The Long Road to Infinity

Giordano Bruno
By Ingrid D. Rowland
(Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 335 pages, $27)

Was he a megalomanic, a crackpot, a genius or a martyr to science? Over the years, Giordano Bruno has been characterized in all sorts of ways. The short, scrappy Neopolitan was certainly a maverick thinker who challenged the pieties of his day. For his pains, he was incinerated at the stake in Rome, naked and gagged, a kind of a sacrifice to the papal jubilee of 1600.

In "Giordano Bruno," the classicist Ingrid Rowland offers a series of brilliant vignettes tracing this peripatetic figure from his birthplace outside Naples, to the Dominican convent in Naples itself where he studied for the priesthood (he was ordained in his mid-20s), to Geneva, Toulouse, Paris, Oxford, London, Wittenberg, Prague, Frankfurt, Zurich and – finally and dangerously – Venice and Rome.

Early in his studies, Bruno was arraigned before the Inquisition for, among other things, reading forbidden books. Over time, he flirted with Calvinism and later with Lutheranism when he was residing among German scholars. He was excommunicated from both churches. (It is important to note that Bruno was born in 1548, only three decades after Luther nailed his 95 theses on the Wittenberg church door.) He gave lectures on logic and metaphysics and taught at various universities. He wrote many small books on a variety of subjects, often in a poetical style. Eventually, Bruno sought reconciliation within the Catholic fold, only to end his life with eight years of imprisonment and execution for heresy.