Shakespeare, astronomy, Thomas Digges, Giordano Bruno, "Hamlet", and more

Edwin Booth as Hamlet

Horatio:

As stars with trains of fire, and dews of blood,
Disasters in the Sun; and the moist star,
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands,
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.

"Shakespeare’s Secret Knowledge of Astronomy"

by

Mick Vagg

August 2nd, 2011

365 Days of Astronomy

There is no shortage of pet revisionist theories about Shakespeare, largely because he left no working notes or manuscripts, and in fact little else beyond basic documentation of his baptism, property purchases, death, and brushes with the law in between. While doing my own research for this podcast I discovered an excellent and provocative argument about Shakespeare’s knowledge of astronomy which suggests that he had knowledge of phenomena such as the craters on the moon, sunspots, the phases of Venus, the Great Red Spot of Jupiter and the resolution of the Milky Way into millions of individual stars at least 10 years before Galileo discovered them, and that this knowledge was probably based on telescopic observations done in England decades before Galileo and Thomas Harriot in 1610.

Forests of trees and tanker trucks of ink have been devoted in efforts to interpret the Bard line by line. Scholars for at least two centuries have made their livings by coming up with ever more subtle and elaborate interpretations of individual lines of Shakespeare. The challenge for the lover of Shakespeare mysteries is to work out how plausible these baroque assumptions actually are. Modern authors like Tolkein and JK Rowling are known to have been bemused by the extraordinary depths of meaning which fans and academics have found in their novels, and James Joyce in fact deliberately laid trails of obscure symbols and even jokes to keep the scholars tied in knots for years to come. So any new revisionist theory has to have a substantial historical basis and other lines of evidence to support it.

Our theory takes place against the tumultuous background of Elizabethan England, and revolves around one of the little-known heroes of astronomy as well as a giant of mathematical thought of the time. Thomas Digges lived from 1546-1595. He took over from his father Leonard the editorship of a successful almanac with the excellent title of A Prognostication Everlasting. Having attempted to measure the distance to the supernova of 1572 using the parallax method, Digges junior got a result which confirmed that the supernova had to be way past the orbit of the moon, thus supporting the Copernican model. He slipped a detailed description of the heliocentric model into an appendix of the Prognostication Everlasting in 1576, and continued to keep it out there until his death in 1595. As well as heliocentrism, Thomas Digges was one of the first to argue that the stars were spread through infinite space, not fixed to the crystal celestial spheres that even Copernicus did not have the insight to smash. Digges was an intellectual protégé of John Dee who was one of the truly remarkable figures of the Tudor period. To scientists he was the first great popularizer of mathematics and the first to try to spread mathematical ideas outside universities and into technological applications. To occultists he was a supreme magus, one of the most successful esoteric scholars ever. To conspiracy theorists he is an unending source of speculation about his activities in espionage, secret societies and hidden knowledge. He is generally accepted by scholars to be the model for Prospero in The Tempest, a wise man who combines knowledge and wisdom to control people’s destinies.

So, is it plausible that Leonard and Thomas Digges could have used a crude telescope? In a word, yes. Leonard Digges invented the theodolite, the optical instrument used by surveyors to measure distances and angles accurately. Digges Snr was also an inveterate experimenter with lenses and mirrors. There are historical documents left by a colleague of his which suggest he may have constructed a functioning reflecting telescope and possibly a refracting telescope. Digges Jnr wrote that his father had created ‘proportional glasses’ to read writing at a distance or spy on far-off activities. Astronomical historians are not convinced that he could do what Digges jnr claimed in detail, but it is at least a plausible conjecture that the Digges’ could have had a crude telescope decades before Galileo, though its optical performance would have been no better than his, and the known quality of lenses and mirrors at the time tend to suggest these claims may be exaggerated somewhat. For more detail about this see Dr Fred Watson’s excellent book Stargazer. But how could Shakespeare have known about this obscure scientific knowledge?

There are a number of fascinating possibilities. Leonard Digges and his colleague William Bourne were well-known to William Cecil, Baron Burghley. Baron Burghley was Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State and Lord Privy Seal and one of the most powerful and capable men in the Tudor era. Thomas Digges was a Member of Parliament for most of his adult life, and was a senior military figure in the English Army in the late 1580’s when he would have been well-known to Burghley. Burghley’s daughter Anne married Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. De Vere is well-known to Shakespeare revisionsists as the most convincing alternative author of the plays. Burghley also supervised the upbringing of the 3rd Earl of Southampton Henry Wriothesley. Southampton was an undisputed patron of Shakespeare’s early poems, and is thought by many scholars to be the Fair Youth to whom the sonnets are dedicated. Finally, the character of Polonius in Hamlet has always been seen by scholars and by the public of the time as a caricature of Burghley.

Thomas Digges’ widow Anne remarried to a man named Thomas Russell, who owned land in Stratford Upon Avon and was an executor of Shakespeare’s will. Thomas Digges’ son Leonard, who was a poet, contributed laudatory poems to editions of Shakespeare’s work that were collected posthumously. They all knew John Dee and had dealings with him in Court and Parliament. As a member of the cultural elite of the time, Shakespeare could quite plausibly have heard of secret discoveries that the Digges could have made, as they clearly moved in the same circles, and probably were on good terms.

So, if it was at least possible that Shakespeare might have known about these phenomena, why put it into his plays, and where are these so-called references? The date of the composition of Hamlet is normally given as between 1599 and 1602, with 1600 or 1601 being the most likely dates. Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher monk who was an advocate of the infinite universe (an idea pioneered by Thomas Digges) and heliocentrism. Bruno lived in England between 1582-85 and given the documented circles in which he moved during this time, it is almost inevitable that he would have met several other major players in this story, including John Dee, Thomas Digges, the Earl of Oxford and Shakespeare himself. The Bard is believed to have met Bruno in a printer’s shop in London. Bruno was executed by the Church in 1600, and his beliefs in heliocentrism and an infinite universe were felt at the time to have contributed to the Church’s persecution of him. The available records of his lengthy trial mention only his numerous unorthodox Christian beliefs, but it would have been a powerful motivation for his English supporters to make an artistic tribute to these beliefs in a way that only those with the secret knowledge would understand. The sentiments and phraseology of Hamlet’s famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy are almost a paraphrase of a work of Bruno’s which would have been familiar at the time only to a select few who were very familiar with them.

So, we have established that it would not be totally implausible for there to have been telescopic observations of celestial phenomena in England prior to Galileo and Harriot. It would also have been likely that as a member of the cultural elite of the time, and intimately associated with the scientific and political players of the time, Shakepseare could have been aware of this new science, and also had a pressing reason at about the time of Hamlet’s composition in 1600 or 1601 to include a disguised tribute to Giordano Bruno in his masterpiece.

The textual evidence supporting the idea that Hamlet is an allegory of the New Astronomy is well set out in detail in a paper by Peter Usher [below]. I will only mention a couple of the more convincing textual arguments.

Shakespeare was not in the habit of naming his characters randomly. Denmark is the home of Tycho Brahe, whose observations were crucial in establishing the nonexistence of the celestial spheres and who was a major Copernican advocate. The unusual Danish names of the characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet are found on the coats of arms behind Brahe in some engravings which he sent to Sir Thomas Savile in England with a letter asking that he be remembered to John Dee and Thomas Digges. Hamlet’s castle is called Elsinore, which is the nearest Danish castle to Brahe’s island observatory on Uraniborg. The false King of Denmark is called Claudius. What was Ptolemy’s first name again? Hamlet has been repeatedly identified with Shakespeare’s own feelings about his son Hamnet who dies when he was only 11. Never one to miss a pun, did the Bard choose to name his allegorical Sun after his own beloved son? The name Ophelia is not recorded in history before Hamlet. Peter Usher argues that it can be derived from combining the Greek prefix ob/op meaning opposite with the Greek word for sun – helios. Ophelia is the allegorical moon character in the play. Her death is foreshadowed by a lunar eclipse. There are several other hints that seem to refer to knowledge of craters on the moon, and the phases of Venus when read in this allegorical context. There are several passages in the play where Hamlet and others play on the sun/moon image for Hamlet and Ophelia.

It seems less amazing that Shakespeare would be up with cutting edge secret scientific knowledge when you know it appears that he was also aware of the circulation of blood years before William Harvey described it in 1616. References to blood circulating occur in nine plays written before 1608, so it seems that unlike today, in Tudor times scientists had to wait until it was politically safe to announce their discoveries, though rumours and even proof may have been circulating among well-educated people prior to the date of publication.

So, to summarize, a reasonably plausible argument can be made from textual and historical sources that William Shakespeare had knowledge of astronomical phenomena at least a decade before Galileo and Thomas Harriot in 1610. He probably got this knowledge from the Digges (father and/or son), Giordano Bruno and John Dee whom he would have been acquainted with due to their mutual connections in the Tudor parliament and aristocracy. I have found a number of additional lines in Hamlet myself which could also be interpreted along this cosmic allegorical theme. It is a fascinating conjecture, to imagine that the greatest playwright of all time was also an early advocate of one of the greatest scientific revolutions of all time.

