Giordano Bruno: Philosopher / Heretic

Giordano Bruno (15481600) is one of the great figures of early modern Europe, and one of the least understood. Ingrid D. Rowlands biography establishes him once and for all as a peer of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Galileoa thinker whose vision of the world prefigures ours.Writing with great verve and erudition, Rowland traces Brunos wanderings through a sixteenthcentury 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 Romes Campo de Fiori.A loving and thoughtful account of [Brunos] life and thought, satires and sonnets, dialogues and lesson plans, vagabond days and starspangled nights. . . . Ingrid D. Rowland has her reasons for preferring Bruno to Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, even Galileo and Leonardo, and theyre good ones.John Leonard, HarpersWhatever else Bruno was, he was wildminded and extreme, and Rowland communicates this, together with a sense of the excitement that his ideas gave him. . . . Its that feeling for the explosiveness of the period, and [Rowlands] admiration of Bruno for participating in itindeed, dying for itthat is the central and most cherishable quality of the biography.Joan Acocella, New YorkerRowland tells this great story in moving, vivid prose, concentrating as much on Brunos 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 foulmouthed Neapolitan mountebank, loquacious poet, religious reformer, scholastic philosopher, and slightly wacky astronomer.Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book ReviewA marvelous feat of scholarship. . . . This is intellectual biography at its best.Peter N. Miller, New RepublicAn excellent starting point for anyone who wants to rediscover the historical figure concealed beneath the cowl on Campo de Fiori.Paula Findlen, Nation