SYMHC Classics: Giordano Bruno

This 2022 episode covers Giordano Bruno, a mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, occultist, and according to the Catholic church of 16th-century Italy, a heretic. He met a bad end because of his views, but he started out as a friar. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  Happy Saturday. Since Giordano Bruno was part of this week's episode on Sarah Weiss and her journeys to Mars, we are bringing out our episode on him as today's Saturday classic.

• 3:10Holly Frey?

  This episode originally came out March 23rd, 2022. Enjoy.

• 3:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 3:28Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.

• 3:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 3:33Holly Frey?

  So today's subject was a mathematician, a philosopher, an astronomer, an occultist, and, according to the Catholic Church of 16th century Italy, a heretic. He was also really comfortable writing pretty scathing critiques of people he disagreed with. We are going to talk about Giordano Bruno today, who, spoiler alert, met a bad end because of his views. But there's actually been some debate over what exactly was the thing that caused him to be finally found officially to be a heretic. And we'll talk about that a bit at the very end. He's an interesting story because he has the trajectory of starting out in a religious

• 4:18Holly Frey?

  career and then becoming a heretic. So we're going to jump right into how Bruno went from being a friar to his heretical life.

• 4:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, so Bruno was born Filippo Bruno in 1548 in Nola, Italy. That's about 30 kilometers east of Naples. His father was a soldier, and at the age of 14, Bruno left Nola to travel to Naples for his studies. Among the many areas of education he had focusing on humanities and dialectics, Bruno was also exposed to the work of the Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd, more commonly known to European scholars as Averroes. Averroes had lived in the 12th century and sought to combine the work of Greek philosophers with the ideologies of Islamic traditions. He had written extensively on the works of Aristotle and Plato and was deeply influential

• 5:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  for the philosophers who came after him. Bruno also studied memory and recall and the way humans can teach themselves to remember things using mnemonic devices and other prompts.

• 5:26Holly Frey?

  Yeah, all of this is interesting because he was exposed to it so early on in his life, and these kinds of ideas of like combining science and religious ideology, his memory teaching to other people, all comes back throughout his life and becomes really important. So while he was studying in Naples, Bruno made an impression on his teachers for his astonishing memory. In 1569, he was sent to perform for the Pope, showing off his recall ability. And then, three years after moving to Naples for his education, Bruno joined the Dominican Order and moved into the convent of San Domenico Maggiore. It was at this point that he took the name Giordano.

• 6:07Holly Frey?

  He was ordained as a friar in 1572, after seven years with the Order. But he continued his studies in Naples, finishing his religious scholarship program in 1575.

• 6:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although Bruno had been ordained and had been encouraged to continue his studies, there had been, from the beginnings of his life with the Dominican Order, some concerns about his heretical leanings. And he did want to discuss heretical ideas. One that was of interest to him is what's known as the Arian Heresy, named for the 3rd century priest from Alexandria named Arius. This heretical doctrine put forth the idea that Christ was not divine, but was an instrument of the divine.

• 6:51Holly Frey?

  Yeah, we'll talk so much more about his thoughts and writings about Christ and why those upset people. Because Giordano Bruno openly discussed this idea and others as worthy of consideration, and of course, because questioning the Holy Trinity was very dangerous, he found himself charged with heresy for the first time by the Neapolitan leaders of the Order in early 1576. But rather than face a heresy trial, Bruno decided he would just leave the city, and he headed to Rome. That only lasted a couple of months because when additional heretical texts were found among the things he left behind in Naples, including works of Erasmus, which questioned

• 7:35Holly Frey?

  the powers of the papacy and the entire structure of the Catholic Church, which Bruno had notated himself in the margins so they knew he had read it, the search for the heretical fugitive intensified, and Rome was no longer safe, so Bruno was once again on the run. This time, he left behind all of his ties to the Catholic Church and his life as a friar.

