APPENDIX
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
Appendix: Bruno’s Sentence
A copy of the sentence leveled against Friar Iordanus of Nola, consigned to the Most Illustrious Governor of the City of Rome:
We, Lodovico Madruzzo, bishop of Santa Sabina, Giulio Antonio Santori, bishop of Palestrina called of Santa Severina, Pietro Dezza, titular cardinal of San Lorenzo in Lucino, Domenico Pinello, titular cardinal of San Crisogono, Friar Hieronymo Bernerio d’Ascoli, titular cardinal of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, Paolo Sfondrato, titular cardinal of Santa Cecilia, Lutio Sasso, titular cardinal of Santi Quirico e Giulitta, Camillo Borghese, titular cardinal of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Pompeo Arrigone, titular cardinal of Santa Balbina, and Roberto Bellarmino, titular cardinal of Santa Maria in Via, summoned by the mercy of God cardinal priests of the Holy Roman Church in all the Christian republic, inquisitors general against heretical depravity, specially deputed by the Holy Apostolic See:
Because you, Fra Giordano, son of the late Giovanni Bruno of Nola in the Kingdom of Naples, professed priest of the order of Saint Dominic, at the age of circa fifty-two years, were denounced to the Holy Office in Venice eight years ago:
That you said that it was a great blasphemy to say that bread transubstantiates into flesh, etc. et infra.
These propositions were presented to you on the eighteenth of January 1599 in the congregation of the lord prelates held in the Holy Office, and you were assigned the limit of six days in which to deliberate and then answer whether you wanted to abjure said propositions or not, and then on the twenty-fifth of said month, when the same congregations had assembled again in the same place, you replied that if the Holy See and the Holiness of Our Lord had declared eight propositions as definitively heretical, or that His Holiness knew them to be such, or that they had been so defined by the Holy Spirit, then you were disposed to revoke them; and then you presented a document addressed to His Holiness and to us, which, as you said, concerned your defense, and subsequently, on the fourth of February 1599, it was ordered that the eight propositions be proposed to you again, as in effect they were proposed to you on the fifteenth of said month, and if you were to recognize them as heretical and desire to abjure them, you would be received in penitence, otherwise, that a term of forty days would be set for you to repent; and you said at the time that you recognized the said eight propositions as heretical and that you were ready to detest and abjure them at a time and place acceptable to the Holy Office, and not only the said eight propositions, but that you were also prepared to perform every obedience with regard to the others that were proposed to you, but afterward, after you had handed over other documents to the Holy Office addressed to the Holiness of Our Lord and to us, from which it is manifestly apparent that you stubbornly persevered in your aforementioned errors.
And because notice has been given that you were denounced to the Holy Office in Vercelli, and when you were in England you were reputed to be an atheist and that you had written a book about the Triumphant Beast, on the tenth of the month of September 1599 you were given the term of forty days in which to repent, after which proceedings would be taken against you as the holy canons order and command; and because you nonetheless remained obstinate and impenitent in your errors and heresies, the Right Reverend Father Ipolito Maria Beccaria, general, and Father Fra Paolo Isaresio della Mirandola, procurator of your order, so that they admonish and persuade you to recognize your most grave errors and heresies; nonetheless, you have always stubbornly and obstinately persevered in these said erroneous and heretical opinions of yours.
