Giordano Bruno

Bruno was born at Nola near Naples and entered the Dominican order at seventeen. Investigated for reading forbidden books and doubting the Trinity, he fled the monastery in 1576 and wandered Europe for fifteen years: Geneva, Toulouse, Paris, London, Oxford, Wittenberg, Prague, Frankfurt. Everywhere he lectured and everywhere he made enemies, quarrelling with Calvinists, Lutherans and the scholars of Oxford alike. He was famous for the art of memory, and Henry III of France summoned him to teach it.

His three years in London were his most productive; he wrote six dialogues in Italian. On the Infinite Universe and Worlds pushed Copernicus to the limit: the universe is infinite, the stars are distant suns with their own planets and inhabitants, there is no centre, no edge and no celestial spheres. God is not a mover outside the universe but the soul within all things. This was no longer astronomy but metaphysics, and heresy.

In 1591 a Venetian nobleman invited him back to Italy to teach memory, then the next year betrayed him to the Inquisition. He was interrogated for eight years in Venice and Rome and refused to recant. On 17 February 1600 he was bound to the stake in the Campo de' Fiori with his tongue pinned so that he could not speak. On hearing his sentence he is reported to have said: perhaps you pronounce this sentence with greater fear than I receive it. In 1889 a statue was raised where he burned, facing the Vatican.