References

http://www.shakespearedigges.org/ox2.htm Peter Usher’s paper Shakespeare’s Support for the New Astronomy

Stargazer –the life and times of the telescope Dr Fred Watson Pub by Allen and Unwin 2004

http://www.levity.com/alchemy/h_shake.html

http://uweb.txstate.edu/~do01/astronomyinliteraturehamlet.htm

Wikipedia pages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_bruno

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dee_%28mathematician%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Digges

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cecil,_1st_Baron_Burghley

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Sidney

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Digges_%28scientist%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wriothesley,_3rd_Earl_of_Southampton

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_de_Vere,_17th_Earl_of_Oxford

"SHAKESPEARE'S SUPPORT FOR THE NEW ASTRONOMY"

by

Peter Usher

2002

Vol. 5, pp. 132-146

The Oxfordian

"Universally, human beings will resort to narrative to come to grips with a shattered reality."

Richard Stone The Healing Art of Storytelling

Renaissance cosmology prior to the year 1543 was based almost entirely on concepts established by Plato and his student Aristotle, that the physical universe comprises an immobile Earth about which move the seven ancient planets and the stars. This geocentric model was eminently plausible for it agreed in its basic form with what was obvious to the naked eye, that all heavenly bodies circled the Earth, albeit at different rates and in slightly different ways.

The geocentric model was brought to a high level of sophistication by the last of the Greco- Roman astronomers, Claudius Ptolemy (fl. 140 AD), yet notwithstanding the ingenuity of its mathematics, the Ptolemaic model suffered from a major defect -- it failed to predict planetary motions for any extended period of time. Informally Plato had assigned to his students the task of explaining the apparent movements of the planets (Pannekoek 102), but neither his simple model nor the more sophisticated one of Ptolemy was up to the task. In fact, the assigned problem remained unanswered for well-nigh two millennia, until the advent of Newtonian mechanics in the last half of the seventeenth century.

A major step in predicting planetary positions occurred in 1543 with the publication of the book De Revolutionibus. This seminal work by the Polish mathematician Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) advanced the revolutionary idea that the Sun was at the center of all motion in the planetary system. Initially the heliocentric model was not superior in its predictive power to the old, but it spurred Renaissance thinkers to view the physical Universe in a new light. Unfortunately, through the labors of Thomas Aquinas, Christianity had become committed to Aristotelian and Platonic ideals and in particular to the doctrine of geocentricity, and so Christian leaders, both Catholic and Protestant, opposed the Copernican model. Centuries of thought were at risk of being toppled as Copernicus subjected the planetary system to a major transformation -- from geocentricism to heliocentricism. As a result, those who were early to see the truth in heliocentricism had to proceed with caution for fear of persecution.

Dissemination of heliocentricism in England began with Robert Recorde (c. 1510-1558) whose Castle of Knowledge of 1556 regarded the doctrines of Copernicus with favor even if he did not fully believe in them (Berry 127). In the same year John Field (c. 1525-1587) published Ephemeris Anni 1557 which contained predictions of planetary positions for 1557 based on the Copernican system. Field calculated these ephemerides at the urging of John Dee (1527-1608), but Dee had a far greater impact on astronomy through his pupil Thomas Digges (c.1546-1595). In 1573 Digges published a treatise on the New Star of 1572, Alae seu Scalae Mathematicae which contained warm praise for the Copernican hypothesis. This work was dedicated to the chief minister to Queen Elizabeth, William Cecil, Lord Burghley. In 1576 Digges followed this publication with A Perfit Description, which clearly described and depicted a heliocentric planetary system.

Digges published his A Perfit Description as an appendix to the almanac A Prognostication Everlasting which his father Leonard Digges (c. 1521 - c. 1574) had begun. Thomas Digges edited and updated the almanac following his father's death. In a recent paper we have examined the circumstances surrounding the publication of A Perfit Description from the time of the 1576 edition of the almanac to the final edition that appeared more than a decade after the death of its author (Best et al.). We concluded that Thomas Digges was able to advance the cause of heliocentricism by unobtrusively tucking away the details in an appendix to an almanac that was already quite popular and that was superficially based on politically correct geocentricism, thereby succeeding in disguising not only Copernican theory, but also his own seminal advance -- a physically infinite universe filled with stars like the Sun. In fact he may have succeeded so well in disguising his advocacy of the New Astronomy (as it came to be called) that not only did it go unnoticed by censors and potential inquisitors at the time but the full impact of the shattering the sphere of the stars has not been fully appreciated even to this day (see Best et al.)

Thomas Digges escaped persecution from the time of the publication of his revolutionary ideas to the end of his life in 1595. This was an extraordinary feat in an age of political and religious intolerance, when the House of Tudor was in constant dread of Catholicism and war with Spain, when Sir Walter Raleigh and his cohorts in the so-called "School of Night" fell under suspicion of atheism, and when one of England's leading mathematicians, Thomas Harriot, was imprisoned simply because his work was sponsored by Raleigh. It would not have gone unnoticed in England in the final years of the writing of Hamlet that the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), who had lectured extensively there and on the Continent and had been captured by the Inquisition, was consigned to the flames for assorted impieties, including his advocacy in 1584 of an Infinite Universe.

The turn of the seventeenth century was a time when heliocentricism was upsetting centuries of geocentric tradition, when the accustomed order of the heavens was turned topsy-turvy. Shakespeare noted that the new cosmic order might presage a new order in the affairs of the Earth as well. In the "degree" speech in Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses says that the heavens show humanity the merits of an harmonious geocentric order: "The Heavens themselves, the Planets, and this center [the Earth], observe degree, priority, and place." Ulysses goes on to warn that when the planets "in evil mixture to disorder wander" then the hierarchy on Earth is imperiled. Later in the play Troilus states that this has indeed occurred: "The bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolved, and loosed." Elsewhere I have suggested that the concerns that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern express to Claudius in Hamlet concerning the collapse of geocentricity may be seen in analogous human terms: "Most holy and religious fear it is, to keep those many many bodies safe that live and feed upon Your Majesty."

Stability in politics is a constant theme in the Shakesperean canon. In Hamlet it manifests itself through the plight of a King who, allegorically speaking, is falsely placed at the center of an hierarchy of planets, including the Sun, that stretches out to the stars, and whose position is threatened by Hamlet, the rightful heir to the throne and so, the rightful Sun and the rightful center.

Shakespeare and Optics

Shakespeare showed great sensitivity to the need for burying the New Astronomy in an allegory that only his inner circle could appreciate. These privileged few would no doubt have included Lord Burghley, who made it his business to develop intelligence in defense of the realm. In the 1570s Burghley consigned to William Bourne the task of writing a treatise on a new-fangled device known as a "perspective glass" or "perspective trunk" (Johnson 176-7). In 1578 William Bourne reported that the device enabled a letter to be read at a quarter mile (van Helden Transactions 30).

Leonard Digges was a keen experimentalist who is regarded as the inventor of the perspective trunk, a unique design comprising a plano-convex lens with a spherical mirror for an eyepiece (Ronan). These devices were in use at least by 1570, as reported by John Dee in that year and by Leonard and Thomas Digges in 1571 in Pantometria. In the Preface, Thomas Digges refers to his father's "continual" use of "proportional Glasses." It should be significant that Leonard Digges was the grandfather of another Leonard Digges, one of four writers who contributed dedicatory poems to Shakespeare's Folio of 1623 (see Whalen).

No doubt Perspective Trunks were quite useful at the time of the Spanish Armada in 1588, amply validating Cecil's interest. The use of optics in warfare would not be surprising given the peacetime use of lenses by artists in Northern Europe by the middle of the sixteenth century. In the fifteenth century, artists graduated from a straightforward pinhole "camera obscura" to use of a "mirror-lens" (i.e. a spherical concave mirror like a shaving mirror). Shaving mirrors are easier to make than plane mirrors and have all the qualities of a lens because they can project images. By this means the image of a subject seen through a hole in the door of a darkened room was projected onto paper pinned up next to the hole. Thus they can be used in lieu of an eyepiece to view images formed by convex lenses. Unlike mirror-lenses, convex lenses reverse images, as evidenced in late sixteenth-century portraiture by a sudden excess of left-handed drinkers (Hockney 64, 113, 208).

Lenses in turn had been known since early times. In the first century AD, Ptolemy is reputed to have had a spectacle glass that enabled him to descry ships from afar, and Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1292) reported that magnifying glasses enabled the stars to "shine in what places you please" (van Helden Transactions 28). Bacon also reports examining the Moon through two lenses, and Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) noted that it was possible to "make glasses for the eyes to see the Moon large" (Rienitz 7). Thus the Perspective Trunk made use of two technologies known in the latter half of the sixteenth century: the mirror-lens and the plano- convex lens. It is our belief that the device that employed these optical devices was trained upon the heavens and the results then reported in Hamlet.

Hamlet and the New Astronomy

Science historians continue to wonder whether or not the Digges model of 1576 was no more than a great imaginative leap to a physical infinity (Johnson & Larkey 117; Johnson 175; McLean 150). The history of Science informs us that it wasn't until Galileo (1564-1642) that data were acquired through telescopic observations, data he published in 1610. Galileo showed among other things that the Moon is blemished, that at least one planet -- Venus -- has phases consistent with motion around the Sun, and that the Milky Way can be resolved into a myriad of stars. But was Galileo the first to see them? That these phenomena had been seen before Galileo now seems certain.

I propose that the text of Hamlet contains descriptions of Solar System objects and the Milky Way, and that these data could not have been gleaned without optical aid. I will further suggest, based in large part on the substantial hints in Hamlet, that telescopic observations occurred in England, probably in the interval 1563-1576, at least 33 years before Galileo first pointed his spyglass at the heavens, and that it is likely that such observations were made with the help of the "perspective trunk" of Leonard Digges.

