Ars reminiscendi et in phantastico campo exarandi (The Art of Recollection, 1583), Lampas triginta statarum (The Lamp of Thirty Statues, 1587), and De imaginum, signorum et idearum compositione, ad omnia, inventionum, dispositonum et memoriae genera (On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas, 1591).
14. Many of these have been lost, and some were never published. Bruno also wrote at least two plays. The best-known of these is Il Candelaio (The Torch-Bearer), a satirical comedy composed during his first sojourn in Paris around 1582. (See Appendix III.)
15. The other book in this quartet is De l’infinito universo et mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Its Worlds), another great work of nonmathematical cosmology.
1. Doc. i.
2. Doc. i.
3. Doc. ii. The “book of conjurations” Mocenigo writes of was The Seals of Hermes and Ptolemy, known to have been in Bruno’s possession at the time of his capture.
4. Doc. v.
5. Doc. i.
6. Doc.iii.
7. Doc. vii.
8. Doc. xi.
9. Doc. xiii.
10. Doc. i.
11. M.S. Fr 20309, fol. 345, V.sqq. Bibliothèque Nationale.
12. During the Venetian trial, Mocenigo also claimed Bruno had, on many occasions, broken his vows of chastity. It is interesting to note that the Venetian Inquisitors ignored this too, a fact that further supports the notion that they did not want anything tangential to obscure their central concerns.
13. Doc. ix.
14. Doc. xii.
15. Registres du Consistoire: Vol. de 1577–79, Geneva University Library.
16. Doc. xii.
17. Doc. ix. By “civil wars” he meant the ongoing religious conflict between the Huguenots and the Catholics that had resulted in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572.
18. Doc. ix.
19. John Bossy, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair (New Haven, Conn., 1991).
20. Doc. ix.
21. Doc. xvii and Doc. xi.
22. Some readers may wonder why it is that known heretics like Bruno were not simply taken from wherever they were in Europe and forced to recant or face execution in Rome. Ironically, perhaps, the Church was disinclined toward such methods. The Inquisition always wanted the heretic to come to it willingly and then to piously admit his wrongheadedness for all to see and hear. Before executing a heretic, Inquisitors did everything they could to encourage the victim to recant and to make it known publicly that he had been pursuing false notions before being guided toward the light of truth.
23. The works were The Trivium (On Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectics) and The Quadrivium (On Arithmetic, Mathematics, Astronomy and Music), which together comprised the seven liberal arts Bruno mentions here.
24. Doc. ix.
25. The Venetian prisons were particularly unpleasant because of overcrowding. Unusually, Bruno was kept in solitary confinement because of the nature of his crimes; the authorities did not want him proselytizing to a captive and impressionable audience.
The year before Bruno’s arrest, a farsighted local physician named Giovanni Ottato published an official report that condemned the treatment of prisoners and included a litany of problems with the Venetian prison system, highlighting the incidence of disease among inmates caused by the unsanitary conditions, the poor air, the rat-infested cells, and the substandard diet.
26. Doc. viii.
27. Doc. x.
28. Doc. ix.
29. Doc. xvii.
30. Doc. vi.
31. Doc. ix.
32. Doc. xi.
33. Doc. xii.
34. Doc xi.
35. Doc. xiii.
36. Ibid.
37. Doc. xi.
38. Doc. xiv.
39. Doc. ix.
40. Doc. xii. Raymond Lully, or Ramon Lull as he was more usually known, was a key character in the alchemical and magical culture of Europe during the early fourteenth century and was imprisoned in the Tower by King Edward III, who demanded he stay in chains until he produced gold to finance a crusade. Bruno may have begun calling Lull Lully after his own spell in England. Bruno often wrote about Lull’s work and delivered a series of lectures at Oxford and Paris on what he called “Lullian philosophy.”
41. Doc. xiv.
42. Ibid.
43. Doc. xiv.
44. Doc. xvii.
45. Ibid.
46. During this era, such “double-think” was a very common technique employed by anyone who had dealings with ecclesiastic authorities. Such arguments had rescued the philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi, who in 1516 had written a treatise, De immortalitate animae, in which he pointed out that the immortality of the soul could not be confirmed using Aristotelian logic. By successfully convincing his judges that he was speaking purely philosophically and that his reasoning had no impact upon theology, he spared himself the stake. Early in Bruno’s hearing, he had similarly claimed that what he said was “according to natural principles and natural understanding, being in no way concerned with that which principally must be maintained according to faith.”
47. Morosini is a very common and ancient Venetian name. Famous admirals, generals, and merchants and no fewer than five doges had shared this surname. The scholar Andrea Morosini and the politician Thomas Morosini were only distantly related. Andrea Morosini had an illustrious career as a scholar at the University of Padua and as Venetian ambassador. In 1600 he became a senator and five years later joined the highest echelon of government, the collegio dei savii (cabinet of ministers).
48. Doc. xv.
49. Doc. xvi.
50. Doc. xvii.
1. Doc. xviii.
2. Doc. xix.
3. Doc. xx.
4. Doc. xxi.
6. Doc. xxiii.
7. Doc. xxiv.
8. Doc. xxv.
1. Bernard Gui, Manuel de l’inquisiteur, trans. G. Mollat (Paris, 1969).
1. Doc. Rom. iii.
2. Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 7(New York, 1958), p.292. It is worth noting that the accuracy of this description is questionable because the description of Campanella’s injuries do not tally with the Inquisition’s practice of torturing victims using only methods that cause little or no bleeding.
