The Ash Wednesday Supper is the first of six philosophical dialogues in Italian that Giordano Bruno wrote and published in London between 1584 and 1585. It lays out a revolutionary cosmology founded on the new Copernican astronomy, one that Bruno extends to infinite dimensions, filling it with an endless number of planetary systems. As well as opening up the traditional closed universe and reducing earth to a tiny speck in an overwhelmingly immense cosmos, the work offers a lively description of Bruno’s clash of opinions with a group of conservative academics and theologians in Oxford and London.
This edition presents, on facing pages, a new English translation with a newly edited Italian text of what has recently been claimed as the final version of Bruno’s Ash Wednesday Supper. The extensive critical commentary by editor and translator Hilary Gatti takes into account the most current discussion of the textual, historical, cosmological, and philosophical issues raised in this seminal work of the late European Renaissance.
(The Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library)
GIORDANO BRUNO (1548–1600), born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, and cosmological theorist. He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended the then-novel Copernican model. Bruno wrote extensively not only on cosmology but also on the art of memory, a loosely organized group of mnemonic techniques and principles.
HILARY GATTI is a retired professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Rome, La Sapienza.