ABSTRACT

When he arrived in England in 1583 to join the household of the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, Seigneur de Mauvissière, Bruno entertained an ambitious programme indeed: to win the rigidly Aristotelian and theologically dominated academic community of Oxford over to his new Copernican, pro-scientific philosophy; and to enlist the help of the English ruling class, above and beyond the political divisions within the latter, ‘in his efforts to end what Bruno saw as the vain and intolerant struggles between Catholic and Protestant’.1