ABSTRACT
Joannes Bruno’s real name was John Brown, probably from Moray, born in 1569. It is not known when Brown went to the Continent, but he joined the French province of the Minims at the convent of Nigeon, near Paris, in 1595. Brown would have been fairly free to do as he liked because Antwerp was in Flanders outside the territorial jurisdiction of the French Minim province to which he belonged: as soon as a Minim province in Flanders was officially established in 1617, he went across the Channel to England. This was the short-lived period of toleration for English Catholics under Charles I, and Brown attached himself to the chapel of Queen Henrietta Maria, administering the sacraments and saying Mass without proper faculties from the English Catholic bishop or from the French Minim provincial.
