The Heretic: Giordano Bruno
August 28th, 2008Did the Catholic Church burn alive anyone more interesting than Giordano Bruno?
Via: Salon:
Bruno’s achievements in the “art of memory” were legendary. (The Dominicans had once sent him to Rome where he recited a psalm in Hebrew before the pope, then repeated it backward word for word.) It’s this aspect of the philosopher’s work that most interests scholars of the Renaissance today…
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Still, the mental powers of Bruno and his fellow memory artists seem almost superhuman today. The basic principle, Rowland explains, is simple enough, “to link words with images.” Nevertheless, the structures employed were mind-boggling: vast, elaborate patterns and nested wheels within wheels (like the color wheels used by visual designers) that could be used to juxtapose and rearrange huge quantities of information without recourse to any extra-mental form of storage (like writing). This ability makes the minds of Renaissance intellectuals radically different from our own, almost incomprehensibly so. Some of the more outlandish things that some of them believed — such as the conviction that the universe is a series of rotating crystalline spheres with planets embedded in them, or that the space in outer space is a liquid — seem merely eccentric by comparison.
More: Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic by Ingrid D. Rowland
Research Credit: Technoccult
