Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno was burned in the Campo de' Fiori in Rome in 1600, and what he was burned for is more complicated than the version in which he is a martyr for science. He was a Dominican friar from Nola who fled the order at twenty-eight over doubts about the Trinity, and spent fifteen years moving between Geneva, Paris, London, Wittenberg and Prague, being expelled from most of them. He taught an infinite universe with no centre, containing countless suns with inhabited worlds around them, and he reached it through Copernicus but also through Lucretius and hermetic magic rather than through observation or mathematics. The charges at his trial were theological: denying the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, transubstantiation and the virginity of Mary, and practising magic. The plurality of worlds was among them. He was held for seven years, refused to recant, and was gagged and burned upside down. Nineteenth-century Italian liberals made him a symbol against the papacy and put a statue on the spot in 1889, over Vatican objection, and it is still there. Historians of science have spent a century pointing out that he was not a scientist, which does not make the trial any better. The trial records were largely lost when the papal archives were moved to Paris under Napoleon, and only a summary survives, which is one reason the argument about what he died for cannot be closed. The Vatican expressed regret in 2000 without rehabilitating him. A crater on the Moon carries his name. His memory-art writings, which he took as seriously as his cosmology, have had a scholarly revival since Frances Yates.

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