Giordano Bruno 1548 – 1600

Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher, cosmologist, and former Dominican friar. Drawing on the new heliocentric astronomy of Copernicus and on Hermetic and Neoplatonic sources, he taught that the universe is infinite, that the sun is one star among many, and that other worlds may host intelligent life. He defended a pantheistic metaphysics in which God is identical with nature and developed sophisticated arts of memory. After years of wandering through Europe, he was tried by the Roman Inquisition for heresy and burned at the stake in 1600.

Giordano Bruno was born Filippo Bruno in 1548 in Nola, near Naples. He took the Dominican habit at the convent of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples in 1565 and was ordained priest in 1572, but his outspoken doubts about Catholic doctrine and his interest in forbidden authors led to a heresy investigation, and in 1576 he abandoned the order and began a fifteen-year wandering across Geneva, Toulouse, Paris, London, Wittenberg, Prague, Helmstedt, and Frankfurt.

In these years he produced an extraordinary body of dialogues and treatises in Italian and Latin, including The Ash Wednesday Supper, On Cause, Principle, and Unity, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, and the Frankfurt Latin trilogy on the minimum, the monad, and the immense. His writings combine Copernican cosmology, hermetic magic, and a Neoplatonic metaphysics of an animate, infinite cosmos.

Lured back to Italy in 1591, Bruno was arrested in Venice the following year and transferred to the Roman Inquisition, where he was held for seven years. After refusing to recant, he was burned at the stake in the Campo de' Fiori in Rome on 17 February 1600. His martyrdom and his cosmology of an infinite universe filled with worlds made him a powerful symbol for later defenders of intellectual freedom.