For which reasons, having seen and considered the trial mounted against you, and the confessions of your errors and heresies with stubborn persistence—although you deny that they are such—and all the other matters to be seen and considered: your case having been presented before our general congregation in the presence of the Holiness of Our Lord on the twenty-second of January last, and voted and resolved, we have arrived at the following sentence:
Therefore, invoking the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ and of his most glorious mother ever virgin Mary, in the case and cases aforementioned pending at present before this Holy Office between the Reverend Giulio Monterentii, doctor of law, fiscal procurator of said Holy Office on one side, and you the aforesaid Fra Giordano Bruno, a felon examined, tried, found guilty, impenitent, obstinate, and pertinacious on the other, by this our definitive sentence, on the counsel and opinion of the Reverend Fathers who are masters of sacred theology and doctors of canon and civil law, our consultants, we proclaim in these documents, state, pronounce, sentence, and declare you, the aforementioned Fra Giordano Bruno, to be an impenitent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretic, and for that reason to incur all the ecclesiastical censures and penalties of the sacred canons, laws, and constitutions, in general and in particular, as those are imposed on such confessed, impenitent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretics; and as such we degrade you in words and declare that you should be degraded, just as we order and command that you now be degraded from all the major and minor ecclesiastical orders to which you have been admitted, according to the order of the holy canons; and that you should be expelled, as we now expel you, from our ecclesiastical bar and from our holy and immaculate Church, of whose mercy you have rendered yourself unworthy; and that you should be released to the secular court, as we now release you to the court of Your Honor, Monsignor Governor of Rome here present, to punish you with the appropriate punishments, heartily enjoining you to mitigate the rigor of the law about the punishment of your person, that it should be without danger of death or mutilation of limb.
Furthermore, we condemn, reprove, and prohibit all the books aforementioned and all other books and writings of yours as heretical and erroneous and containing many heresies and errors, ordering that all those that have up to now and in the future shall be consigned to the Holy Office shall be publicly destroyed and burned in the piazza of Saint Peter’s, before the stairs, and as such they shall be posted on the Index of Prohibited Books, as we now order be done.
And thus we state, pronounce, sentence, declare, degrade, command, and order, expel, and release and pray that in this and in every other most binding way and form that we can and ought reasonably to do.
So pronounce we the undersigned Cardinals Inquisitors General:
Ludovicus Cardinal Madruzzi
Iulius Antonius Cardinal Santa Severina
Petrus Cardinal Dezza
Dominicus Cardinal Pinellus
Fra Hieronymus Cardinal d’Ascoli
[Paulus Cardinal Sfondrato]
Lutius Cardinal Sasso
Camillus Cardinal Borghese
Pompeius Cardinal Arrigoni
Robertus Cardinal Bellarminus
The aforementioned sentence was rendered and given by the aforementioned Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord Cardinals Inquisitors General sitting at the bench in Rome in the general congregation of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition held in the presence of the aforementioned Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord Cardinals Inquisitors General in the palazzo that is the habitual residence of the aforementioned Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord Cardinal Madruzzi by the Church of Sant’Agnese in Agone, in the year of our Lord’s birth 1600, on the eighth day of the month of February … cited yesterday for today and sent by a courier of Our Most Holy Lord the Pope to the aforementioned Brother Jordano, summoned to hear said sentence.
And on the same day, by an order of the Most Illustrious and Reverend Lord Cardinals Inquisitors General, said Fra Jordano having been led out of the jail of the Holy Inquisition and conducted to the palazzo that is the habitual residence of the aforementioned Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord Cardinal Madruzzi, and with himself present and hearing said sentence recorded by myself the Notary, by their order, in a loud and intelligible voice, it was read and published.
Notes
P
lease note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.
References to Bruno’s works cite the section of the work in which the passage is found rather than pages of a particular edition. Like most sixteenth-century works, Bruno’s are divided into small sections, so that tracing an individual reference is never difficult.
PROLOGUE: THE HOODED FRIAR
statue of a hooded friar: See Berggren, “Visual Image of Giordano Bruno.”
“It is not our place”: Angelo Cardinal Sodano, “Letter [Feb. 14, 2000] of the Cardinal Secretary of State … to the Principal of the Pontifical Theological Faculty of Southern Italy,” www.vatican.va/roman_curia/secretariat_state/documents/re_segst_doc_20000217_sodano-letter_it.html.
1: A MOST SOLEMN ACT OF JUSTICE
For a public execution: See Ricci, Giordano Bruno, pp. 542–57; Spampanato, Vita, pp. 579–98; Firpo, Il processo, pp. 87–104.