Omens, Sun and Moon

Shakespeare frequently blends images and ideas of the heavens from classical mythology with what appear to be images derived from direct observation. Among these classical ideas is that events in the heavens portend disasters on earth.

To the ancient Greeks, Phoebus Apollo was god of the Sun and his sister Diana goddess of chastity and the Moon (Bulfinch 6). The Sun-chariot was the symbol of royalty (Graves 109.2), an idea that carried over into Elizabethan iconography, where kings were customarily associated with the Sun (Fleischer 33). It seems reasonable to suppose therefore that Hamlet, heir to the throne, should be associated with the Sun, and that his beloved Ophelia should be associated with the Moon (Endnote 1). Together the Sun and the Moon rule the sky, for they are the most prominent Ancient Planets. Shakespeare calls the Moon the "moist star" because of her tidal influence upon "Neptune's empire," viz. upon the world's oceans (1.1.118-9). I also suggest that Ophelia's name, used, it seems, for the first time ever in Hamlet, may have been coined from the prefix ob- (or op-) as in "opposite," and helios, the Sun, since she and Hamlet are destined to rule just as the Moon and Sun dominate the heavens -- unless of course something goes awry.

In the first scene (1.1.117-20) Horatio says:

As stars with trains of fire, and dews of blood,
Disasters in the Sun; and the moist star,
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands,
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.

Whereupon Horatio says that these events in the heavens are omens foretelling disasters pending on earth (1.1.121-5):

And even the like precurse of feared events,
As harbingers preceding still the fates
And prologue to the omen coming on,
Have heaven and earth together demonstrated
Unto our climatures and countrymen.

Unfortunately lines 1.1.117-8 cannot be analyzed unambiguously, if only because they include an incomplete sentence, but according to Edwards, "dews of blood" does immediately precede and belong with "disasters in the Sun." "Disasters" is a plural noun that suggests to me the wounds mutually inflicted on the two claimants to the throne, Hamlet and Claudius.

The available textual data seem also to contain a second omen which, together with the first, reflects the suffering experienced by Hamlet and Ophelia, presaging their deaths. The solar disasters identify circumstances surrounding Hamlet's death, while the eclipse of the Moon foretells the death of Ophelia by drowning (4.7.164). Both omens are associated with excess: in Act IV, Ophelia will meet her demise because she has "too much of water" while in Hamlet's case he is "too much in the Sun." Hamlet's being too much in the Sun may be a pun on his being "too much" the "son" of Old Hamlet (Edwards 1.2.67n), and may also refer to his alleged "madness" (as in: "mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun").

It may also connect his troubles with sunspots.

Large sunspots are visible to the naked eye and in pre-telescopic times were attributed to transiting foreground objects. Galileo thought of them as clouds, but with ever-improving optical resolution, it was believed by the eighteenth century that they were actual holes in the surface of the Sun (Berry Sections 124-5, 268). If Shakespeare means "in the Sun" to be taken literally, he would have to have had optical evidence. Taken literally, "disasters in the Sun" imply breaks in the skin of the Sun. Since both Hamlet and Claudius vie for the crown, both have the right to a mythological identification with the royal Sun and, in the final act, both suffer "disasters" in the form of puncture wounds.

Ophelia and Venus

Laertes advises his sister not to take matters of the heart too seriously. He states his reasons for caution, first in the context of love (1.3.5-28) and then of chastity (1.3.29-44). The context of love pertains to the Goddess of Love, Venus. The context of chastity pertains to the Goddess of Chastity, the Moon.

In 1.3.11-4 Laertes introduces the subject of love with the words:

... nature crescent does not grow alone
In thews and bulk, but as this temple waxes
The inward service of the mind and soul
Grows wide withal.

The word "crescent" pertained originally to the waxing Moon in any phase -- crescent or gibbous -- since it derives from the Latin crescere meaning to increase in size, regardless of the size itself (OED). This meaning probably obtains here since "crescent" and "waxes" precede "grows wide withal," i.e. tends toward the Full phase. [Note added Dec. 2002: Scientific usage of the word "gibbous" entered the English language only in 1690 (OED).]

Thus we learn that the Moon is not the only object that waxes, but the issue in question here is love (Venus) and not chastity (the Moon). It would be disjunctive if the description of crescent and gibbous phases of the Moon were to apply to Venus, unless of course that was what Shakespeare intended. If so, the phases of Venus can be detected with certainty only telescopically, as when Galileo trained his spyglass on Venus in 1610 and reported his finding in a letter to the Tuscan ambassador (van Helden Sidereus 107). Only if Venus circles the Sun can it show the full range of phases from new to full and back to new again. In 1610 this finding was hailed as a great piece of evidence in favor of heliocentricism. However, since, as we have shown in previous articles, so much of cutting edge astronomy is to be found in a subtext in Hamlet we feel justified in suggesting that the newly discovered phases of Venus, as hinted at by Laertes, may also be intended.

Ophelia and the Moon

Laertes then warns Ophelia of dire outcomes if does not protect her virginity, arguing that she might be dishonored if she were to entertain Hamlet's advances. The passage (1.3.33-44) in question begins and ends with Laertes urging Ophelia to remain a virgin. Laertes instills fear with the help of three metaphors whose common theme is physical impact:

(i) The first is a purely military metaphor that urges Ophelia to stay out of the "shot and danger of desire" (1.3.34-5).

(ii) Next, Laertes cites two adages: the first (1.3.36-7) states that a maiden would go far enough if she were merely to reveal her beauty to the chaste Moon, and immediately upon uttering the word "moon," he uses a second commonplace to describe the threat to Ophelia's virtue (1.3.38): "Virtue itself scapes not calumnious strokes." If the chaste Moon herself can be impugned, so too can anyone's reputation.

(iii) Lastly, Laertes launches into a botanical conceit, likening the possible outcome of Ophelia's relationship with Hamlet to the cankers that afflict young plants (1.3.39-42):

The canker galls the infants of the spring
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed,
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are most imminent.

These few lines hold a wealth of meaning.

Cankers on the Moon

It has been known since antiquity that cankers can result from wounds to plants (Orlob 99-107). The cankers that attack plants are roundish spots and lesions that result when leaves, stems, thorns, and fruits are injured, allowing fungi and bacteria to assail the tissue. These lesions are like small sunken craters, closely resembling the craters that can be seen on the surface of the Moon through a telescope: a central depression encircled by a raised ridge where the plant resists the infection (Barnes 175-6). The disease is contagious and young plants are particularly susceptible (Carefoot & Sprott 176).

The noun "gall" in 1.3.39 has been in use since 1398 to mean an excrescence produced on trees, while the verb "to gall" has been in use since 1548 not only to signify injury to trees by contact, but also to "harass or annoy in warfare" especially by "arrows or shot". In early use the word "gall" means also a "breach" as in "gaules made by the artillerie" (OED). Thus a botanical image is connected with a military image similar to the previous two, the wordplay conflating two sorts of defenses; the botanical one being apt because of the remarkable similarity in appearance of plant cankers and lunar craters, despite their immense disparity in size. Here also the Bard uses for the first time the word "blastments," which Edwards interprets as "blightings," but the frequent wedding of biological and military metaphors suggests that Shakespeare still has the Moon in mind, and is thinking of some surface defects that appear to have been caused by being struck by something hard, as buildings or city walls have craters "blasted" in them by cannon balls.

Laertes repeatedly invokes "fear": "Fear it Ophelia, fear it my dear sister" (1.3.33) and ". . . best safety lies in fear" (1.3.43). This suggests that Shakespeare knew full well the consequences if these explosions were to occur on earth. In fact, the "blastments are most imminent." The word "imminent" connotes something that is "impending threateningly" and "hanging over one's head" (OED) which is where the Moon is seen a lot of the time. "Imminent" also means "close at hand in its incidence" and indeed lunar features are astronomically "most imminent" since it was known at the time that the Moon is the closest of the ancient planets under discussion here. Even the meanings of "projecting or leaning forward" (OED) might apply, for the Moon peeks over the horizon as she rises and peers back as she sets.

In 1988 Maurice Charney devoted a full chapter to the largely neglected subject of skin disease in Hamlet, stating that this imagery is among the most distinctive of the play (120-30). We support this interpretation because it appears that Shakespeare is conflating plant cankers with lunar blemishes. Since all we can ever see of the planets are their surfaces, we must trust to the information the surface conveys about the health of the organism, whether plant or planet (Endnote 2). Thus we learn that the Moon's Platonic perfection is sullied. But what of the real- life counterpart?

When Ophelia tries to return letters supposedly written by Hamlet, he denies having done so, cruelly questioning her honesty and fairness (3.1.103-8). In the sixteenth century, "honest" and "fair" meant "without blemish." Many have seen Ophelia as a dissembler like her father, both of whom in their own way undermine her budding relationship with Hamlet, but about one interpretation there can be little doubt: in sharp contrast to Desdemona and Juliet, she always obeys her father, allows herself to be manipulated by him, and is wholly uncritical of his scurrility. These character flaws endanger the potential harmony of a Sun/Moon relationship with Hamlet. Hamlet then owns up to flaws of his own, calling himself "proud, revengeful, ambitious" and an "arrant knave" (3.1.122-5). So it is that Ophelia's dishonesty and Hamlet's self-styled "indifferent honesty" are paralleled by the existence of blemishes in their celestial counterparts. It seems that something is "rotten," not only in "the State of Denmark," but in the entire universe, from plant to planet.