3. Giordano Bruno, De gli eroici fuori (Paris, 1585).
4. Angelo Mercati, Il sommario del processo di Giordano Bruno (Vatican City, 1942), p.61.
5. Gabriel Naudé, Instruction à la France sur la vérité de l’histoire des Frères de la Rose-Croix (Paris, 1623), pp.15–16.
6. See Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London, 1972).
7. It would seem that even before he arrived in Frankfurt during the summer of 1590, information that Bruno was moving into more radical territory had extended beyond the circle of magi and Hermeticists who shared Bruno’s ideals. When Bruno applied for permission to live with Wechel (a process comparable to applying for a visa), the usually liberal-minded administrators of Frankfurt made it clear they did not approve of him. A note in the Burgomaster Reports dated July 2, 1590, tells us, “It has been resolved that his [Bruno’s] petition [to take up residence with Wechel] be refused and that he be told to take his penny elsewhere.” Burgomaster Reports, Frankfurt, no. 160, p.48, Frankfurt City Records Office. Presumably, the Carmelite monastery lay beyond the jurisdiction of the burgomaster.
8. Luigi Firpo, Gli scritti di Francesco Pucci (Turin, 1957), pp.182–83.
9. Doc. Rom. xviii.
10. Doc. Rom. xxiv2 and xxiv3.
11. Domenico Berti, Vita di Giordano Bruno da Nola (Turin, 1868), Appendix I.
12. Doc. Rom. xxvi.
1. Doc. Rom. xxix.
2. MS. Urbane 1068(Doc. Rom. xxviii, xxxi, and xxxii), Vatican Library.
3. Other tales report that particularly reviled heretics were burned using very dry wood. This produced little smoke and so the victim would be less likely to suffocate. Instead, the flames burned and the wounds cauterized until the fire overwhelmed the victim and he died of shock. We do not know whether this worst of fates befell Bruno, but the powerful men who sanctioned his murder considered him the most extreme heretic in the history of the Church, and so it is a strong possibility.
1. Ellen Knickmeyer, “Tributes made to the martyr of free thought Giordano Bruno,” Associated Press, Friday, February 18,2000.
2. The renowned evolutionary biologist and friend of Darwin Ernst Haeckel composed an address for this event.
3. Luigi Firpo, “Il processo di Giordano Bruno” (Rome, 1993), p.145.
4. Bruno was an “ideas man” but he had a profound effect upon many of those of his own and later generations who were interested in experiment. The best example of this is found in the work of Bruno’s English contemporary William Gilbert, who met Bruno during the Nolan’s stay in England during the early 1580s. In his De magnete, published in the year of Bruno’s death, Gilbert applied thinking similar to Bruno’s “universal Copernicanism” as expressed in The Ash Wednesday Supper, written in 1584 in London.
5. P. O. Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, Calif., 1964).
6. Letter dated April 15, 1610, published in E. Favaro, ed., Galileo Galilei (Florence, 1890–1909).
7. Galileo Galilei, Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems, edited by G. Santillana (Chicago, 1953), p.15n.
8. Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner, “Galileo and the Long Shadow of Bruno,” Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences 25, no. 97(1975), pp.223–46.
9. In one of Bruno’s thought experiments he imagined himself floating above and beyond the earth. As he drifted closer and closer to the moon he visualized it growing larger as the earth became smaller. From the surface of the moon itself, the earth seemed like a satellite and the moon had taken on the dimensions of the earth. Traveling farther still, he imagined both the earth and the moon as specks of light. Eventually they disappeared into endless night. From this he determined a primitive form of nonmathematical relativity in which he emphasized the fact that the appearance and the reality of things are not always the same. To us, the vision of the earth as a speck of light is almost commonplace (we’ve all seen plenty of science fiction films), but for those living during an age in which a journey to the next village was a major undertaking, such an idea represented a truly remarkable insight.
10. Christiaan Huygens, The Celestial Worlds Discovered (London, 1698).
11. It is interesting to recall that contemporaneously Newton was also led to his great discoveries by a blend of his incomparable talents as an experimenter and his profound understanding of mathematics as well as his knowledge of alchemy and ancient religion. This is discussed at length in my book Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer.
12. Punch 5, no. 389(1712), pp.301–5.
13. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol.3(Oxford, 1936), p.156.
14. Both Sidney and Greville were independently initiated into occult teaching by no less a figure than John Dee himself.
15. David Lloyd, Statesmen and Favourites of England Since the Reformation (1665), quoted in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare, vol.2(Oxford, 1930), p.250.
16. In her book The Art of Memory (London, 1992), Dame Frances Yates describes in detail her theory that Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London was designed according to Hermetic occult rules. The theory suggests that in much the same way the design of their temples was intrinsic to the religious practices of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, every aspect of the Globe Theatre, from its floor plan to the materials used in its construction, was calculated to energize the performers working there and enhance their memories.
17. Giordano Bruno, Opere italiane, edited by Giovanni Gentile and Vincenzo Spampanato, vol.2(Bari, 1925–27), p.192.