ABSTRACT
Giordano Bruno was born in Nola, near Naples, in 1548, and died in Rome in 1600, burnt at the stake as a heretic. That means he was born only five years after the first publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus in 1543, and only thirtyodd years after Martin Luther's excommunication from the Catholic church had divided Europe and its culture into two militantly hostile factions. During the second half of the sixteenth century, in a lifetime of wandering through the cultural capitals of an often blood-stained Europe, Bruno was able to witness first hand, as few of his contemporaries could do, the crisis that Copernicus, Luther and their numerous progeny were bringing about, in their different ways, in the previously compact culture of renaissance humanism initiated by Petrarch. For the universal values deriving from the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome had from the beginning of the humanist movement been grafted onto the universal Christian values claimed by the papacy (although with increasing difficulty). The result had been an extraordinary and unique moment of cultural progress and rich, sometimes tense, but ultimately harmonic diversity. Now that line of development had been shattered in many of its core assumptions. In the seventeenth century the universal values of European humanism would be re-forged under the sign of the dominion of reason, and the scientific mechanicism to which it gave rise. Eventually, however, the romantic movement operated what William Blake saw as a liberation from the ‘mind-forged manacles’ of an oppressive obsession with rules. The rest is the story of a modern culture based on the idea of diversity, in which the humanities (as renaissance Europe conceived of them) struggled to survive. 2
