Giordano Bruno – Philospher/Heretic
February 14th, 2009 | Bookshelf | Add Your Comment »About the author: Ingrid D. Rowland is a professor, based in Rome, at the Notre Dame School of Architecture. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Review of Books. 
Notes on the book: Giordano Bruno was a man who refused to back down to the Inquisition. For that he was burned at the stake on Ash Wednesday, 1600, after seven years of languishing in Venetian and Roman prisons. The Holy Inquisition declared him to be “an impenitent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretic.”
He could have saved his life like Galileo, but chose not to do so. His statute overlooks the marketplace of Campo de’ Fiori (Field of Flowers) in Rome where he died.
Hounded by critics because of his outspoken and heretical views on doctrinal matters like transubstantiation, the divinity of Jesus, and the virginity of May, Bruno is said to be the world’s first martyr to science. He was a free thinker who held a distinctly modern view of the universe – he said there could be many worlds besides ours which could be inhabited with many other forms of life. He taught mathematics and astronomy, and the “art of memory” for which he became famous.
Bruno was a thinker and scholar with expansive views on the nature of God and the cosmos. He had the misfortune of living in a time when Catholic orthodoxy was being challenged and the church was fighting back. Not unlike our own day.
Read the Washington Post review here.
Read the New York Times review here.
