Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher, cosmologist and former Dominican friar from Nola, near Naples. Suspected of heresy, he left his order and wandered through Geneva, Paris, London, Germany and Prague, writing on cosmology, magic and the art of memory. In On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1584), written in London, he went beyond Copernicus to argue that the universe is infinite, has no centre and contains countless suns with their own worlds. Arrested in Venice in 1592 and tried by the Roman Inquisition, chiefly for theological heresies, he was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.

Key ideas

• The universe is infinite and has no centre; neither the Earth nor the Sun holds a special place.
• The stars are suns, and there are innumerable worlds, some perhaps inhabited.
• God and nature are closely united: an infinite cause expresses itself in an infinite universe.
• All things are animated by a single world-soul and formed from one underlying substance.

Major works

• On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1584)
• The Ash Wednesday Supper (1584)
• On Cause, Principle and Unity (1584)
• The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (1584)
• The Heroic Frenzies (1585)

In the Book corner

• On the Infinite Universe and Worlds 1584 · Intermediate
  A work of five dialogues in Italian, written and printed in London in 1584 while Bruno was living in the household of…

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