ABSTRACT
When Giordano Bruno came to Elizabethan Oxford and expounded his Copernican philosophy he met with a great deal of opposition, some idea of which can be gathered from his Cena de le ceneri (1584), 1 in which he describes an encounter with two Aristotelian pedants, and from the beginning of his De la causa, principio e uno, 2 where he makes a half-hearted apology for the strictures on English academic learning in the earlier work. Writers on Bruno have generally assumed that his clash with Aristotelianism in England is symbolic of the conflict between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, the ‘old’, in their eyes, being the medieval world-system and the authoritarian rigidity of medieval Aristotelianism whilst the ‘new’ is represented by what they believe to be Bruno’s acceptance of the new science (i.e. the Copernican theory) on rational grounds and his determination to build upon it a thought-structure unhampered by the chains of scholastic orthodoxy. On this view Torquato and Nundinio, the Oxford Aristotelians of the Cena de le ceneri, would represent the dead hand of traditionalism lying heavy upon their ancient university, whilst Bruno’s stormy encounter with them would typify the new boldness of Renaissance thought breaking through Ptolemaic barriers into the boundless possibilities of the infinite. A suspicion that this generalization may be misleading can be gained by a study of the historical background of Bruno’s visit to England.
