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Reviewed by:
  • Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance
  • Jill Kraye
Hilary Gatti , editor. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002. Pp. xxiv + 424. Cloth, $89.95.

The Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake on 17 February 1600 in the Campo de' Fiori in Rome. The four-hundredth anniversary of this dramatic event, which has come to symbolize the end of the High Renaissance, was a rather tepid and bland affair compared to the third centenary, which occurred at the height of "Brunomania," with all its attendant ideological fervor and political partisanship. In their struggle against the Church and other conservative elements in Italian society, nineteenth-century liberal and anti-clerical thinkers had transformed the renegade Dominican, whose radical ideas and heretical views were expressed in bombastic Italian prose and pseudo-Lucretian Latin verse, into a martyr of free thought and scientific progress. Bruno still arouses passions in our own day, but these are largely confined to the academic community, whose views rarely have an impact beyond the classroom and the international conferences and scholarly publications in which they are set forth. Such an enigmatic figure as Bruno will always remain to some extent elusive, and the "Brunisti" will never run out of things to argue with each other about. It seems, however, that the sustained examination to which Bruno's life and writings have been subjected over the past hundred years has resolved the major problems and answered the most pressing questions. Scholars nowadays are reduced to rehashing old disputes, quibbling over details, grasping at the few straws of unexamined evidence or, more promisingly, re-evaluating the overblown claims of previous generations.

That, at any rate, is the impression given by the papers published in Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Italian Renaissance, which were originally delivered at a conference held in 2000 at University College London. The book is dedicated to the late Giovanni Aquilecchia, a leading Bruno scholar and editor; and the keynote address which he gave on the occasion of the colloquium serves as the "Introduction." In Italianate English, Aquilecchia summarizes the conclusions of his own work on Bruno, claiming that he was not merely "a Renaissance philosopher" but "the Renaissance philosopher par excellence" (6). This attitude, shared by many contributors to the volume, reflects the all too predictable déformation professionelle of scholars who devote their lives to studying Bruno. While those who are already true believers in the cult of Bruno will no doubt find their assumptions confirmed by the book, there is little that is likely to win over the unconverted.

In the first two sections of the volume, "Bruno and Italy" and "Bruno in England," only the article of Ingrid Rowland has any important bearing on his philosophy. In search of the Neapolitan roots of Bruno's Neoplatonism, she concentrates on his youth, from age 14 to 28, which was spent in a Dominican convent in Naples. Unfortunately, we know very little about this period in Bruno's life, apart from the fact that he studied logic with an Augustinian friar by the name of Teofilo da Vairano, whom he would much later describe as his "greatest master in philosophy" (97). Rowland studies a theological treatise by Teofilo, De gratia Novi Testamenti, preserved in the Vatican Library, whose Neoplatonic elements she plausibly suggests are due to the influence of Egidio da Viterbo, Prior General of the Augustinian Order and a prominent Christian Neoplatonist. Although the lessons which Teofilo gave to Bruno in logic seem a rather unlikely conduit for such ideas, she tries to back up her case by identifying echoes of Egidio's philosophy and imagery in the Heroici furori.

The section on "Philosophical Themes" starts off with Leen Spruit's useful and reliable survey of Bruno's views on astrology, showing that although his knowledge of the subject was not profound, he "was acquainted with its basic ideas" (238). Stephen Clucas steers a careful course between the divergent interpretations of Bruno's mnemonics put forward by Frances Yates and Rita Sturlese, endorsing in his own account the current trend to rescue Bruno from the charge of inconsistency by stressing the "syncretic, eclectic and pluralist nature" of...

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