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This chapter traces how Warburg came to view Giordano Bruno's cosmography, imagery, and biography as confirming the central motifs of the Mnemosyne project. It details Warburg's and Gertrud Bing's attempts during their late September 1928 to June 1929 sojourn in Italy to explicate Bruno, and then it considers Cassirer's insistence that the interdisciplinary Warburg was the thinker best suited for this task. Such praise, this chapter contends, acquires still greater weight if we ponder Warburg's appropriation of Bruno's cardinal notion of synderesis, which signals both an ironic conscience and the faculty of intuition needed to join disparate things in a single vision.

This chapter traces the more secular spirit of Giordano Bruno's Petrarchism. It suggests that Bruno's originality can be seen in the fact that he brings his Italian experience of the Petrarchan and anti-Petrarchan debate to Britain and that he confronted the principal English Petrarchan poet of his time, Sir Philip Sidney. It discusses Bruno's dedication of the Gli eroici furori to Sidney and his belief that the Petrarchan sonnet is a suitable vehicle for philosophical enquiry in the post-Copernican, infinite universe.

This chapter addresses the question of liberty in sixteenth-century religious debates. It first takes a look at the discussion between the Augustinian friar Martin Luther and Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam concerning the freedom of the will. The chapter then turns to the theological thinking of John Calvin and the reintroduction into the Protestant world of the notion of heresy. Hereafter the chapter details the circumstances surrounding the dramatic rupture between the friar Giordano Bruno and the Dominican order, including the philosophical doctrines which eventually landed him in the Inquisition. Finally, this chapter follows up on Bruno's insights through the commentary of theologians Richard Hooker and Jacob Harmensz, who is more widely known as Jacobus Arminius.

Focusing on Galileo's Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632) and Giordano Bruno's La Cena de le Cenari (1584), this chapter explores the role of performative allegory in the written text and assesses the impact of allegory within philosophical discourse on what it calls the baroque ontology of the page. It shows that the drawing (or misdrawing) of Nicolaus Copernicus's cosmological diagram in De revolutionibus (1543) within the dialogues of Galileo's and Bruno's texts is itself a staging that takes place on the surfaces of the pages themselves, “a materialization of natural contemplation.” It also argues that Galileo's text advocates a “script” of “naturalized allegory” in which the book of the universe is written, while Bruno considers philosophical contemplation to be the only means to control the extreme tendencies of allegorical language. In the allegorical nature of nature, readers are required to read allegorically. Both Bruno and Galileo view the philosophical-scientific text as a performance of allegory requiring the participation of the authors, the characters, and the readers.

This chapter begins by discussing how St. Thomas Aquinas aligns God with Aristotle’s prime mover wherein the existence of God puts a stop to worldly endlessness. The doctrine of plurality jeopardizes Aquinas’ theological infrastructure, since there is no starting point for God to occupy if worlds have existed from eternity. The chapter also examines Cusa’s one universe and its structure—its plural worlds that do not only interact with but also compose one another. Cusa’s cosmology seems like a Christianized Atomism, consisting of a staggering plurality of worlds, plus God, but minus the unqualified “infinity.” In addition, Giordano Bruno’s neo-Cusan multiverse claims that the universe is neither monistic, dualistic, nor pluralistic; rather it is irreducibly “multimodal” as a result of its infinite multiplicity, with the whole reflected in each of its parts.

In the 1580s, second-generation interpreters of De Revolutionibus, mostly Nullists, rapidly produced a spate of new readings. These readings opened up issues that Nicolaus Copernicus himself had tersely bounded off (such as the universe's infinitude), merely used as a piece of his main argument (the Capellan arrangement of Venus and Mercury), altogether neglected to develop (heliocentric and geocentric transformations), or treated ambiguously (the ontology of the spheres). Planetary order, left out of consideration by the Wittenbergers, now moved from liminal to central consideration, making it at times a matter of aggressive advocacy and defense of priority. By 1588, a via media had become the site of a highly contentious priority struggle within which Tycho Brahe's geoheliocentric scheme emerged as the most visible and, ultimately, the most influential alternative. Brahe's encounter with Paul Wittich nicely frames the problematic of the via media. More likely, Christopher Rothmann followed a path somewhat like that of Wittich and the early Tycho. Giordano Bruno, an immediate contemporary of Wittich, Rothmann, and Brahe, was a second-generation advocate of Copernicus's theory.