• 7:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  For a couple of years, Bruno was on the move, traveling around northern Italy. He's said to have made his way by picking up odd jobs like teaching Latin or basic astronomy to students and interested adults. Then in 1578, he left Italy and went to Geneva, Switzerland. For a while, he survived there, taking copy editing and proofing work. But though he had been branded a heretic by the Catholic Church and had left his life in the Naples clergy, he still really sought a religious haven for himself. He briefly thought he might have found it in Calvinism.

• 8:35Holly Frey?

  So for context, John Calvin had been born just a little less than 40 years before Bruno, and he had died 14 years before the former Dominican found himself in Geneva. Bruno saw so much potential in the reformist ideas of Calvin's book, Institute of the Christian Religion, which had first been published in the mid-1530s and had been reissued already many times in the intervening decades. So Giordano Bruno converted to Calvinism while he was in Switzerland.

• 9:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  But he continued to have a questioning nature, and he got into trouble with the Calvinist Church just as he had the Catholic Church. He wanted to examine doctrine rather than follow it, and while he had believed that approach would be more welcomed in his new church, he was ultimately incorrect. The final straw was a pamphlet he published, which openly criticized a prominent Calvinist. Soon, he was arrested and excommunicated. He retracted the writing, which had caused the rift with the Church, to get out of any serious repercussions, but once again, he was a man with no religious affiliation.

• 9:42Holly Frey?

  After that strife with the Calvinist Church in Geneva was more or less resolved, Bruno moved on once again, and this time, he headed to France. While spending time first in Toulouse, he continued to be troubled by his rift with the Catholic Church. And to rectify the situation, he formally requested absolution. He wanted to make amends with the Church and offer penance in the hopes of being officially forgiven, but he was denied. Despite the fact, though, that he was still considered a heretic, which of course had considerable weight in the 1570s, Giordano Bruno was able to find work teaching philosophy in Toulouse, and that was something that he did for roughly two years.

• 10:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1581, Bruno moved on to Paris after escalating tensions between Huguenots and Catholics in Toulouse made that city too dangerous to stay in. This ultimately led to the 1562 riots of Toulouse, but Giordano Bruno was long gone by the time that happened. And those issues in Toulouse were reflective of a bigger issue in France. In the 1580s, France was smack dab in the middle of its wars of religion. At this point, it was actually sort of a perfect time for Bruno to move to Paris, though. The Huguenot massacre at Vassy and the massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day were well in the past. The Huguenots had been granted the freedom to worship.

• 11:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  Henry III, who was one of Catherine de Medici's sons and had been one of the conspirators in the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, was king of France when Bruno moved to Paris. And Henry III really liked Giordano Bruno, so much so that he made him a royal lecturer. Bruno had fallen in with the Politiques, that's the faction in the religious wars that was Catholic but moderate and wanted compromise in religious matters as a means for unity for France, rather than the emergence of any single religion as dominant and ruling. While in Paris, Bruno wrote and published a great deal. He had finally kind of found like where he might have belonged, at least for a moment.

• 11:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  He produced several works that were rooted in his study and fascination with memory, which elaborated far beyond the idea of recall and kind of focused on how a person could use their memory to develop a deeper understanding of reality. He wrote a comedy in 1582 called The Candlemaker. This play, if staged, would run at an estimated five hours. And the author in the original is listed as Bruno the Nolan, the academic of No Academy, nicknamed the exasperated. His exasperation was with society as a whole. He felt there was corruption all around and that people claiming morality were often lax in upholding it. It was essentially a protest play.

• 12:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  We should point out Bruno was kind of exasperated with a lot of people, a lot of the time. If he thought somebody was foolish or frivolous or pompous, he did not hesitate to write scathing critiques of them. No, he's a little bit of a firebrand in this regard. And I think he kind of liked the conflict, like it fueled him. That's my speculation. When we come back, we are going to talk a little bit more about political and religious strife in France, as well as Bruno's time in England. But first, we are going to pause for a quick sponsor break.

