Essays on Giordano Bruno (ebook)

Argumento de Essays on Giordano Bruno (ebook)

This book gathers wide-ranging essays on the Italian Renaissance philosopher and cosmologist Giordano Bruno by one of the world's leading authorities on his work and life. Many of these essays were originally written in Italian and appear here in English for the first time. Bruno (1548-1600) is principally famous as a proponent of heliocentrism, the infinity of the universe, and the plurality of worlds. But his work spanned the sciences and humanities, sometimes touching the borders of the occult, and Hilary Gatti's essays richly reflect this diversity.

The book is divided into sections that address three broad subjects: the relationship between Bruno and the new science, the history of his reception in English culture, and the principal characteristics of his natural philosophy. A final essay examines why this advocate of a "tranquil universal philosophy" ended up being burned at the stake as a heretic by the Roman Inquisition. While the essays take many different approaches, they are united by a number of assumptions: that, although well versed in magic, Bruno cannot be defined primarily as a Renaissance Magus; that his aim was to articulate a new philosophy of nature; and that his thought, while based on ancient and medieval sources, represented a radical rupture with the philosophical schools of the past, helping forge a path toward a new modernity.

"Gatti's specific attention in giving an account of the different critical interpretations of Bruno's philosophy and of the status quo of current research makes this book a particularly worthwhile read for students and scholars of Bruno and of the sixteenth century in general."--Anna Laura Puliafito, Renaissance Quarterly0Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
INTRODUCTION Beginning as Negation in the Italian Dialogues of Giordano Bruno 1

PART 1: BRUNO AND THE NEW SCIENCE
Chapter 1: Between Magic and Magnetism: Bruno?s Cosmology at Oxford 17
Chapter 2: Bruno?s Copernican Diagrams 40
Chapter 3: Bruno and the New Atomism 70
Chapter 4: The Multiple Languages of the New Science 91

PART 2: BRUNO IN BRITAIN
Chapter 5: Petrarch, Sidney, Bruno 115
Chapter 6: The Sense of an Ending in Bruno?s Heroici furori 127
Chapter 7: Bruno and Shakespeare: Hamlet 140
Chapter 8: Bruno?s Candelaio and Ben Jonson?s The Alchemist 161
Chapter 9: Bruno and the Stuart Court Masques 172
Chapter 10: Romanticism: Bruno and Samuel Taylor Coleridge 201
Chapter 11: Bruno and the Victorians 220

PART 3: BRUNO?S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE
Chapter 12: Bruno?s Natural Philosophy 249
Chapter 13: Bruno?s Use of the Bible in His Italian Philosophical Dialogues 264
Chapter 14: Science and Magic: The Resolution of Contraries 280
Chapter 15: Bruno and Metaphor 297
EPILOGUE: Why Bruno?s "A Tranquil Universal Philosophy" Finished in a Fire 309

Bibliography of Cited Works by and on Giordano Bruno 325
Index 335