Old Hamlet and the Great Red Spot

In his mother's chambers, Prince Hamlet describes his father's image as it appears in a miniature portrait: "the front of Jove himself, an eye like Mars, to threaten and command . . ." (3.4.56-7); words that require careful analysis. The phrase "an eye like Mars" is sandwiched between "Jove" (Jupiter) and his capacity "to threaten and command," this latter attribute alluding to his role as God of Laws maintaining order among the residents of Mont Olympus.

Bullough (34) takes the last line above at face value to mean that Hamlet's "father had 'An eye like Mars,'" etc. There are a number of arguments that support the interpretation that it is Old Hamlet's eye that is "like Mars," and not that Old Hamlet himself is like Mars. Bullough (34, 174-6) refers to a poem by Antonio Francesco Rainieri appended to a book Eulogies of Men Famous for Warlike Virtue by Paolo Giovio. This poem compares the Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria della Rovere (1490-1538), to Hercules, in the words: "The mace from Hercules, from Mars the sword." Bullough's suggestion is that in line 3.4.57 Hamlet "indirectly compares his father to Hercules." Bullough does not say that Hamlet is comparing his father to Mars as well; he merely states that Hamlet's father had an eye like Mars (just as the Hamlet text says), not that Hamlet's father was like both Hercules and Mars.

The planet Mars, however, is not known for an "eye," only for its red color. What Shakespeare means is that Jupiter has an eye that is red; in short, it seems most reasonable that Shakespeare is describing Old Hamlet's face as like that of Jupiter which has an "eye" that is red like Mars, in other words, a reference to the planet Jupiter's Great Red Spot.

At the turn of the seventeenth century it was not generally known that the planet Jupiter has an "eye like Mars" for this feature too can be discerned only telescopically. The history of science claims that the Great Red Spot was first observed in 1664-5 by Robert Hooke (1635-1703) and Jean Dominique Cassini (1625-1712). But if Hamlet's creator had seen the planets by means of Leonard Digges's perspective trunk, or had heard tell of them from someone who had seen them, it seems perfectly reasonable that he would have seen the Great Red Spot as well. (Endnote 3)

Resolution of the Milky Way

The Milky Way is aptly named for it appears to the naked eye as a nebulous band stretching across the sky from horizon to horizon. When examined under magnification with the help of a telescope, much of the nebulosity resolves into a vast number of separate and distinct stars. The resolution of the Milky Way into discrete stars is one of the first sights that amateurs observe with a new telescope, a fact that Shakespeare relates in his usual subtle way. In 2.2, Player I recites a passage begun by Hamlet about the savagery of Pyrrhus, a passage so moving as to engender sympathy in the gods. Such sympathy would "make milch the burning eyes of heaven" (2.2.475) and evoke the passion of the gods (2.2.476). Apparently the recounting of the brutality is so heart-rending that Player I has no trouble bringing tears to his own eyes. Polonius's comment on the actor's tears suggests the meaning of the preceding line 2.2.475; viz. that if the gods were to have seen this brutality then they too would have become bleary-eyed. But why use the term "milch" or "milk" if the subject is passion and tears?

If, as Philip Edwards suggests, "milch" here refers to the Milky Way (2.2.475n), then Shakespeare, in a sort of connection by opposition, may have invoked the image of the resolution of the Milky Way into discrete stars when seen through a telescope, something that for him is connected with the opposite phenomenon, the blurring of lights caused by tears. Resolution of the Milky Way into discrete stars revives the interpretation of the ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus, of the nature of the Milky Way, viz. that it was "the luminescence due to the coalition of many small stars which shine together because of their closeness to one another" (Jaki 8-10), a theory that was itself in the process of resolving into the present solid reality of an infinite universe, thanks in large part to the perspective trunk of Leonard Digges.

"Demonstrations grounded upon late observations"

Taken singly, any one of the items above might be overlooked, but collectively the evidence for sixteenth-century advances in astronomy due to telescopy merits close examination. There is evidence that the interpretations presented here do not exist in a vacuum. In his Pantometria of 1571, Thomas Digges makes a point of referring to his father's discovery of "things farre off," though he omits identifying them or stating how remote they are. But we can guess what they might be, for in a preface to Stratioticus of 1579, Thomas Digges states that he had begun writing several books including one on the Copernican theory. This book, he writes, was intended to "ratifye and confirme" the theories and hypotheses of Copernicus by "evidente Demonstrations grounded upon late Observations." I take this to mean that he was to report and analyze observational data recently acquired in support of the hypothesis advanced by Copernicus in his De Revolutionibus of 1543. Unfortunately this was one of several of the books by Thomas Digges that never appeared.

In previous papers I suggest that the "trick" in Hamlet's remark: "Here's fine revolution an' we had the trick to see't" (5.1.75-6), refers to the device by which Thomas Digges and his father may have observed the stars. I suggest that the Digges, father and son, made observations with an early telescope, thereby supporting a new world view that became known as the New Astronomy. That they were able thereby to see the details, not only of stars, but of planets as well, the "blastments" on the Moon, the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, the discrete stars in the Milky Way, requires nothing more than common sense. I suggest that observations were probably made sometime between 1563, when Leonard Digges' estate was restored following his conviction for supporting Wyatt's Rebellion in 1554, and 1571 when Pantometria was published and the Elder Digges died; but certainly before the publication of A Perfit Description in 1576.

In conclusion

Shakespeare's knowledge of astronomical results prior to their formal announcement would not be unprecedented, because a similar condition obtains in anatomy. Knowledge of the circulation of the blood was formally announced by William Harvey in 1616 but Shakespeare incorporates this knowledge into at least nine plays written prior to 1608 (Davis). Fear of persecution probably delayed announcement of the advance in anatomy, and the same foreboding probably convinced Thomas Digges to withhold details of the New Astronomy by quietly slipping reference to an infinite universe into an appendix of his father's best-selling almanac.

Copernicus lived his life in fear of ridicule and persecution. Andreas Osiander (1498-1552) endeavored to protect Copernicus by penning a Preface and changing the title of this work, but these ploys didn't fool Thomas Digges. It seems reasonable to expect therefore that Digges would have known the risk, both in shattering the outermost sphere of the stars, because this was what shielded our gaze from the abode of the gods, and in displacing the center of the planetary system, lest this be interpreted as undermining the monarchy. Shakespeare, who may have adopted an allegorical pen name to protect his own identity, may have acted in a similar fashion to protect the Digges family by using the allegory to disguise the empirical evidence for the New Astronomy. Indeed when Hamlet is viewed in the light of this cosmic cosmic allegory, we may see him withholding information on the New Astronomy even from his best friend: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

WORKS CITED:

Barnes, Larry. "Canker" in O.C. Maloy & T.D. Murray eds. Encyclopedia of Plant Pathology, Vol. 1. New York: Wiley, 2001.

Berry, Arthur. A Short History of Astronomy (1898). New York: Dover 1961.

Best, Jason, Sara Maene, & Peter Usher. "Copernicus's Neglected Successor." Mercury Magazine 30:5 (2001): 38-40.

Bulfinch, Thomas. Mythology. New York: Avenel, 1978.

Bullough, Geoffrey. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. New York: Columbia UP, 1973.

Carefoot, G.L. & E.R. Sprott. Famine on the Wind: Man's Battle Against Plant Disease. Rand McNally, 1967.

Charney, Maurice. Hamlet's Fictions. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Davis, Frank M. "Shakespeare's Medical Knowledge: How did he acquire it?" The Oxfordian 3 (2000): 45-58.

Edwards, Philip, ed. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Cambridge: CUP, 1985.

Fleischer, Martha Hester. The Iconography of the English History Play. Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974.

Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. Penguin, 1960.

Hockney, David. Secret Knowledge. London: Thames & Hudson 2001

Jaki, Stanley L. The Milky Way. New York: Neale Watson, 1972.

Johnson, Francis R. Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England. New York: Octagon Books, 1968.

_______________, & Sanford V. Larkey. "Thomas Digges, the Copernican System, and the idea of the Infinity of the Universe in 1576." Huntington Library Bulletin No. 5 (1934).

McLean, Antonia. Humanism and the rise of science in Tudor England. New York: Neale Watson, 1972.

Orlob, G.B. "Ancient and Medieval Plant Pathology." Pflanzenschutz-Nachrichten Bayer. Leverkusen: Bayer, 1973.

Oxford English Dictionary.

Pannekoek, Anton. A History of Astronomy (1961). New York: Dover, 1989.

Rienitz, Joachim. "Make Glasses to See the Moon Large: An Attempt to Outline the Early History of the Telescope." Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society No. 37 (1993): 7-9.

Ronan, Colin A. "Postscript concerning Leonard and Thomas Digges and the Invention of the Telescope." Endeavour, New Series 17.4 (1993): 177-9.

Usher, Peter. "Shakespeare's Cosmic World View." Mercury Magazine 26.1 (1997): 20-3.

__________ "Hamlet's Transformation." Elizabethan Review 7.1 (1999): 48-64.

__________ "New Advances in the Hamlet Cosmic Allegory." The Oxfordian 4 (2001): 25-49.

__________ "Sixteenth Century Astronomical Telescopy." Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society 35.4 (2001): 1363.

van Helden, Albert. "The Invention of the Telescope." Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 67.4 (1977): 1-67.

_______________, transl. Sidereus Nuncius. Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 1989.

Whalen, Richard. "Cross-examining Leonard Digges on his Stratford Connections." The Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter 37.1 (2001): 13-15.

