L'arte di Giordano Bruno: Memoria, furore, magia (review)

Simonetta Bassi has worked as a collaborator of Michele Ciliberto on two much-discussed Bruno editions, the Dialoghi filosofici italiani, published in 2000, and the Opere magiche, published in 2002. The book under review contains thirteen essays by Bassi, with a brief introduction. Three of the essays and the introduction are published here for the first time.

The essays have been arranged in three sections. The first is concerned with Bruno's early period in London between 1583–85, the second with the late works on magic, the third with some major Bruno commentators of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy: the golden age of Italian Bruno studies. The short introduction, rather than introducing this volume, appears as preliminary notes on the emblematic quality of Bruno's writing, particularly in the Heroici furori.

Bassi's attention to the quality of Bruno's writing and his brilliantly varied modes of expression is one of the strongest points of her book. Another positive note is her use of her editorial experience to investigate what she calls the philosopher's "laboratory," or "workshop": the experimental processes by which the philosophical text moves toward completion. Bruno's final works on magic, unpublished during his lifetime and available to modern scholarship only through contemporary transcripts made under Bruno's direction, with frequent authorial comment and correction, provide an ideal space for such an analysis. Interesting in this context is also the paper on Felice Tocco's annotated copy of Bruno's Italian dialogues edited by Paul de Lagarde (1888), considered as a preliminary experience towards the writing of Tocco's Le opere latine di Giordano Bruno esposte econfrontate con le italiane (1889): one of the seminal works of modern Bruno scholarship. These final pages on Tocco, Giovanni Gentile, and Ludovico Limentani present new documentary material and some excellent comment.

In the earlier parts of her book, Bassi takes up clearly defined positions on a number of hotly debated issues in recent Bruno scholarship. That is good. Her weakness lies in her habit of avoiding confrontation with those scholars who do not share her opinions. To give only one example, in her excursus on Bruno and the moon Bassi claims that Bruno is nowhere polemical with respect to Ariosto but only "distant" from him (39), without confronting Lina Bolzoni's previous and more convincing arguments in favor of an ironical use of Ariosto on the part of Bruno. Actually Bruno was polemical with respect even to authors he was near to, such as Copernicus, who nowhere gets a serious mention in Bassi's book.

The interpretative axis that underlies Bassi's reading of Bruno also remains unsupported by valid argumentation. Opting for Frances Yates's hermetic interpretation, as endorsed by the later Ciliberto, Bassi simply states that Bruno's ideas and doctrines are primarily magical, lying "parallel to" the science developing in his times, but never coinciding with it (103). This statement raises major issues that are nowhere addressed in her book. What do we mean today when we talk about the scientific revolution? Has the radical rethinking of this term that characterized twentieth-century culture given rise to a new idea of modern science that brings the scientific revolution closer to the occult sciences? Similarly, Bassi fails to address the alternative interpretations of Bruno that have been developing in recent decades. No serious confrontation, for example, with Giovanni Aquilecchia's lifelong work on Bruno as a thinker with advanced scientific interests: a commentator who looms far too large on the scene of Bruno studies to be dismissed with a footnote. No mention at all of Hélène Vedrine's important work on Bruno as a natural philosopher, of Luciana de Bernart's exciting books on the role of the imagination in Bruno's science and mathematics, or of Leen Spruit's work on Bruno's doctrine of knowledge, which underlines his use of...