Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #337470 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Synopsis
Giordano Bruno is one of the great figures of early modern Europe, and one of the least understood. Ingrid D. Rowland's path breaking life of Bruno establishes him once and for all as a peer of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Galileo, a thinker whose vision of the world prefigures ours.By the time Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600 on Rome's Campo dei Fiori, he had taught in Naples, Rome, Venice, Geneva, France, England, Germany, and the "magic Prague" of Emperor Rudolph II. His powers of memory and his provocative ideas about the infinity of the universe had attracted the attention of the pope, Queen Elizabeth - and the Inquisition, which condemned him to death in Rome as part of a yearlong jubilee.Writing with great verve and sympathy for her protagonist, Rowland traces Bruno's wanderings through a sixteenth-century Europe where every certainty of religion and philosophy had been called into question and shows him valiantly defending his ideas (and his right to maintain them) to the very end. An incisive, independent thinker just when natural philosophy was transformed into modern science, he was also a writer of sublime talent.

His eloquence and his courage inspired thinkers across Europe, finding expression in the work of Shakespeare and Galileo."Giordano Bruno" allows us to encounter a legendary European figure as if for the first time.

Customer Reviews

Renaissance Clown
This book is a biography of the sixteenth-century Italian ex-Dominican philosopher-poet Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake in 1600 for incorrigible heresy and blasphemy (he denied transubstantiation, thought that Christ was a fraud, cursed the Catholic Church, denied Catholic doctrine and moral teaching, and advocated a pantheistic view of the cosmos, God and creation). It should be pointed out that many Calvinists and Lutherans also found him and many of his views distasteful, while he did himself no favours by being extremely arrogant and contrary wherever he went.

It is an interesting subject, and the author's handling of it is generally accomplished and not too biased, well-written, and evocative of the period in which Bruno lived: describing his origins, education, wandering across Europe (in Italy, France, Switzerland, England, Germany, Bohemia), before his incarceration by the Inquisition and execution by the state.

Nevertheless, there are a number of quite major factual errors. Peter Lombard the scholastic philosopher is said on a few occasions to be a Dominican (he wasn't). The Franciscans did not originate in the 11th century. The text seems to be somewhat hurried and darts from description to exposition of Bruno's writings rapidly. For all the quotes, one is not always left enlightened by this approach, and somewhat sceptical as to the accuracy of the author's information (the book is poorly referenced) and the validity of her judgements.

The major problem with this book is that it is quite vague and impressionistic. It is an amateur rather than a scholarly account, since it does not draw upon many primary materials, while its use of Bruno's writings is haphazard. There is much more here on Bruno's surroundings and 'life' than on his ideas, and this makes him come across as a bit of a lunatic, since his beliefs and ideas just seem contradictory while his personality was conflicted to say the least. The author should have been more organised and precise, and given a more coherent and lucid account of his ideas. For all that, this book offers an entertaining overview of his life and times.