NOTES:

1. According to this interpretation, Prince Hamlet also personifies the New Astronomy which comprises the heliocentric model of Copernicus, and the Infinite Universe of stars of Thomas Digges. Claudius personifies the bounded geocentric model of his namesake Claudius Ptolemy, while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern personify the bounded model of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). The allegory recounts the struggle to distinguish physical reality from appearances, a struggle well-known to astronomers as they strive to convert images on the sky to the reality of three- and four-dimensional space (Usher).

2. This fact would seem significant to astronomers and geophysicists interested in planetary and stellar structure, for generally speaking, information on the interiors of these objects can only be gleaned from observations the outer skin, which must then be used in theoretical models.

3. If we take the long axis of the Great Red Spot (GRS) to be 30,000 km and the diameter of Mars to be 6,800 km then as seen from the Earth at the time of Opposition, the angular diameter of Mars is about 19 arcseconds, or roughly twice that of the GRS. Thus even though the long axis of the GRS is physically about 4.5 times greater than the diameter of Mars, the two appear to be of comparable angular size because the distance of Jupiter at Opposition (5.2 - 1 = 4.2 astronomical units) is about 8.4 times greater than that of Mars at Opposition (1.5 -1 = 0.5 astronomical units). The similarity of these values suggests that "an eye like Mars" refers both to angular sizes and colors.


Giordano Bruno and the Catholic Church

Giordano Bruno--conference of 2003 now in print

The American Academy in Rome held a conference in May 2003 in Rome concerning increasing interest in Giordano Bruno entitled Alchemia degli Estremi [The Alchemy of Extremes]. Now, the conference is in print:

The Alchemy of Extremes: The Laboratory of the Eroici Furori of Giordano Bruno

by

Eugenio Canone and Ingrid D. Rowland [editors]

ISBN: 978-88-8147-449-3.

Reviewed by Arielle Saiber of Bowdoin College as received from The Medieval Review.

Co-edited by Eugenio Canone and Ingrid D. Rowland, The Alchemy of Extremes. The Laboratory of the Eroici Furori of Giordano Bruno, is a wonderful and welcome addition to recent Bruno studies, which continue to flourish. Both Rowland and Canone have been quite active in this Bruno revival, with Rowland's 2008 publication of GiordanoBruno: Philosopher/Heretic (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a biography that is sure to join Frances Yates' renowned Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition as important reading on Bruno; and Canone's numerous studies, as well as directorship of the Istituti
Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali--the publisher of this present volume and of the journal Bruniana & Campanelliana since 1995. Soon, the University of California Press will begin releasing as a series of six volumes, under the direction of Brian Copenhaver and
David Marsh, the first critical English edition of Bruno's Dialoghi italiani.

The Alchemy of Extremes is the proceedings of a conference dedicated to Bruno's 1585 dialogue, De gli eroici furori [The Heroic Frenzies] held May 9-10, 2003 at the American Academy in Rome and co-hosted by the Istituto del Lessico Intellettuale Europeo. The
thirteen contributors are among the leading Bruno scholars residing in Italy, England, the US, and Germany, and, as is often the case in gatherings of Bruno scholars, they approach Bruno's work from various disciplinary orientations: philosophy, literary studies, history, religion, and art history.

The word "laboratory" chosen by the editors is an apt term to describe Bruno's Furori. Reading the text is, in fact, like entering a busy workshop and seeing before you numerous individuals (the interlocutors: ten, to be exact) crafting an amalgam of dialogue,
prose, poetry, mottos, and verbally-depicted emblems. Placed by Bruno as the final dialogue of six that he wrote while in England, and his last published text in Italian, the Furori is, arguably, an important text to investigate in light of his early and mid-production
thought. While, as a sort of road map or recipe book for the true, "heroic" seeker of wisdom/the Divine the Furori is unique in Bruno's oeuvre, it contains, as these essays show, more than a few echoes and anticipations of topics associated more directly with his earlier and later works.

In their preface, Canone and Rowland offer a concise overview of Bruno as an historical figure (special attention is given to his "loner" and "knight errant" status) and subject of study. They point to how the many interpretations elicited by Bruno's work (and in this particular case, his Furori) seem to echo his theories of a universe of infinitely many centers and possible entities, as well as his theory of vicissitudes in the human and natural worlds. The "extremes" of Bruno's "alchemy" is, in fact, precisely about this: navigating the dynamic interactions of multiples, binaries, differences, and opposites in the world around us and within us. It is this very principle underlying Bruno's universe and language that makes the meanings of his works so eminently debatable and, at times, so elusive to one's grasp.

The editors acknowledge straight off that many of Bruno's works were not easily understood by his contemporaries; in some cases, this was precisely the author's intention. Subsequently, his writings are even more challenging for modern readers, complicated as they are by the frequent difficulty with which scholars are faced in identifying Bruno's sources as well as the "basic unity of [his] thought" (10). Given the academic forum in which the essays in this volume were first presented, these studies are primarily geared toward scholars of Bruno and Renaissance Studies, not a general readership. That said, anyone interested in Bruno's thought could certainly benefit from perusing this volume, which engages a great many issues central to Bruno's works and Bruno criticism.

The essays (eight in English and four in Italian) are not organized into thematic sections, but rather arranged in alphabetical order by the author's last name. Luciano Albanese opens the collection with a study on the "tripartite" (Anima, Intelletto, e Intelletto superiore, 17-18) apophatic theology in the Furori, strongly influenced, he submits, by the so-called Chaldaic Oracles in its manner of speaking about the journey to the Divine, that is, through speaking about all that it is not.

Also looking at Bruno's Furori with a theological lens, Angelika BÜnker-Vallon discusses the Christian Neoplatonism in the Furori in terms of the gnoseological and aesthetic principles informing Bruno's concept of being and the self-consciousness of the subject. She traces elements of Bruno's theology and use of metaphoric language back to Pseudo-Dionysius, Scotus Eriugena, and Cusanus, and investigates the paradox of the visualization of God in a paradigm in which God is meant to remain hidden and invisible.

Two essays contemplate "endings." One is Hilary Gatti's "The Sense of an Ending in Bruno's Eroici furori." She begins the essay speaking broadly about endings in Bruno, pointing to Bruno's vision of time and space as endless, and phenomena such as death as a transition. The bulk of her essay engages Bruno's stance on the Christian notion of Apocalypse, looking especially at Joachim of Fiore and the Protestant Jacopo Brocardo, whose writings on the subject may have influenced images in the Furori's final canto.

The other essay on "endings," the longest essay in the volume, is Eugenio Canone's piece entitled "The Two Lights: The Final Concert of the Eroici Furori". By "the final concert" Canone refers to the enigmatic song of the nine illuminati with which Bruno ends the Furori. Often citing water metaphors, Canone explores the song's prophetic, liberatory nature and its representation of the eschatological and soteriological interpretations one can extract from the poem's nod to the vicissitudes of nature. He also notes symbolic and numerological connections between Bruno and Dante, and between the mysterious Signora Morgana B. of the Candelaio, Beatrice, Queen Elisabeth, and Diana.

Three authors in the collection look at Bruno's relation to an important historical figure. Ingrid Rowland discusses Bruno's debts to poet Luigi Tansillo, interlocutor for the first five cantos/dialogues, and outlines why Bruno wove Tansillo--an author of love sonnets not dissimilar to those of Petrarch, for whom Bruno's spares no harsh words--so closely into the fabric of the Furori.

Elisabetta Tarantino looks at elements in Bruno's Furori that may have be of interest to Shakespeare and even inspired him, acknowledging, however, that the jury is still out as to whether Shakespeare and Bruno ever met, or whether Shakespeare read or even
knew much about Bruno's work. She looks primarily at Shakespeare's Hamlet, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Tempest, King Lear, and Timon of Athens, turning often to Philip Sydney as the possible link between Bruno and Shakespeare.

Michael Wyatt's essay fortuitously follows that by Tarantino, investigating why Bruno chose to dedicate the Furori to friend Philip Sydney. He points out similarities in their intellectual strategies, their issues with "imitation" in writing, and a "shared sense of the potentiality of language" (p. 157).

Two essays focus on passions in the Furori. With regard to the "erotic" origin and nature of the frenzied hero in the Furori, Delfina Giovannozzi considers the doctrine of love-sickness--in particular, the confusion between ÉrÖs and erÖs drawn from Plato's Cratylus, as well as links between "hero," love, and the concept of the mediating demon in the Symposium; and Ficino's El libro dell'Amore.

And with regard to a Brunian theory of "emotion" (which, as contributor Leen Spruit points out, Bruno never explicitly developed in his writings) Spruit looks at how Bruno portrays passions (affect, affection, and bodily arousal) in the Furori, as well as in De vinculis in genere, addressing issues such as the rational/cognitive aspects of emotion, the psychomachia that can occur between emotion and reason, and the peace that can result from emotion that is guided by the intellect.

Armando Maggi's essay is the only one to speak directly to the numerous and central emblems--the "hypothetical imprese" (95)--of the Furori. Maggi analyzes them in a variety of ways: noting the centrality of the rhetorical structure and force of these verbal images; considering the ways in which Bruno's emblems are "signs" and "indices"; noting the presence of antithetical elements in the emblems (and comparing them to various Renaissance emblem books); and perceiving the frenzied hero as someone who himself becomes an emblem through searching for the Divine. His essay is followed by nineteen figures.