Protestant troublemakers: See also the Avvisi di Roma.
“Today we thought”: Avvisi di Roma.
the burning of a Scottish heretic: His name was Walter Merse, and his death is reported in a compilation of executions effected in Rome under various popes, including Clement VIII; Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Urb. Lat. 1645, 337r–340v. The passage cited is found on 340r.
2: THE NOLAN PHILOSOPHER
Bruno’s home: Spampanato, Vita, pp. 1–66; Ricci, Giordano Bruno, pp. 7–32.
discuss how to live wisely: Bruno, Heroic Frenzies, pt. 1, dialogue 2.
“Once, when I was a boy”: Bruno, On the Immense and the Numberless, 3.1.
as if he were still there: Bruno, Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, pt. 3, dialogue 1.
3: “NAPOLI È TUTTO IL MONDO”
My special thanks to Eugenio Canone, Maria Ann Conelli, Mario Pereira, Livio Pestilli, Sebastian Schütze, and John Marino for information about all things Neapolitan.
umbrella pine: This is the description of Pliny the Younger, an eyewitness to the eruption of A.D. 79, Letters, 6.16; see also 6.20.
rivers of fire: In fact, a flood in 1504 had generated a Nolan proverb about fearing water more than fire; see Bruno, Candlemaker.
“It was almost as if”: Bruno, On the Immense and the Numberless, 3.1.
wine: Bruno specifically mentions the asprinio of Nola and the “greco” of Vesuvius in Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, dialogue 3.
“benigno cielo”: The line comes from Ash Wednesday Supper, dialogue 4; see the epigraph to chap. 17.
Beneath that benign heaven: Spampanato, Vita, pp. 66–243; Ricci, Giordano Bruno, pp. 32–51; Nino Leone, La vita quotidiana a Napoli al tempo di Masaniello (Milan: Fabbri, 1998).
Naples’s sixteenth-century population: See Chase-Dunn and Willard, “Systems of Cities and World-Systems”: In 1550, “Ottoman Constantinople was once again the largest city with a population of 660,000. Cairo was now second with 360,000, down 40,000 since 1500. [Tabriz, with about 275,000, would have been third.] Paris was growing again with 210,000. Naples was in fifth place with 209,000.” By 1575, Cairo’s population had shrunk and that of Paris and Naples had grown.
Spanish Inquisition: Ricci, Giordano Bruno, pp. 47–48; Olga Casale, introduction to Giovanni Battista Pino, Ragionamento sovra del asino, ed. Olga Casale (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1982).
“the influence”: Ricci, Giordano Bruno, p. 33.
“To whom shall I dedicate”: Bruno, Candlemaker, “To Signora Morgana B.”
4: “THE WORLD IS FINE AS IT IS”
“The comedy will have”: Bruno, Candlemaker, proprologue.
“Consider that, like virgins”: Ibid., act 2, scene 3.
“It is common opinion”: Ibid., act 5, scene 19.
“O gentle master”: Ibid., act 2, scene 1.
5: “I HAVE, IN EFFECT, HARBORED DOUBTS”
San Domenico Maggiore: Miele (who is himself a member of the congregation of San Domenico Maggiore), “L’organizzazione degli studi”; Miele, “Indagini sulla comunità conventuale”; Spampanato, Vita, pp. 147–93.
Oziosi: I am indebted to Mario Pereira, “The Accademia degli Oziosi” (master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1997).
weapons: Spampanato, Vita, pp. 196–212, 619–25.
Fra Teofilo Caracciolo: Ibid., pp. 200–201.
Gregory XIII: Cited in ibid., p. 200.
less accommodating: Canone, Giordano Bruno, 1548–1600, p. 37.
Council of Trent: O’Malley, Trent and All That; Gleason, Gasparo Contarini.
“I have, in effect, harbored doubts”: Firpo, Il processo, p. 170.
Fra Giordano Crispo: Spampanato, Vita, p. 125.
expulsion: Miele, “L’organizzazione degli studi,” pp. 49–50.
project he must have: An excellent account is in O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome.
