The Ash Wednesday Supper

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Giordano Bruno's The Ash Wednesday Supper presents a revolutionary cosmology founded on the new Copernican astronomy that Bruno extends to infinite dimensions, filling it with an endless number of planetary systems.

"Winner of the Hopwood Award for Fiction, this novel is set in the Elizabethan world of the extraordinary Giordano Bruno, a philosopher, a magician, a professor, a spy, an initiate in a pan-European secret society. In this vivid novel the reader encounters kings and queens, court alchemists, great playwrights, scoundrels, and come to know the greatest minds of the Western European Renaissance, engages with the esoteric spiritual practices of the art of memory, visualization, and mysticism, and allows the reader to enter into the secret societies that sought to bring about a new culture and a new society"--

Giordano Bruno was an itinerant Italian friar who was burned at the stake in 1600 for heresies, which included his rejection of the Ptolemaic cosmology. Of his important writings, 'La Cena de le ceneri' was one of the first works in which Copernican theory had impact outside the sphere of the natural sciences. Arguing for the physical reality of the infinite universe with no centre, Bruno sought to prove that each man is every man, that conflict would be resolved if all men accepted the unifying potential of his hermetic religion. Using this radical cosmology, Bruno sought to heal the secular and religious wounds of sixteenth-century Europe.

Some of the world's most eminent researchers on Bruno offer an exhaustive overview of the state-of-theart research on his work, discussing Bruno's methodological procedures, his epistemic and literary practices, his natural philosophy, or his role as theologian and metaphysic at the cutting-edge of their disciplines. Short texts by Bruno illustrate the reasoning of the contributions. The book also reflects aspects of Bruno's reception in the past and today, inside and outside academia.

The Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno was a notable supporter of the new science that arose during his lifetime; his role in its development has been debated ever since the early seventeenth century. Hilary Gatti here reevaluates Bruno's contribution to the scientific revolution, in the process challenging the view that now dominates Bruno criticism among English-language scholars. This argument, associated with the work of Frances Yates, holds that early modern science was impregnated with and shaped by Hermetic and occult traditions, and has led scholars to view Bruno primarily as a magus. Gatti reinstates Bruno as a scientific thinker and occasional investigator of considerable significance and power whose work participates in the excitement aroused by the new science and its methods at the end of the sixteenth century. Her original research emphasizes the importance of Bruno's links to the magnetic philosophers, from Ficino to Gilbert; Bruno's reading and extension of Copernicus's work on the motions of the earth; the importance of Bruno's mathematics; and his work on the art of memory seen as a picture logic, which she examines in the light of the crises of visualization in present-day science. She concludes by emphasizing Bruno's ethics of scientific discovery.

The contributions to Making of Copernicus examine exemplarily how some of the Copernicus myths came about and if they could hold their ground or have vanished again. Are there links between a factual or postulated transformation of world images and the application of certain scientific metaphors, especially the metaphor of a revolution? Were there interactions and amalgamations of the literary and scientific enthronement, or outlawry of Copernicus and if so, how did they take place? On the other hand, are there repercussions of the scientific-historical reconstructions and hagiographies on the literary image of Copernicus as sketched by novelists even in the 20th century? The history of the reception of Copernicus shall not be dominantly dealt with from the point of view of a factual affirmation and rejection of the astronomer and his doctrine but rather as accomplishments of transformation respectively. Thus, the essays in this volume investigate transformations: methodological, institutional, textual, and visual transformations of the Copernican doctrine and the topical, rhetorical and literary transformations of the historical person of Copernicus respectively.