BRUNO, GIORDANO (b. Nola, Italy, 1548; d. Rome, Italy, 17 February 1600), philosophy.

    rate, he allowed Bruno to deliver an oration on his recently deceased father which echoed the moral and religious program of the Spaccio della bestia trionfante. While at Helmstedt, Bruno was busily writing; the De magia and other works on magic preserved in the Noroff manuscript may have been written during this period. Henry Julius possibly gave him money toward the publication of the Latin poems that he had been writing during his travels; and Bruno went on to Frankfurt to supervise their printing.

The De immenso et innumerabilibus, the De triplici minimo et mensura, and the De monade numero et figura were published in 1591. In these poems, written in a style imitating that of Lucretius, Bruno expounded for the last time his philosophical and cosmological meditations, mingled, as in the works published in England, with powerful Hermetic influences. His last published work, also published in 1591 by Wechel at Frankfurt, was a book on the magic art of memory dedicated to the alchemist and magician Johannes Hainzell.

While at Frankfurt, Bruno received, through an Italian bookseller who came to the Frankfurt fair, an invitation from Zuan Mocenigo, a Venetian nobleman, to come to Venice and teach him the secrets of his art of memory. He accepted, and in August 1591, he returned to Italy, going first to Padua and then to Venice. There can be little doubt that Bruno believed, like many others at the time, that the conversion of Henry IV of France was a sign of vast impending religious changes in Rome, and that he and his mysterious mission would be well received in the approaching new dispensation. That he had no idea that he was running into danger is shown by the curious fact that he took with him the manuscript of a book that he intended to dedicate to Pope Clement VIII.

Bruno's reception in Italy was tragically other than he had expected. Mocenigo informed against him, and he was arrested and incarcerated in the prisons of the Inquisition in Venice. There followed a long trial, at the end of which Bruno recanted his heresies and threw himself on the mercy of the inquisitors. He had to be sent on to Rome for another trial, however, and there his case dragged on for eight years of imprisonment and interrogation. After some wavering, he finally refused to recant any of his views, with the result that he was burned alive as a dangerous heretic on the Campo de' Fiori in Rome.

The grounds on which Bruno was sentenced are unknown, for the processo, or official document containing the sentence, is irretrievably lost. It formed part of a mass of archives that were transported, by order of Napoleon, from Rome to Paris, where they were pulped. From the reports of the interrogations, it is, however, possible to form an idea of the drift of the case against him. To his major theological heresy, the denial of the divinity of the Second Person of the Trinity, was added suspicion of diabolical magical practices. It was probably mainly as a magician that Bruno was burned, and as the propagator throughout Europe of some mysterious magicoreligious movement. This movement may have been in the nature of a secret Hermetic sect, and may be connected with the origins of Rosicrucianism or of Freemasonry. If any philosophical or cosmological points were included in his condemnation, these would have been inextricably bound up with his “Egyptianism.”

The legend that the nineteenth century built around Bruno as the hero who, unlike Galileo, refused to retract his belief that the earth moves is entirely without foundation. Bruno's case may, however, have affected the attitude of the Church toward the Copernican hypothesis and may have encouraged the Inquisition's suspicion of Galileo. Although Galileo accepted the Copernican world view on entirely different grounds from Bruno, there are curious formal resemblances between his Dialogo dei due massime sistemi del mondo, in which the pedantic Simplicius takes the Aristotelian side, and Bruno's Cena de le ceneri, in which the Oxford pedants oppose the “new philosophy.”

The history of Bruno's reputation is instructive. Abhorred by Marin Mersenne as an impious deist, he was more favorably mentioned by Kepler. Rumors of his diabolism seem to have been circulated, and were mentioned even by Pierre Bayle in one of the footnotes to his contemptuous article on Bruno. The eighteenth-century deist John Toland revived interest in some of his works. It was not until about the mid-nineteenth century that a revival on a large scale began to gather strength and the legend of the martyr for modern science was invented—of the man who died, not for any religious belief, but solely for his acceptance of the Copernican theory and his bold vision of an infinite universe and innumerable worlds. Statues in his honor proliferated in Italy; the literature on him became immense.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Giordano Bruno was one of the most widely known, and most frequently written about, philosophers of the Italian Renaissance. His ideas, isolated from their historical context, were interpreted in terms of the then dominant type of history of philosophy, for example, by Giovanni Gentile, and the large areas in his writings that are not intelligible in terms of straight philosophical thinking were neglected or