Giordano Bruno : philosopher/heretic

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Title:

Giordano Bruno : philosopher/heretic

Author:

Rowland, Ingrid D. (Ingrid Drake)

ISBN:

9780226730240

Personal Author:

Rowland, Ingrid D. (Ingrid Drake)

Publication Information:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Physical Description:

viii, 335 p. ; 23 cm.

General Note:

Originally published in 2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Contents:

Prologue: the hooded friar -- A most solemn act of justice -- The Nolan philosopher -- "Napoli e tutto il mondo" -- "The world is fine as it is" -- "I have, in effect, harbored doubts" -- "I came into this world to light a fire" -- Footprints in the forest -- A thousand worlds -- Art and astronomy -- Trouble again -- Holy asininity -- The signs of the times -- A lonely sparrow -- Thirty -- The gifts of the Magi -- The song of Circe -- "Go up to Oxford" -- Down risky streets -- The art of magic -- Canticles -- Squaring the circle -- Consolation and valediction -- Infinities -- Return to Italy -- The witness -- The adversary -- Gethsemane -- Hell's purgatory -- The sentence -- The field of flowers -- Epilogue: the four rivers.

Personal Subject:

Bruno, Giordano, 1548-1600.

Subject Term:

Philosophers -- Italy -- Biography.

Copies:

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Material Type

General Books

Item Barcode

33168025448511

Shelf Number

195 R883G 2009

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Bound With These Titles

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Summary

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) is one of the great figures of early modern Europe, and one of the least understood. Ingrid D. Rowland's biography establishes him once and for all as a peer of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Galileo--a thinker whose vision of the world prefigures ours.

Writing with great verve and erudition, Rowland traces Bruno's wanderings through a sixteenth-century Europe where every certainty of religion and philosophy has been called into question, and reveals how he valiantly defended his ideas to the very end, when he was burned at the stake as a heretic on Rome's Campo de' Fiori.

"A loving and thoughtful account of [Bruno's] life and thought, satires and sonnets, dialogues and lesson plans, vagabond days and star-spangled nights. . . . Ingrid D. Rowland has her reasons for preferring Bruno to Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, even Galileo and Leonardo, and they're good ones."--John Leonard, Harper's

"Whatever else Bruno was, he was wild-minded and extreme, and Rowland communicates this, together with a sense of the excitement that his ideas gave him. . . . It's that feeling for the explosiveness of the period, and [Rowland's] admiration of Bruno for participating in it--indeed, dying for it--that is the central and most cherishable quality of the biography."--Joan Acocella, New Yorker

"Rowland tells this great story in moving, vivid prose, concentrating as much on Bruno's thought as on his life. . . . His restless mind, as she makes clear, not only explored but transformed the heavens."--Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books

"[Bruno] seems to have been an unclassifiable mixture of foul-mouthed Neapolitan mountebank, loquacious poet, religious reformer, scholastic philosopher, and slightly wacky astronomer."--Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review

"A marvelous feat of scholarship. . . . This is intellectual biography at its best."--Peter N. Miller, New Republic

"An excellent starting point for anyone who wants to rediscover the historical figure concealed beneath the cowl on Campo de' Fiori."--Paula Findlen, Nation

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