The relationship between Johannes Kepler and Galileo has a pronounced historiographical profile, in part because both were followers of Nicolaus Copernicus. The failures of that relationship would have heavy consequences for seventeenth-century heavenly science and natural philosophy. By the following decade, Kepler and Galileo were already engaging one another within the discursive space created by the second-generation Copernicans and the practitioners of the contested via media. This chapter examines how those differences evolved in the decade prior to the telescopic discoveries and the elliptical astronomy. It discusses Galileo and the science of the stars in the Pisan period, Galileo and the Wittenberg and Uraniborg-Kassel networks, Galileo's exchange with Jacopo Mazzoni, Gian Vincenzo Pinelli's circle and Edmund Bruce's letters to Kepler, Giordano Bruno's execution, William Gilbert's project for a magnetical philosophy, Galileo's first run-in with the Inquisition, and Kepler's continuing search for astrology's foundations.

The paper deals with the reception of the Platonic theory of love during the Italian Renaissance. Plato's theory offers a specific conception of love, in which personal love is understood only as a part of a broader concept of love, which has specific relevance to the philosopher. In particular, this love figures as a means to acquire self-improvement and self-perfection. After outlining the Platonic theory of love to show how the erotic attraction to another person based on the perception of the beautiful is linked to the philosopher's desire for wisdom, the paper explores the reception of this theory by three well-known Renaissance philosophers, i.e. Marsilio Ficino, Leone Ebreo, and Giordano Bruno, and their appropriation of it to different ends.

Considers the relationship between writing and the arts in Joyce's works, where it is possible to conceive figurative arts and music not only as major themes in the narrative, but also and more poignantly as crucial influences for the style and for the form of the texts. The non-literary artistic disciplines become prominent and significant devices for a writing which markedly employs phonosymbolism and which possesses plastic qualities deriving from the “spatial arts.” Joyce's experimentation increasingly focuses on such an “intermedial” discourse, revealing a constant concoction of various artistic disciplines and methods as well as the intersection between the artistic discourse and the scientific one. Such a stylistic peculiarity points to the influence of Giordano Bruno, who also advocated a tangled combination of arts and sciences and whose work was overtly praised by Joyce beginning with his essay “The Philosophy of Bruno” (1903). Bruno's work later became a philosophical source for the structure and language of Finnegans Wake. Besides Bruno's famous theory of the coincidence of contraries, which is applicable to Joyce's poetics as well, a similar “intermedial” and interdisciplinary discourse can be found in Bruno's aesthetics and philosophy.

This chapter explores how James Joyce interrogates the traditional procedures through which geometric symbols of "perfection and the divine”—including the concept of the infinitely straight line—are first acquired. By referring to Joyce’s early readings of Euclid’s Elements and other geometric texts including the works of Giordano Bruno, it examines how geometry is presented as a traditional system of ideal objectivities in II.2. More specifically, it demonstrates how the schoolchildren’s senseless application of the Wakean classbook’s instructions, and their attempted measurements of the visible world, reflects Bruno’s and Edmund Husserl’s congruent concerns regarding the practice of geometry as a “tradition emptied of sense.” This chapter also sheds light on Joyce’s application of non-Euclidean concepts by referring to his manuscript drafts for II.2, illustrating how non-Euclidean concepts stemming from the works of Bruno and Henri Poincaré are developed within the context of ALP’s curved bodily and terrestrial forms. More generally, this chapter illustrates how Joyce disrupts the univocity of Euclidean symbols by referring to non-Euclidean alternatives, questioning the absolute rectitude (i.e., correctness) of Euclidean geometry. In doing so, it argues, Joyce responds to a history of uncertainty regarding Euclid’s parallel postulate which began over two thousand years ago.

This chapter explores how James Joyce evokes an overarching concern with the linear in his works, both formally (in terms of the Euclidean ideal of rectilinearity) and conceptually (in terms of linear narratives, histories, arguments, modes of thought, etc.). In particular, it considers how the non-linearity of Joyce’s works reflects a wider questioning of the straight line in modernist literature which followed the development of non-Euclidean geometries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chapter also provides an overview of the geometric babble which entered into the context of Joyce’s writing following the popularization of non-Euclidean geometry in modernist art and literature, as well as the “fashionable nonsense” associated with the application of geometric concepts in contemporary literary criticism. By referring to the source texts which informed Joyce’s articulation of multiple geometric registers, it traces his engagement with non-Euclidean geometry to his early readings of Giordano Bruno’s mathematical and philosophical works, illustrating how notions associated with the curvature of the straight line inform the structural composition of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

Focusing on how we perceive images and their relationship to cognition, perception, and representation, this chapter examines the relationship of Joyce’s long fascination with the history of inscription and alphabet, letters and sigla, primitive art, Giordano Bruno, The Book of Kells, and the image-making powers of the mind.

Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, and Johann Amos Comenius step from central Europe's Reformed world into the pages of English intellectual history as if from out of a void. The places where they studied — Elbing, Brieg, Herborn — are towns which few Anglo-Saxon scholars could even locate unassisted on the map of central Europe. Historians have considered Johann Heinrich Alsted as the culmination of Herborn's accomplishments. German scholars often portray Alsted as a pillar of Calvinist orthodoxy, a pioneer of Reformed scholasticism, a participant at the Synod of Dort. In English scholarship, his primary association is with millenarianism. In Spain, he is a disciple of the medieval Catalan mystic, Ramon Lull. To students of his encyclopedism, Alsted is characterized especially by his tendency to combine Aristotelianism, Ramism, Lullism, and the arts of memory in a pursuit of universal knowledge similar to that of yet another of his favorite authors, Giordano Bruno. Thus, every main phase and aspect of Alsted's intellectual career can be illuminated by examining it in the context of the movement for further reformation.

This chapter offers a close reading of Warburg's 1926 lecture on Rembrandt, in which he crystallizes his thinking about the Baroque and “superlatives” in art and lays the groundwork for the final sequence of panels in the Atlas. This lecture also directly informs panels 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, and 75 of Mnemosyne and helps him forge a novel, diagrammatic form of thought that lead to his fateful encounter with Giordano Bruno. In the panels in the Atlas the notion of “metaphorical distance” is at once realized and ironized, as Warburg contemplates the ambivalent symbolism associated with Mussolini, the Eucharist, and new technology.

This chapter explores the Platonism in Pater’s Gaston de Latour, which began publication in monthly instalments in 1888. Like Marius, Gaston is set in a time of religious turmoil—the religious wars of sixteenth-century France—and follows a single character in search of spiritual transcendence. Along the way Gaston has critical encounters with historical authors, such as Michel de Montaigne and Giordano Bruno, who enrich his understanding of Platonism. The love that seeks wholeness in Plato’s Symposium is proposed as a model for Pater’s critical engendering with historical authors. Beyond Platonic love narratives, Pater incorporates the Odyssean homecoming, employed by Neoplatonists, and the Christian narrative of desire in Song of Solomon. Gaston’s later chapters seem to engage with Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ concerning what Pater means by the phrase ‘lover and philosopher at once’, inspired by Plato’s Phaedrus.

Chapter 4 analyses the erotics of bounded place and of limitless space in Antony and Cleopatra. The chapter begins by exploring Edward Casey’s philosophical history of place and space in order to consider the erotic implications of these two scenes for characters as well as for audiences. Images of bounded place in Antony and Cleopatra get their erotic charge from the language of sexual bondage, more specifically, the formal and temporal features of masochism. Chapter 4 then explores accounts of infinite space from early modern cosmologists such as Francesco Patrizi and Giordano Bruno, who theorized about the void. This chapter argues that Antony and Cleopatra eroticize the infinite void by imposing the sturdy boundaries of place onto vacant space. Binding the void allows the lovers to present this vacancy to one another, enabling pleasurable experiences of self-loss and self-forgetting.

This chapter explores the activities of seventeenth-century cosmologies, starting with Giordano Bruno’s heretical cosmology and subsequent execution. The fascination with the possibility of other worlds was further incited by Galileo’s telescopic discoveries in 1610, and he was credited with lighting the fire of seventeenth-century “pluralism.” The cosmological writings of the seventeenth century presented a combination of anthropological interest, scientific restraint, and theological innovation—a combination most evident in Johannes Kepler’s research. The latter half of the century witnessed the emergence of Rene Descartes’ “vortex” theory. The chapter looks at how it spurred an increasing number of “pluralist” discourses, such as the works of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle and Christiaan Huygens. The chapter also looks at Immanuel Kant’s cosmology, citing the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens as his attempt to theorize the constitution and mechanical origin of the universe.