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  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesse have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends

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• 18:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1584, Henry III's brother, Francis, Duc d'Anjou, died. And this made Henry of Navarre air presumptive to the throne of France, and that catalyzed a new rise in the conflict among France's religious factions in what became known as the War of the Three Henrys. But Bruno was lucky enough to have left the country before that happened. In 1583, he had moved from Paris to London. And King Henry III had sent along with him a letter of recommendation, which Bruno took to Michel de Castelnaud, the French ambassador to Queen Elizabeth I's court. For a while, Bruno went to Oxford, where he lectured on astronomy. But Bruno's views did not go over well at Oxford,

• 19:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  so he quickly returned to court convinced that the alleged intellectuals of Oxford were beneath him. That cracks me up. Returning to Elizabeth's court connected him to another recent podcast subject, that was Mary Sidney Herbert, because Bruno became friends with her brother, Sir Philip Sidney. He apparently did not think Sir Philip Sidney was beneath him, just the so-called intellectuals of Oxford. Yeah, it was basically like, you know, if you don't believe me, clearly you are a ding dong.

• 20:10Holly Frey?

  Sidney, of course, had a wide circle of intellectual acquaintances and through them Bruno was invited to speak once again with scholars from Oxford. It once again did not go well. A fight actually broke out in which Bruno called one of the men that he had met with a pig.

• 20:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  Bruno started writing a comprehensive explanation of his thoughts on morality and cosmology in the wake of the skirmish at Oxford. This resulted in a six-volume set that's referred to as the Italian Dialogues. Three of the volumes, The Ash Wednesday Supper, Concerning the Cause, Principle and One, and On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, examined the universe and our understanding of it. And the other three, which were The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, Cabal of the Horse Pegasus, and The Heroic Frenzies, work through Bruno's views on morality, often in a way that's highly critical of society.

• 21:10Holly Frey?

  Yeah, he was a critical gent. In The Ash Wednesday Supper, Bruno is a character in the writing. He calls himself the Nolan, which we had mentioned him using before, that signified his birthplace of Nola. And another character, Teofil, serves as the purveyor of Bruno the writer's ideas, including the idea that there are innumerable worlds.

• 21:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  He subscribed to the idea that the universe was infinite and that there could be other solar systems like ours. He wrote of the belief that space could be finite, quote, "Suppose now that all space were created finite. If one were to run on to the end, to its furthest coasts, and throw a flying dart, would you have it that the dart hurled with might and main goeth on, whether it is sped flying afar, or think you that something can check and bar its way? For whether there be something to check it and bring about that it arriveth not, whether it was sped, and planteth not itself in the goal, or whether

• 22:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  it ferret forward, yet it set not forth from the end." He continued his argument with, quote, "We cannot deny infinity merely because we do not sensibly perceive it."

• 22:26Holly Frey?

  Yeah. So in case that definitely older style of writing was in any way confusing and bless Tracy for reading it, he's basically like, if you go to the edge of space and throw a dart, is it gonna doink back and hit you? Like, what do you think happens? Because we've never found that. So, all of this meant that Bruno also supported heliocentrism. Now, that idea was of course not new in the 16th century. As early as the 5th century BCE, there were philosophers in Greece that were suggesting that the Earth might be revolving around a central fire. But that concept and theories that built on it had not become

• 23:09Holly Frey?

  accepted, in part because it was just so difficult to reconcile the idea of the planet being in motion while we are also able to see what appear to be fixed objects in the night sky, like star clusters that were observed night after night.

• 23:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  By the time Bruno was writing about heliocentrism, it had come once again to the forefront of cosmological discussion. In the mid 15th century, the German religious scholar Nicholas of Cusa had worked on an idea that Earth was influential in the movement of the universe, but that it was not the center around which other things revolved. Copernicus had published six books concerning the revolutions of the heavenly orbs just a few years before Bruno's birth. It's really when heliocentrism started gaining a foothold in cosmological circles. So, though Bruno's writing was just supporting what other intellectuals

• 24:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  at the time were already espousing, he was definitely doing so when the idea was far from a settled matter. It was still really controversial. To put it in context on the historical timeline, Galileo was put on trial by the Inquisition over his support of the Copernical heliocentric theory almost 50 years after Bruno wrote in support of it.

