Essays on Giordano Bruno

377 Pages·2011·2.68 MB·English

by  Bruno

ESSAYS ON GIORDANO BRUNO

ESSAYS ON GIORDANO BRUNO
HILARY GATTI
princeton university press
princeton and oxford
Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gatti, Hilary.
[Essays. English. Selections]
Essays on Giordano Bruno / Hilary Gatti.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-14574-7 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-691-14839-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Bruno, Giordano, 1548-1600. I. Title.
B783.Z7G38 2011
195--dc22 2010012090
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Sabon
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my friend Ingrid Rowland

CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
INTRODUCTION
Beginning as Negation in the Italian Dialogues of
Giordano Bruno 1
PART 1 BRUNO AND THE NEW SCIENCE
1
Between Magic and Magnetism: Bruno’s
Cosmology at Oxford 17
2
Bruno’s Copernican Diagrams 40
3
Bruno and the New Atomism 70
4
The Multiple Languages of the New Science 91
PART 2 BRUNO IN BRITAIN
5
Petrarch, Sidney, Bruno 115
6
The Sense of an Ending in Bruno’s Heroici furori 127
7
Bruno and Shakespeare: Hamlet 140
8
Bruno’s Candelaio and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist 161
9
Bruno and the Stuart Court Masques 172
10
Romanticism: Bruno and Samuel Taylor Coleridge 201
11
Bruno and the Victorians 220
PART 3 BRUNO’S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE
12
Bruno’s Natural Philosophy 249
13
Bruno’s Use of the Bible in His Italian
Philosophical Dialogues 264
viii CONTENTS
14 Science and Magic: The Resolution of Contraries 280
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
PREFACE
A good question to start with might be: “Why Giordano Bruno?”
IT ALL BEGAN WITH A COURSE I was giving on Shakespeare’s
Hamlet at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” in Italy. During my
reading of a small slice of the daunting amount of critical material on
Shakespeare’s tragedy (someone somewhere has done a statistical count
and arrived at the conclusion that to read all the criticism dedicated to
Hamlet alone would require more than a single life span), I came across
a reference to a theory that some of Hamlet’s characteristics might have
been based on the life and tragic death of Giordano Bruno, in the Campo
dei Fiori (The Field of Flowers), in Rome. Although I was living in Rome
at the time, and aware of where the Campo dei Fiori was, and of the
imposing statue that dominates that lovely square, I realized that I had
little idea of whom the statue was commemorating or why. I dedicated
some hours to it, and the next day went on a visit of discovery to the phi-
losophy library that constitutes one of the areas of excellence of my erst-
while university, where I would spend many hours in the coming years.
I brought home with me the dialogue especially mentioned on the page
I had been reading, La cena de le ceneri, or The Ash Wednesday Supper,
in the Einaudi edition of 1955 edited by Giovanni Aquilecchia—a fine
scholar who would soon become a major point of reference throughout
my Bruno studies. I remember reading it through in a few hours, get-
ting to the end almost out of breath. I found it stunning, overwhelming.
What was this? Philosophy or cosmology or drama? Or philosophy and
cosmology in the form of a drama? And what kind of language was this?
Like no Italian I had ever read or heard anywhere before, either ancient
or modern. And how did this man from Nola (where was Nola?) know
so much about Elizabethan London? Of one thing only I felt quite sure
then, and I have never changed my mind: Shakespeare had been through
those pages. Somehow, somewhere, he had either read them or had them
read to him. For The Ash Wednesday Supper is an extraordinary theater
of conflicting ideas, as indeed (as I would discover later) are all Bruno’s
Italian dialogues, and his Latin works as well. But The Ash Wednesday
Supper in particular, which I would later translate into English, remained
and still remains a center of particular interest and concern: a hub around
which would coil and develop in the coming years and decades my vari-
ous and varied studies of Bruno’s life and thought.