ABSTRACT
Rhetorical tropes of "listing" and "diversion" line Bruno's Candelaio, functioning as a medium for satirizing unidirectional rectilinear thought. While hardly the only literary devices Bruno employs in his satire, the tropes of brachylogia, systrophe, and hyperbaton most clearly reveal the nature of his contention with the narrowness of thought, which is characterized by all three protagonists. Bruno, indeed, thought of the term "pedant" as particularly useful for describing this kind of thinking, given its similarity to the word ped, meaning "foot," or perhaps even to the word for "child" (given the pederasty of Mamfurio, or the "childishness" of all three characters). The insufferable scholar Mamfurio elucidates that a pedant means someone who is "Pe, perfectos [perfect]—Dan, dans [in]—Te, thesaurus [thesaurus]" (Ill.vii, 179); but as Gioan Bernardo, the painter, ringleader of the evening's events, and arguably Bruno's mouthpiece, would have it, a pedant is short for someone who is a "Pe, pecorone [big sheep/idiot],—Dan, da nulla [of nothing],—Te, testa d'asino [ass-head/hole]" (Ill.vii, 179). The pedant is thus associated, in Bruno's mind, with an unbearable kind of pedestrian thinker.