• 24:28Holly Frey?

  But Bruno's writing integrates this idea of an infinite universe with the idea of a God that held dominion over infinity. This was absolutely not a rejection of Christian beliefs for him. Bruno wrote in On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, quote, "So great is God's excellence that it is manifested in the greatness of his empire. It is not glorified in one, but in innumerable suns. Not in one earth, one world, but in ten hundred thousand, I say, in infinite."

• 25:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  A very controversial view that Bruno held and included in the Italian Dialogues is his case that the Bible is great as a guide for a moral life, but it's not a text that should be used as the basis of astronomical information. He made lots of assertions about there being other worlds in the cosmos, which would probably support life, none of which had ever been mentioned in biblical writing. He got a lot of things wrong in his guesses about how things might work, but he was able to grasp the idea that the Earth might not be all that singular in the vastness of space. For these ideas and others, Bruno knew the

• 25:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Italian Dialogues would not be welcomed in Italy, so he published them outside of his home country.

• 25:49Holly Frey?

  Yeah, there's some cute additional on that where he kind of still wanted to make it seem like they were published in Italy that we could talk about in the behind the scenes. In the fall of 1585, Bruno decided to return to France. But in that short time he had been away, that conflict among the Henrys had started, and he did not find himself in a group of moderates as he had before. His moderate friends had gotten a little more hardline in their beliefs. Henry III had taken a stronger stance against all non-Catholics. It would have been smart on Bruno's part to kind of keep his head down and maybe dial back his constant critiques of just about everyone in an environment like this, but

• 26:32Holly Frey?

  instead, he got in a very public argument with Fabrizio Mordente, an Italian mathematician who was also Catholic and well-connected to Catholic political leaders in France at the time. Bruno also made a focused attack on the work of Aristotle in 1586 with the writing of 120 Articles on Nature and the World Against the Peripetetics. Because of his ongoing strife with so many Catholics and his increasingly unpopular views, the politiques distanced themselves from Bruno.

• 27:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  He next moved on to Germany. He taught and wrote as he traveled the country and produced the work 160 Articles in 1588. In this, he asserted that all religions could coexist peacefully if they would stop attacking one another and foster communication. In early 1589, Bruno was banished from yet another religious sect, this time the Lutherans, who he tried to join up with briefly. So, if you're keeping score, he had now been excommunicated by the Catholics, the Calvinists, and the Lutherans.

• 27:40Holly Frey?

  And after his fallout with the Lutheran Church, Bruno worked on a book about the connection between mathematics and magic, although that was not published in his lifetime. He also continued to reiterate his ideas from the Italian Dialogues in new writings, specifically three poems that he wrote in Latin, On the Threefold Minimum and Measure, On the Monad, Number and Figure, and On the Immeasurable and Innumerable. Bruno also included some new ideas in these poems alongside the concepts that he was echoing from his previous work. And one of these new ideas was the concept of matter being made up of tiny, tiny particles. This was essentially an early exploration of the idea of atoms.

• 28:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  Although he was doing all this writing, he couldn't publish any of it because of all of his fallouts with basically everyone. He knew he couldn't publish in Italy, so in 1590, he asked to be granted residency in Frankfurt where he hoped to publish his work, but that request was denied. He tried, it seems, to get around that denial by moving into a Carmelite convent in Frankfurt. The head of the convent didn't really seem to love that arrangement because he felt that Bruno wasn't actually religious at all and had become vain and obsessed with, quote, "novelties" in his work.

• 28:58Holly Frey?

  In 1591, Bruno traveled once again to Italy, not to Rome or Naples, where he still would have certainly been an outcast, but he was just traveling across northern Italy en route to the Republic of Venice, which was not part of Italy at this time. This was a move that was catalyzed by being asked to come to Venice by a nobleman of the city. And this might sound like a pretty rash move to head back through a country where he had been a wanted man for a long time at this point for his heretical ideas, but the circumstances were such that it probably didn't seem all that dangerous for Bruno.

