ABSTRACT

The dialogues of Giordano Bruno’s Cena de le ceneri (1584) 1 purport to describe how Bruno and two companions went through the streets of London from the French embassy, where he lodged, to the house of Sir Fulke Greville where he attended a supper party at which he disputed with two Oxford doctors concerning his Co-pernican philosophy. Sir Fulke Greville and his courtly friends, amongst whom was probably Sir Philip Sidney, seem to encourage Bruno to pour contempt on the pedantry of the Oxford doctors. As I suggested in an earlier article, 2 the courtiers who listened with sympathy to Bruno were in contact, through Dee and others, with the older English philosophical tradition which was carried on throughout the Tudor period, though in unofficial channels. In circles where this older tradition was preserved, the Copernican theory was well known and was thought of in the way in which Bruno thought of it – namely as a re-emergence of ancient Pythagorean and mystical truth.