ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews, to the extent possible from desperately scarce documentation, the events that led to the arrest of Giordano Bruno in Venice, and the significance of the accusations made against him in the first phase of the trial – the part conducted in Venice between 1592 and early 1592. The chapter sheds light on how from the start the Bruno trial was a trial characterized by many anomalies and exceptions: in the form of the arrest and detention, in the accusations presented, and in the extremely political subtext that it seems possible to read into them. This exceptionality is matched by the fact that the Roman Curia was readily interested in a case that, from the merely procedural point of view, should have appeared fairly marginal, but which evidently was immediately perceived as (or perhaps purposely recreated to become) an exceptional case.