• 29:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  Gregory XIII had been Pope when Bruno had become a fugitive in the 1570s. He had died in 1585 and was replaced by Sixtus V, but Sixtus V had died in 1590. And after that, there were three Popes in rapid succession. Urban VII was Pope for only 12 days. And then Gregory XIV had become Pope in December of 1590. And while Bruno couldn't have known it when he made his way to Venice in late summer of 1591, Gregory XIV also would not be Pope that much longer. He died in October. He would be replaced by Innocent IX, who was Pope for only 12 months.

• 30:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  We're mentioning all of this because it probably would have seemed like any of the concerns about Bruno's heresy would have been lost in the shuffle of just so many rapid shifts in leadership. Additionally, he was going to what was a fairly liberal state.

• 30:37Holly Frey?

  Yeah, Venice at this point was all about exploration and new ideas. And so he thought like, it'll be cool. I'll just run across northern Italy. It'll be fine. And Bruno also had his eyes on a job in this move. The University of Padua needed a head of their mathematics department. And if he could secure it, the position would grant him some stability and it would make it possible for him to publish. So if you are familiar with this time in European history and/or with the work of Galileo, you might already know that Bruno did not get the job because Galileo did. Bruno had really campaigned for it, though. He had even given a private lecture series on geometry and other mathematical subjects in Padua to prove his abilities.

• 31:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  After the position went to Galileo, Bruno returned to the city of Venice and to the nobleman who had invited him in the first place, which was Giovanni Mozzinigo. This is not the Giovanni Mozzinigo who was the Doja of Venice in the 15th century. This was a later member of the same family. Mozzinigo had been the one to tell Bruno about the position in Padua and had hoped that Bruno would instruct him in the art of memory. But these two had a falling out.

• 31:49Holly Frey?

  And there are a couple of different takes on what exactly caused this rift, depending on what source you're reading. One version is that the Venetian, Mozzinigo, was not satisfied with the lessons that he had received from Bruno. And he was also irritated that Bruno was talking about his intention to move back to Frankfurt again, something that Mozzinigo apparently took as an insult. Another version is that in teaching Mozzinigo about mnemonics and philosophy, Bruno had maybe overshared his ideas and it troubled the Venetian a great deal because those ideas were so at odds with mores of society and especially the church.

• 32:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  Regardless of the specific cause of the friction between the two of them, Mozzinigo turned his house guest into the Venetian Inquisition in May of 1592 via a letter. He included a list of 21 alleged instances in which Bruno had committed heresy, including accusations that Bruno had said that the Virgin Mary could not have been a mother and that miracles ascribed to Christ were not miracles at all, but magic tricks used to dupe the foolish. I can see how this would have been upsetting.

• 33:04Holly Frey?

  Yes. We're going to talk about Bruno's trials for heresy. That was plural, after we hear from some of the sponsors that keep Stuff You Missed in History Class going.

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  Oh yeah, that includes what is not limited to ad-free viewing of YouTube. Imagine no more ads popping up in the middle of videos or at the end of videos, uninterrupted videos.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  And now think about this. Let's say you're using YouTube on the go. You're exercising, you're washing dishes. You can have YouTube playing in the background with Premium, which means you can keep listening while your screen is locked.

• 34:10Speaker 05

  Also, you can download videos offline, so you don't even need Wi-Fi connection to watch your stuff.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  I love this on plane flights.

• 34:18Speaker 05

  Ben, how have you been using YouTube Premium?

• 34:21Speaker 04

  Oh man. Well, Matt, you know, I like to take a night walk and YouTube Premium is perfect for this because of the background play. So I can pull up a documentary about the neighborhood I'm walking around in, put the phone in my pocket and still hear everything perfectly.

• 34:37Speaker 05

  Amazing.

• 34:38Speaker 04

  So don't delay. Sign up now for your free trial. Terms and conditions apply.

• 34:42Holly Frey?

  We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers and real people trying these trends.

• 35:25Holly Frey?

  Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 35:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter and decades of perspective from four friends

• 36:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 36:45Speaker 06

  Okay, chicken nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped. And they are the crispiest, the juiciest and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.

• 37:27Speaker 06

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• 37:40Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 38:24Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 38:57Holly Frey?

  So after Mochenego turned him in, Bruno was formally accused of heresy again and was arrested. And the trial that followed in Venice actually went pretty well for him initially. He explained that he was always working from a philosophical viewpoint rather than a religious one. And he did walk back some of the statements he had made about religion, clarifying that he had said some things in error when he really meant to talk about theoretical ideas and just examine them in relation to religion. And the Venetian Inquisition, it sounds like it was kind of initially receptive to this defense.

• 39:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  But even though there had been those several changes in popes, once word reached the Vatican that Bruno was being tried in Venice, it was demanded that he be extradited to Rome to stand trial there for heresy. His charges were even more serious than heresy, though, because he was also accused of converting other Catholics into heretics as well. In total, he was charged with more than four dozen different heresies by the Roman Inquisition, including speaking ill of Catholicism, having contempt for holy relics, practicing divination, apostasy, believing that souls could transmigrate, asserting that there could be other worlds

• 40:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  like Earth in the cosmos, and even eating meat on days that it was prohibited.

• 40:20Holly Frey?

  So many accusations of varying degrees of intensity. He arrived in Rome on January 27th, 1593, and he spent the rest of his life there. His trial spooled out over the next seven years. And while he went with the same philosophy and theory approach to his defense against the heresy charges, that explanation was not as welcomed in Rome as it may have been in Venice. What the Inquisitors of Rome wanted was a full retraction of everything he had said about religion. Full stop.

• 40:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  Bruno, though, thought he could maybe convince his accusers that really the things he had said were not in conflict with the teachings of the Catholic Church. He believed that in presenting himself as a philosopher, he would have to be granted leeway to conjecture about just about anything. But that was not appreciated. Attempting to separate philosophy from theology for discussion was actually considered heretical in its own right, according to some writings, because it could lead anyone down the path to heresy. And while Venice had not been quite so finicky on that point, Rome really dug in. This was also in part because he could call himself a philosopher all he wanted, but the Inquisition viewed

• 41:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  him as a friar who had strayed.

• 41:40Holly Frey?

  A retraction, as we said, was what the Church was after. But Bruno was adamant that he didn't have anything to retract. He said he didn't even understand what they wanted, because in his opinion, he had done nothing wrong. But the latest Pope, Clement VIII, did not concur. Bruno was found guilty of heresy on February 4th, 1599, in a proclamation which read, quote, "Our Most Holy Lord decrees and ordains that it be intimated to the apostate brother Giordano Bruno of Nola by the theologian fathers, namely Father Bellarmine and the Father Commissary, that these propositions are heretical, and not only heretical as now declared, but by the most ancient fathers of the Church and the Apostolic See."

• 42:25Holly Frey?

  There was apparently a list of eight heretical points for which he was absolutely found guilty. But that list has been lost, so we don't know what of the many dozens of accusations were really the ones. But he was given several weeks to recant, like they kind of gave him an out. But he didn't. The Inquisitors extended that opportunity to recant several times, but Bruno consistently denied that his work was in any way heretical.

• 42:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  Bruno received his death sentence on February 8th, 1600. The Inquisitors also condemned all of his writings, and his books were added to the Index of Forbidden Books. While it's often reported that his last words before execution were, quote, "Perhaps you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it," that was actually his reaction to the sentencing. Nine days later, on February 17th, 1600, Bruno was taken to the public square known as Camp de Fiori in Rome, gagged and burned alive.

• 43:28Holly Frey?

  Okay, we have talked about Bruno's philosophy and religious views in regard to his being judged a heretic. And you will also see accounts of his life that say he was actually executed for believing that there were other solar systems, and that ours was not really the center of the universe. Sometimes this is also as like, the sun is a star, or the sun is one of many stars. And the disparity of whether this was a cosmological issue or a philosophical one has been a matter of debate among historians and scholars for quite a while. In the second half of the 20th century, most scholars had landed at the conclusion that, yes, issues of cosmology were part of the heresy of Giordano Bruno,

• 44:10Holly Frey?

  but that really the biggest problem in his work was his assertion that Christ was not divine. You can see where the Church sure would dislike that. But in recent years, there has been a deeper look at Bruno's trial that adds a little more nuance and brings the cosmology back into focus.

