Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic

By Ingrid D. Rowland

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809095246
• ISBN13: 9780809095247
• Release Date: August 2008
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.4"

Customer Reviews

Misinformation and fantasy

If you are looking for an historically objective, authoritative, scholarly discussion of Giordano Bruno along the lines of Frances Yates, this isn't it. While Rowland's book is not as ridiculous as the hate-fueled religious bigotry of Alberto Martinez's book "Burned Alive" nor as patently brain-dead as Michael White's "The Pope and the Heretic," Rowland nevertheless provides a book along the lines of Domenico Berti, wherein a fictional person and myth is created from the ashes of an obscure, wandering, magical charlatan and that myth is based on the author's fantasy and not fact. From Rowland, we learn for example that Bruno was a trained Inquisitor; we learn that Protestant churches were vibrant and thriving in northern Italy hundreds of years before there was such thing as a "Protestant." We learn that the Catholic Church was terrified of Bruno and that Saint Bellarmine lacked the intellectual skills necessary to develop a suitable rational argument to convince the philosophically superior Bruno of the "correct" cosmological and theological truth. We learn that The Catholic Church has long since accepted Bruno's cosmological model for being correct. We learn a lot of things – none of which are true of course, but apparently they make for fascinating reading for the more credulous members of the public who really just want to find some kind of justification to hate The Church, and they don't really care where they get it. Life is short. Read good books. In my opinion, this one was a waste of money and time and merely contributes to myth and misinformation.