Simonetta Bassi's piece traces Bruno's interest in magic since the time of the Candelaio and how his thoughts on magic--as a delicate subject that requires discipline, humility, great knowledge, and care--developed over the course of his production. Central to
Bruno's writing on magic is love: the connector between all things (soul-body, eyes-heart, individual-cosmos, etc.). In the Furori, which is not, as Bassi notes, a work on magic, magic is, in fact, present in the portrayal of the love that is fundamental to the hero on his journey.

Paul Richard Blum's study, "La caccia di Atteone" [The Hunt of Actaeon], illuminates what is comic and painfully human in discussions of the Divine, drawing connections between Bruno's Spaccio de la bestia trionfante and the Furori in terms of the oft humorous, oft self-inflicted dangers in encountering mysteries and searching for answers.

As a side note, and not by any means a problem, there are no essays in this collection that take as their primary subject the possible links between the Furori and his art of memory, or the Furori and his cosmology.

If there are any lacks in this marvelous volume of excellent essays, they are small and few: the preface does not include an overview of the contributions in the volume; and despite the rich bibliography in the footnotes accompanying each essay, a volume of this sort would have been well-served by a bibliography on the Furori that includes all scholarship to date. Another bit of discussion the preface might have addressed is why the editors hold that not only is the Furori unique within Bruno's opus, but within Renaissance literary and philosophical production as a whole.

And finally, a bit more elaboration on the references the editors make to Bruno's "antitheological," "antimetaphysical," "anti-Christian," and "anti-Platonic" positions would have been helpful. While Bruno engaged in a great deal of polemics with most doctrines he encountered, these are strong terms, and it is not clear how the editors are using them.

There is no question that The Alchemy of Extremes constitutes essential reading for anyone interested in the Furori and Bruno's thought in general. The essays gathered here are both innovative and in conversation with centuries of Bruno scholarship--they demonstrate Bruno scholarship at its very best.


Giordano Bruno--visionary?...a new book

Giordano Bruno--visionary?...a new book

Giordano Bruno
1548 to February 17th, 1600

Giordano Bruno Moon Crater
[1960]

Giordano Bruno...not exactly a household name to the populace or even scientists but from the perspective of the history of science, he is a significant and interesting figure. Under 30 bucks is not a bad price for a glimpse into the past of scientific history and I am sure used copies will be available as well as the library.

Two reviews:

"Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic"

Giordano Bruno was a philosopher before his time

by

M.M. Bennetts

August 22nd, 2008

The Christian Science Monitor

During the 15th and 16th centuries, Europe underwent an information revolution unprecedented in the history of mankind.

The invention of the compass, the printing press, and the telescope, the translation of the Bible into the vernacular, the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, and the discoveries of the New World, gunpowder, and that the Earth was not the center of the universe – all instigated radical shifts in the thinking that had dominated the mental landscape for centuries.

Occasionally the shifts were seen as good things. More frequently, they were fiercely resisted by church and state authorities. Moreover, the great thinkers, writers, pioneers, and scientists of the age – Leonardo da Vinci, Erasmus, Galileo, Luther, and Tycho Brahe to name a few – were often persisting in their work in the face of unparalleled persecution.

Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic is Ingrid Rowland's portrait of a lesser known, though no less daring, Italian, whose religious, philosophical, and scientific quests helped to usher in the modern age of science and mathematics.

Shaped by the priesthood

Filippo Bruno was born in Nola, in southern Italy, in 1548. He was the precocious only child of a mercenary soldier. At 17 he was sent to the convent of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples to train for the priesthood. There, in the rigorous academic atmosphere that was Renaissance Naples, he studied and learned to emulate or argue with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, as well as those of Thomas Aquinas, Marsilio Ficino, and Giles of Viterbo.

He took his vows as a friar of the order in 1566, and assumed the name Giordano. Although he would spend the next 10 years of his life pursuing his studies, including developing his own method of memorization, eventually the reactionary crackdowns of the Inquisition would force him into the life of a peripatetic scholar and teacher.

His travels took him from Switzerland to Paris to England to Germany to Prague and back to Italy. But wherever he went, an irascible nature and fiery intellectual pride drove him into conflict with local academics, whom he bitterly reviled and caricatured.

Profuse thinker, writer

Yet throughout his life, he wrote and published copiously: poetry, plays, books on the art of memory, philosophical tracts, and essays expounding his evolving theories of infinity. His attempts to find an adequate means to measure and calculate both the infinite and the infinitesimal led directly to his formulation of atomic theory.

Unsurprisingly, his theories were far too expansive and threatening to the dogmatic religious authorities of his day. Thus, after nearly a decade in prison, first in Venice and then in Rome, he was condemned as a heretic by the Inquisition in 1600 and suffered a heretic’s fate: burned at the stake.

Still, Ms. Rowland's "Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic" is less a biography of the man than a largely uncritical examination of his vast literary and philosophical output, with the few facts of his life offered as source material or a mere framework for the discussion of his writings.

The early chapters are a testament to the risks of speaking out or thinking originally in a society ruled by a repressive regime.

Because of the lack of factual information, the author frequently substitutes conjecture and inference such as "[he] must have read" or "must have known" or "must have met" for factual evidence.

Further, Rowland assumes a specialist's knowledge of Renaissance politics, religion, and philosophy which may leave one wanting for the nonexistent Cliff Notes on philosophers and significant figures of the Counter-Reformation in Rome and Naples.

And as Bruno wrote copiously, so does Rowland quote copiously – page upon 8-point-type page of it, much of it imponderably obscure. Only rarely does she attempt to convey the color, vigor, and clamor of life in a Renaissance city.

Frequently tangled in the web of her own scholarship and Bruno's sophistry, she seems unable to distinguish between Bruno's flights of insightful genius, which, as in the works of many Renaissance authors, lie cheek by jowl with ideas we now find arcane or hopelessly naive.

For the sake of knowledge

But "Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic" is not without merit. It is a rare excursion into the cosmos of sumptuous prose and philosophical delight as exemplified by Giles of Viterbo, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Giordano Bruno.

It is a venture into a lost world where man's pursuit of spiritual understanding and wisdom made for bestseller reading – and where such journeys into the uncharted territory of infinity led these philosophers to examine ideas which although rejected at the time, proved to be modern beyond their and our wildest dreams.

"The Forbidden World"

Did a sixteenth-century heretic grasp the nature of the cosmos?

by

Joan Acocella

August 24th, 2008

The New Yorker

In 1600, Rome's Campo de' Fiori, now a nice plaza lined with cafés, was one of the city's execution grounds, and on Ash Wednesday of that year Giordano Bruno, a philosopher and former priest accused of heresy by the Inquisition, was taken there and burned. The event was carefully timed. Ash Wednesday is the primary day of Christian penance. As for the year, Pope Clement VIII chose it because 1600 was a jubilee for the Church—a festivity that would be enhanced by the execution of an important heretic. Bruno rode to the Campo on a mule, the traditional means of transport for people going to their death. (It was also a practical means. After years in the Inquisition’s prisons, many of the condemned could not walk.) Once he arrived and mounted the pyre, a crucifix was held up to his face. According to a witness, he turned away angrily. He could not speak; he had been gagged with a leather bridle. (Or, some say, an iron spike had been driven through his tongue.) He was tied to the stake, and the pyre was lit. When it had burned out, his remains were dumped into the Tiber. As Ingrid Rowland writes in "Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $27), the Church thereby made Bruno a martyr. But "a martyr to what?" she asks. That is the question that her book, the first full-scale biography of Bruno in English, tries, with difficulty, to answer.

Bruno was born in Nola, a small city east of Naples, in 1548. His father was a mercenary in the service of the Spanish crown, which had ruled Naples since the beginning of the century. According to Rowland, he was a lonely, bookish boy. At the age of fourteen, he was sent to Naples to be educated—a move that apparently left a permanent mark on his mind. At that time, Rowland writes, Naples was the fifth-largest city in the world, housing masses of "fishermen, seamstresses, vendors, porters, laundresses, carpenters, sausage makers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and water sellers who went barefoot in the mild climate and lived largely on bread and figs." Above those plain folk were the grandees who ruled the city; below them were the beggars and prostitutes who swarmed the alleys. No one knows where Bruno lived during his first years in Naples, but Rowland imagines him in crowded student quarters, "a solitary teenager plunged suddenly into urban chaos." This experience, she says, taught him survival skills, which he would need in his life. It may also have been the source of what would later be his governing image of the universe: fullness, infinitude.

At seventeen, he entered the Dominican monastery of San Domenico Maggiore, in Naples, a learned institution staffed with sons of the nobility. That didn’t mean that they behaved any better than other priests—or noblemen—of the period. During Bruno’s time, friars of San Domenico were involved in cases of assault, theft, and forgery, not to mention the chronic problem of fornication. But this rich monastery was useful to Bruno. There, Rowland writes, he learned to move among the ruling class. He also acquired intellectual rigor. San Domenico was a conservative institution. It taught Scholastic philosophy—the world of Aristotle, revived and Catholicized by St. Thomas Aquinas and other scholars of the Middle Ages—as if no other philosophies existed. They did exist. From the early Renaissance onward, that world picture—limited, tidy, and comforting—had been challenged by a rebirth of the ideas of Plato, who had a very different slant on things: visionary, poetic. After Bruno’s Scholastic training at San Domenico, Rowland says, he encountered Neoplatonism, and it transformed his thinking. She gives this a lot of space. As a Renaissance historian—see "The Culture of the High Renaissance" (1998) and "From Heaven to Arcadia" (2005), a collection of essays for The New York Review of Books—she has been dealing with Neoplatonism for years, and she likes the idea of philosophy as rapture. That's probably why she decided to write a book on Bruno. She sees Neoplatonism as his beacon, but she is glad for him that, before he stuck his head up among the stars, his feet had been planted on the ground by Aristotle and Aquinas.