• 44:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  In an article published in Annals of Science in 2016, historian Alberto A. Martinez made the case that a many worlds cosmology had been well-established as heretical, going back through the centuries leading up to Bruno's trial. For example, he notes that Balaster, who was the bishop of Brescia, Italy in the 4th century, made this very clear, writing, quote, "Another heresy is to say that worlds are infinite and innumerable, following the asinine opinion of the philosophers, whereas scriptures say that the world is one, and it teaches us that it is one." Martinez also points out that closer to the time of Bruno's trial, in the mid 16th

• 45:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  century, there was a move to define heresy, but also debate about it. Long lists of heretical offenses that were punishable by death were published, and the idea of innumerable worlds was one of them.

• 45:26Holly Frey?

  And in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII, for whom the Gregorian calendar is named, and who was Pope when Bruno was first accused of heresy, had an updated edition of Corpus of Canon Law published. And appearing in that updated edition was the following heresy, quote, "having the opinion of innumerable worlds."

• 45:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  From the beginning of Bruno's heresy trial in Venice, his belief in the idea of infinite worlds was part of his accusations. That had been on the list that Mochenego had sent the Inquisition. And unlike some of the other accusations, Bruno never denied this one. In fact, he asserted its verity repeatedly, telling Inquisitors, quote, "I affirm an infinite universe, which is the consequence of the infinite divine power, because I regard it as unworthy of the divine goodness and power, that being able to produce in addition to our world another and infinitely many others, to produce one finite world.

• 46:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yes, I have asserted infinite particular worlds similar to the Earth, which with Pythagoras I consider a star similar to which is the moon, other planets and other stars which are infinite, and that all these bodies are worlds and numberless, which thus constitute the infinite universality in an infinite space. And this is called the infinite universe, in which are innumerable worlds, thus the fortune that is double from the infinitude and greatness of the universe and the multitude of worlds, but without indirectly meaning to reject the truth according to the faith."

• 47:07Holly Frey?

  Some of that is so poetic, and I know that's a translation, but I love it. According to Martinez's research, at least five witnesses who testified against Bruno in Venice mentioned specifically his cosmological beliefs in multiple worlds as part of his heresy. Four of the five repeated this testimony at the trial in Rome. And when tallied up, it is the accusation of this belief in many worlds that appears most frequently in Bruno's trial summary. And the summary also reflects that he was specifically ordered to abandon his, quote, "delusions regarding many worlds." Additionally, a witness to his execution recounted that one of the heresies read aloud

• 47:50Holly Frey?

  before Bruno was killed was his belief that, quote, "worlds are innumerable." So it does seem that the idea of this sort of plurality of worlds was a significant part of the accusations that led to Bruno's fate and execution.

• 48:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  In his time, Bruno became infamous, denounced by philosopher Marin Marsan 24 years after his death as, quote, "one of the most evil men that the earth has ever borne." But Bruno's expansive view of the cosmos and religion, and his efforts to create a philosophy that combined the two also fascinated scholars and later philosophers and scientists built on various ideas that he had put forward.

• 48:33Holly Frey?

  Yeah, I mean, we talked about many things that are, that were pretty ahead of their time when he was saying them, but unfortunately, very angering to the Church. The Inquisition did not appreciate. He's another figure that I love, despite the fact that I think I wouldn't enjoy hanging out with him at all.

• 48:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 49:20Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 49:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T: Connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details. Snoring, gasping for air during sleep, daytime sleepiness? I'm Shaquille O'Neal, and this shouldn't be anybody's experience.

• 50:31Speaker 04

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• 51:15Speaker 04

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• 51:52Speaker 00

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• 53:01Speaker 00

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