Essays on Giordano Bruno / / Hilary Gatti.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Gatti, Hilary,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2010]; ©2011
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Edition: Course Book
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (376 p.) :; 17 halftones.

This book gathers wide-ranging essays on the Italian Renaissance philosopher and cosmologist Giordano Bruno by one of the world's leading authorities on his work and life. Many of these essays were originally written in Italian and appear here in English for the first time. Bruno (1548-1600) is principally famous as a proponent of heliocentrism, the infinity of the universe, and the plurality of worlds. But his work spanned the sciences and humanities, sometimes touching the borders of the occult, and Hilary Gatti's essays richly reflect this diversity. The book is divided into sections that address three broad subjects: the relationship between Bruno and the new science, the history of his reception in English culture, and the principal characteristics of his natural philosophy. A final essay examines why this advocate of a "tranquil universal philosophy" ended up being burned at the stake as a heretic by the Roman Inquisition. While the essays take many different approaches, they are united by a number of assumptions: that, although well versed in magic, Bruno cannot be defined primarily as a Renaissance Magus; that his aim was to articulate a new philosophy of nature; and that his thought, while based on ancient and medieval sources, represented a radical rupture with the philosophical schools of the past, helping forge a path toward a new modernity.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION: Beginning as Negation in the Italian Dialogues of Giordano Bruno -- PART 1. BRUNO AND THE NEW SCIENCE -- 1. Between Magic and Magnetism: Bruno's Cosmology at Oxford -- 2. Bruno's Copernican Diagrams -- 3. Bruno and the New Atomism -- 4. The Multiple Languages of the New Science -- PART 2. BRUNO IN BRITAIN -- 5. Petrarch, Sidney, Bruno -- 6. The Sense of an Ending in Bruno's Heroici furori -- 7. Bruno and Shakespeare: Hamlet -- 8. Bruno's Candelaio and Ben Jonson's The Alchemist -- 9. Bruno and the Stuart Court Masques -- 10. Romanticism: Bruno and Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- 11. Bruno and the Victorians -- PART 3. BRUNO'S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE -- 12. Bruno's Natural Philosophy -- 13. Bruno's Use of the Bible in His Italian Philosophical Dialogues -- 14. Science and Magic: The Resolution of Contraries -- 15. Bruno and Metaphor -- EPILOGUE: Why Bruno's "A Tranquil Universal Philosophy" Finished in a Fire -- Bibliography of Cited Works by and on Giordano Bruno -- Index