That dichotomy becomes the basis of her portrait of Bruno. He had three personalities, she says. One was Scholastic—strict, system-building. The second was "a Platonist’s poetic exaltation." He added a third, all his own: "a dark wit born in his parents' little house . . . and stiletto-sharpened on the streets of Naples." In time, the darkness came to rule his thoughts. In one of his books, he described himself as "irritated, recalcitrant, and strange, content with nothing, stubborn as an old man of eighty, skittish as a dog that has been whipped a thousand times." His nickname, he said, was "the exasperated."

He became a priest at the age of twenty-four and received the equivalent of a doctorate in theology three years later. He was apparently a brilliant student and also, now and then, an exasperated one. Upon moving into his cell at the monastery, he disposed of the holy art—pictures of the Madonna, St. Catherine of Siena, a pious bishop—that decorated its walls. Another time, in a discussion with an older priest, he defended the logic (not the substance) of an argument made by the fourth-century priest Arius that Christ was not fully divine—the so-called Arian heresy. Eventually, a copy of Erasmus's proscribed "Commentaries," with notes by Bruno in its margins, was found in the latrine that he used. Even at the height of the Counter-Reformation, which this was, such offenses, distributed over ten years in the monastery, seem trifling. They sound like notations from the F.B.I. file of some poor professor who dared to teach Gorky in the fifties. Nevertheless, Bruno, at around the age of twenty-seven, was informed that he was being investigated by the Inquisition. Was someone trying to get rid of him? (Why the latrine search, an unpleasant task in the sixteenth century?) Was he trying to get out of the priesthood? (Why annotate the Erasmus? Why not just read it?) Whatever the real story, Bruno, hearing of the proceedings, discarded his priest’s garments and headed north, eventually crossing the border into Switzerland. To the Church authorities, that was as good as a confession; they defrocked and excommunicated him in absentia. To Bruno, apparently, it was a liberation, and he became the man we know, or think we know: the freethinker, the heretic, the man who would be burned.

For fifteen years, he travelled—to Geneva, Toulouse, Lyon, Paris, London, Oxford, Wittenberg, Prague, Helmstedt, Frankfurt, Zurich, Padua, Venice—never staying more than two or three years in any city. Wherever he went, he looked for a job teaching philosophy, and in some places he got one. In Paris, he gave a series of thirty lectures on logic and metaphysics. Elsewhere, he had less luck. At Oxford, when he gave a tryout presentation, the audience laughed at his accent and his Neapolitan way of talking with his hands. (He hated the English ever after. They "look down their noses," he said, "laugh at you . . . fart at you with their lips.") Sometimes he damaged his own cause. During his stay in Geneva, he published a broadsheet listing twenty mistakes that a highly placed professor had made in a single lecture. He was sued for slander and had to leave town in a hurry.

By about the age of twenty-eight, he was publishing as well as teaching. In his lifetime, he produced some thirty works—treatises, pamphlets, dialogues, poems, even a play. Some of these writings were in Latin, the language of his schooling; accordingly, they were rigorous, systematic, Scholastic. The others were in vernacular Italian, and these were often ebullient, concrete, and dramatic—Neoplatonic, by Rowland's definition. Either way, they advanced the concept of the universe that he said he had begun developing soon after his departure from Italy.

In this system, there were three main ideas. One was heliocentrism, the notion that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of the universe. This revision of the standard, Ptolemaic cosmos was, of course, not original to him. It had been made by the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543, five years before Bruno was born. But while Copernicus's repositioning of the earth and the sun was a radical proposal—indeed, a heresy (the Church needed the Earth, the arena of salvation, to be the center of the universe)—in other respects his cosmos was quite orthodox: a finite structure consisting of fixed spheres that revolved in concentric circles, just as in Ptolemy. Bruno, on the other hand, proposed an infinite cosmos, consisting of innumerable heliocentric worlds. This, his second and most important idea, was also not new. It had been put forth by Nicholas of Cusa, a German cardinal, in the fifteenth century. But here, too, Bruno went further, claiming that the universe was a vast, wheeling, unknowable thing, and that all theories about it, including his own, were not descriptions but merely approaches—"models," as we would call them today.

Finally, Bruno developed an atomic theory, whereby everything that existed was made up of identical particles—"seeds," in his terminology. Other people, notably Lucretius, had had this idea, but, again, Bruno expanded it. Not only were all parts of the cosmos constituted of the same elements, but God, whom the Church strictly set apart from the material world, resided in these elements. It was his love, informing every "seed," that unified the world.

In all these ideas, there seems to have been a single preoccupation: immensity—things incalculably large and incalculably tiny, and all joined together in a kind of choral exultation. I think that this mental image, more than any quarrel with the Church, underlay Bruno's philosophy. In an Italian dialogue that he wrote in his mid-thirties, he paints a fanciful portrait of his home town, Nola. There, he says, fate has decreed that Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl her hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won’t burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently. That from the dung of her ox fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio’s foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim’s progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random. . . . Antonio Savolino’s bitch shall conceive five puppies, of which three shall live out their natural lifespan and two shall be thrown away, and of these three the first shall resemble its mother, the second shall be mongrel, and the third shall partly resemble the father and partly resemble Polidoro's dog. . . . Paulino, when he bends over to pick up a broken needle, shall snap the red drawstring of his underpants, and if he should blaspheme for that reason, I mean for him to be punished thus: tonight his soup shall be too salty and taste of smoke, he shall fall and break his wine flask.

Here the structural rule of Catholic theology, and of Western thought—hierarchy—is serenely discarded. The things of the world are numberless, and they are all equal, and interesting. In Bruno's cosmology, that rule applied not just to humble matters like the goings on in Nola but also to great and sacred things. In his book "The Song of Circe" (1582), the sorceress calls the universe to order, beginning with the sun: "Apollo, author of poetry, quiver bearer, bowman, of the powerful arrows, Pythian, laurel-crowned, prophetic, shepherd, seer, priest, and physician. Brilliant, rosy, long-haired, beautiful-locked, blond, bright, placid, bard, singer, teller of truth. . . . Reveal, I pray, your lions, your lynxes, goats, baboons, seagulls, calves, snakes, elephants. . . . The turtle, butterfish, tuna, ray, whale, and all your other creatures of that kind." To enumerate was Bruno’s joy and, in some of his writings, such as these, the engine of his dizzying prose.

Another idea of his, which has not attracted as much attention, because it is not a heresy, had to do with "artificial memory," the science of improving recall. This was not a side project. It was the subject of many of his Latin writings, and often the source of his income during his wandering years—he tutored people in memory skills. Ancient orators had used artificial memory systems, mentally attaching their ideas onto statues, or objects in the rooms of a building, so that later, in their minds, they could revisit those statues and rooms, retrieve their ideas, and thus give seven-hour speeches without note cards. Closer to Bruno's time, a Catalan mystic named Ramon Llull had refined the method, imagining memory as a system of concentric wheels. Bruno adopted Llull’s schema and enlarged it. Rowland bravely tries to summarize the methods he developed. One involves storing words by their syllables, she says: "the first syllable as an 'agent' who is a mythological figure (the Egyptian Apis bull, Apollo, the witch Circe); the second syllable as an action (sailing, on the carpet, broken); the third syllable as an adjective (ignored, blind, at leisure); the fourth as an associated object (shell, serpent, fetters); the fifth as a 'circumstance' (a woman dressed in pearls, a man riding a sea monster)." Given these rules, Bruno described to his readers how, for example, one would remember the word numero, "number." In Rowland's paraphrase:

The "NU" . . . is the Apis bull, "ME" is "on the carpet," "RO" is "neglected." . . . Bruno, clearly influenced by Ramon Llull, advises envisioning these stored sets of syllables and their imagery on concentric wheels, each with thirty compartments corresponding to the various combinations of letters. The outermost wheel in the system stores the agents (or first syllables of words), the second wheel stores the actions (or second syllables), the third wheel stores adjectives (or third syllables), and so on inward to the fifth wheel. A single sentence thus becomes a pageant of mythological characters set in strange places, engaged in strange actions in strange company.

How marvellous, and how utterly incomprehensible! And this was only one of his systems. But Bruno may have used such methods—he was known for his prodigious memory—and with their endless numbers of combinations, as in a giant slot machine, they obviously contributed to his vision of an infinite cosmos.

Inconveniently, that vision was heresy from end to end. If there were countless worlds besides ours, this sidelined the Christian story. Creation, expulsion, salvation: such things might have happened, but somewhere off in a corner, while other things were happening on other planets. Also eliminated was God's difference from humanity. If, as Bruno saw it, God was present in every atom of the universe, then transubstantiation became a silly idea. (God was already in the wine.) Ditto incarnation. Bruno later said that he started having doubts about Jesus at the age of eighteen; in his mature philosophy, the Messiah has no place. Nor does original sin, or pretty much any sin. God "makes his sun rise over good and bad," Bruno wrote. Even devils were going to be pardoned. To lead a virtuous life, you had only to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. As the reader may have noticed by now, much of this constitutes liberal Christian thought in our time. (What Bruno discarded was the Church's literalism—exactly what many of today's believers have done.) Likewise, Bruno's cosmology anticipated modern physics and astronomy. But it did not accord with the views of the sixteenth-century Church. It sounded like Protestantism, or worse.