“Is it nothing to you”: The sorrows of Don Carlo Gesualdo, always a strange, aloof man, finally took him to the verge of madness; he would shock the residents of Piazza San Domenico one morning in 1590 when he opened his palazzo’s huge wooden door and laid out the naked, ravaged bodies of his earthy young wife, Maria d’Avalos, and her dashing lover, Fabrizio Carafa, whom he had stabbed the night before when he discovered them in bed together, as well as the body of the young daughter he now suspected might have been Fabrizio’s child rather than his own.
6: “I CAME INTO THIS WORLD TO LIGHT A FIRE”
Bernardino of Siena: Iris Origo, The World of San Bernardino (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962); Bolzoni, Web of Images.
Mariano da Genazzano: O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome.
Giles of Viterbo: O’Malley, Giles of Viterbo; Martin, Friar, Reformer, and Renaissance Scholar.
Fra Teofilo da Vairano: Giovanni Mercati, Prolegomena, pp. 121–23; Carella, “Tra i maestri”; Ricci, Giordano Bruno, pp. 40–46.
“what we have been taught”: Teofilo da Vairano, De gratia Novi Testamenti, c. 130r.
As it survives today: Probably about half the text of De gratia Novi Testamenti has been preserved.
“God is love”: Pope Benedict XVI, God Is Love (Deus caritas est) (Fort Collins, Colo.: Ignatius Press, 2006).
7: FOOTPRINTS IN THE FOREST
Marsilio Ficino: James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Allen, Marsilio Ficino and the Phaedran Charioteer.
Bruno’s work: For Bruno’s relationship to the Augustinians of San Giovanni a Carbonara, see Rowland, “Giordano Bruno and Neapolitan Neoplatonism.” For Platonic influence on Bruno, see also Bönker-Vallon, “Unità nascosta.”
In one manuscript from the Seripando library: Now Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS 13.D.43.
“girded in chestnut”: Bruno, On the Immense and the Numberless, 3.1; see chaps. 2 and 3.
Calcidius: Van Winden, Calcidius on Matter.
“That hunter”: Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Cavalcanti to Giorgio Antonio Vespucci, in Ficino, Opera omnia, vol. 1.2.631.
Seripando’s own copy: Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS 8.F.8.
The “Sentences” According to the Mind of Plato: Sententiae ad mentem Platonis. See Gionta, “‘Augustinus Dux meus’”; O’Malley, Giles of Viterbo, pp. 15–16, 25, 197; Pfeiffer, Zur Ikonographie von Raffaels Disputa; Rowland, “Intellectual Background of the School of Athens.”
“Sometimes, however”: Giles of Viterbo, Sententiae, 37v.
a specific sum: Ibid., 37v–38r.
“God … created”: Ibid., 39r.
“Those blessed souls”: Ibid., 155r–v.
“I bear what I’ve become”: Giles of Viterbo, “La caccia bellissima dell’amore,” D iiir–v.
8: A THOUSAND WORLDS
For this chapter, I am indebted to Brian Copenhaver, Peter Mazur, and James Nelson Novoa.
all Jews: The Italian periodical Zakhor, issued annually, has articles on Jewish life in Italy; see also Cooperman and Garvin, Jews of Italy.
de Monte’s learning and eloquence: Spampanato,
Vita, pp. 188–89.
“Judaizing”: This is the subject of a Ph.D. thesis by Peter Mazur, forthcoming from Northwestern University.
his readings in Kabbalah: See de León-Jones, Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah; Idel, Kabbalah; Secret, Hermétisme et Kabbale.
Giles of Viterbo: O’Malley, Giles of Viterbo; Martin, Friar, Reformer, and Renaissance Scholar.
“all are elected by God”: Teofilo da Vairano, De gratia Novi Testamenti, 158v.
“Let no one think”: Ibid., 144r–166r, esp. 145r, 150r.
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