That was why he had fled his homeland. For fifteen years, he lived in relative safety in the cities of the North, which, if not Protestant, were more tolerant than Italy. Then he did something inexplicable. Was he homesick? Had he become overconfident? In any case, he returned to Italy, and within a year he had been captured by the Inquisition.

Soon after recrossing the border, he took a job tutoring a Venetian nobleman, Giovanni Mocenigo, in artificial memory, but Mocenigo made little progress, and he came to suspect that his teacher was cheating him, holding back some key to the method. So one day he locked Bruno in the attic of his palazzo and called the Inquisition. In his deposition, he accused Bruno of the heresies listed above, plus some more, and of saying (in Mocenigo’s words) "that our Catholic faith is full of blasphemies . . . that our opinions are the doctrine of asses, that we have no proof that our faith has any merit with God, and that he marvels at how many heresies God tolerates among Catholics."

Venice was a modern-minded commercial city, far less conservative than Rome or Naples. Furthermore, Bruno eventually recanted. Therefore the Venetian inquisitors let him live, but they did not release him, because the Vatican had got wind of the case and was demanding extradition. Venice complied, and in Rome Bruno was retried on essentially the same charges, with a few additions obtained from his cellmates in Venice. One of them reported that Bruno had called Christ “a dog cuckold fucked dog” and had given him the finger—a not unreasonable action on the part of a man who had been locked up for months in a Venetian hellhole, with four other, equally maddened prisoners. The proceedings in Rome, however, lasted longer—seven years. The Roman jurists, eventually headed by Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, an eminent Jesuit theologian (he was later canonized), were more methodical than the Venetians. They tracked down his books, and read them. According to Rowland, they may also have worried that to execute Bruno, who in his exile had enjoyed the patronage of various noblemen, might be politically unwise. Bruno parried with his inquisitors. Twice he offered to recant and then withdrew the offer. We don’t know all the particulars of the inquiry. (The trial records are lost. Only a summary, discovered in the Vatican in 1941, survives.) But, in the end, Bruno gave his inquisitors an unanswerable ultimatum: he told them that if the Pope came forward to certify that the actions he was charged with were definitely heretical, or that the Holy Spirit had said they were, then he would recant. If not, not. The Pontiff did not condescend to join in this discussion, and the inquisitors probably did not invite him to. They insisted on their own ability to recognize false doctrine. So, as in other heresy trials, the conflict came down to a simple quarrel: the Church's word versus the individual's understanding of his own experience. The Church won. Bruno was declared an "impenitent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretic," and he was condemned to die.

Rowland does the best she can with this material, but she has a big problem, which is that very little is known about Bruno's life. She is unable to tell us much of anything about his childhood, his teaching, his friendships, or his moral character. And, when she does have something to report, it is often a wild card, which she has trouble fitting into the rest of the story. She says, for example, that Bruno, after being thrown out by the Roman Catholic Church, was also excommunicated by the Calvinists, in Geneva, and by the Lutherans, in Helmstedt—clearly, organized religion was not for him—but we hear nothing about his prior conversion to these faiths. She also tells us that in his exile he applied repeatedly (she cites three separate occasions) to be taken back into the Roman Catholic Church, and was refused each time. That is curious. Returning to the Church, as Bruno knew, would have involved a major act of penance, including the disavowal of most of his writings. How could he—famously intransigent, a champion of free thought—have contemplated that? And, if he did, what possessed him, in a public lecture in Helmstedt, to compare the sitting Pope to the Medusa head, infecting the world with "ignorance and depravity"? Did he think that this would get him back into the Church?

What about his love life? Rowland writes that after his departure from the priesthood he "pursued women with Falstaffian matter-of-factness." Whom, when, where? She doesn’t say. Whatever his sexual activities, a passage that Roland quotes from one of his dialogues suggests that he did have strong feelings about women. How could men pine, he asked, for that bosom, for that white, for that crimson, for that tongue, for that tooth, for that lip, for that hair, that dress, that mantle, that glove, that slipper, that high heel, that avarice, that giggle, that scorn, that empty window, that eclipse of the sun, that throbbing, that disgust, that stench, that sepulcher, that cesspit, that menstruation, that carrion, that malaria, that uttermost insult and lapse of nature?

This is something other than matter-of-factness. Rowland tries to argue that Bruno didn’t really hate women. She says that since this dialogue, written in England, ends with a tribute to Elizabeth I, Bruno "must have believed on some level, that male and female made no difference in the potential of an individual soul." But evidence for such a belief is nowhere in sight. Rowland is well aware of the gaps in her portrait of Bruno’s life, and she tries to fill them with other material. For his years in the monastery, she again has almost no facts to go on, so, once she deposits him there, she switches gears and offers a series of history-of-ideas chapters—on Neoplatonism, on Kabbalah, and so forth—in order to let us know what intellectual trends might have influenced him at that time. She is a lively writer, and these chapters are interesting. Still, we're sitting there wondering, How's he doing in the monastery?

We do not get a firm hold on his ideas, either. In the past half century, there have been two large trends in Bruno scholarship. In the nineteen-sixties, the English historian Frances Yates claimed that he was a hermeticist, carrying on the tradition of the Renaissance mystics and alchemists. She called him a "poet-magician." Later, in the nineteen-nineties, this view was disputed by Hilary Gatti, a historian of science, who argued that Bruno’s contributions were mainly to natural science, which grew so fast during his time. (Nine years after Bruno died, Galileo invented his telescope, and the information that he gained from it landed him, too, before the Inquisition, under Bellarmine. Rowland thinks that Bellarmine, feeling guilty over Bruno, may have pressed Galileo to recant, and thus saved his life.) Rowland wants nothing to do with the hermeticism theory, and though her book is dedicated to Gatti, she is also skeptical about Bruno's credentials as a scientist. To her, he was primarily a philosopher. Her discussions of his philosophy are often sketchy, however. Trying to explain why the Roman inquisitors took seven years to decide Bruno's case, she guesses that maybe they didn't understand his books. I think she had the same problem. At one juncture, poignantly, she suggests that Bruno may have held back some of his material, so as not to give away the store—the same charge that Giovanni Mocenigo made. As she wrote eight years ago in an essay in The New York Review of Books, but apparently could not bear to say in the biography, where so much more was at stake, "His surviving work supplies no clear explanation" of what constituted his philosophy.

The book has one great, compensating virtue. Whatever else Bruno was, he was wild-minded and extreme, and Rowland communicates this, together with a sense of the excitement that his ideas gave him. She quotes from a poem of his:

Suddenly I am raised aloft by primordial
passion;
I become Leader, Law, Light, Prophet,
Father, Author, and Journey,
Rising above this world to the others
that shine in their splendor.
I wander through every part of that
ethereal country;
Then, far away, as they gape at the
marvel, I leave them behind me.

That sounds thrilling, and Rowland relates it to other instances of the exuberance of the late Renaissance; for example, the language of Shakespeare. ("Hamlet" was written within a year or two of Bruno's death.) It’s that feeling for the explosiveness of the period, and her admiration of Bruno for participating in it—indeed, dying for it—that is the central and most cherishable quality of the biography. Mocenigo, in his deposition, reported that one day, when he and Bruno were going to church, Bruno told him "that he knew how Christ had performed his miracles, and using the same art he intended to do as much and more." Rowland seems to smile as she considers this "excitable little Neapolitan," in a gondola, on his way to church, "bragging more and more extravagantly" about how he's going to displace the founder of the Church. Even when he's acting crazy, she is fond of him, and I like her for that.

Bruno's writings were placed on the Church’s "Index of Forbidden Books," so that they would not lead the faithful astray. As always, important people found a way to get hold of the proscribed material. Kepler told Galileo that one of his (Galileo’s) ideas was a steal from Bruno. After the seventeenth century, Bruno seems to have dropped from view, but then, in the nineteenth century, he rose again, as a hero to the revolutionary movements of that time. In 1889, soon after Italy's establishment of a secular republic, a group of Roman students, with the help of eminent thinkers from across Europe—Victor Hugo, Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel, Henrik Ibsen—raised a statue in his honor in the Campo de' Fiori. According to Rowland, the statue, which shows Bruno going to his death, looks nothing like him. It depicts a tall, glowering figure, in a cowl, with a book between his manacled hands. The real Bruno was a short, skinny man, who at the time of his execution hadn’t worn a Dominican habit for twenty-four years. Furthermore, he was burned naked. The inscription at the base of the statue begins, "To Bruno, from the generation that he foresaw." In other words, the students claimed him for their story. Every year, on the anniversary of his execution, various groups of freethinkers—Masons, atheists, pantheists—gather at the monument, and a representative of Rome’s mayoralty places a wreath at its feet. If Bruno had not been burned, would he receive these tributes? Maybe not, but he was burned, and he thereby entered our history. Fittingly, a crater of the moon was named for him, in 1960.

Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic

by

Ingrid D. Rowland

ISBN-10: 0809095246
ISBN-13: 978-0809095247

Online texts:

The Heroic Enthusiasts (Gli Eroici Furori) Part the First

The Heroic Enthusiasts (Gli Eroici Furori) Part the Second

[Thanks to stringer Tim for the notification.]

Additional material:

Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition

by

Frances A. Yates

ISBN: 9780226950075

Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition

by

Marjorie G. Jones

ISBN: 978-0-89254-133-1