Bruno, Giordano, originally Filippo Bruno, nicknamed Il Nolano 1548-1600
Italian hermetic thinker

Born in Nola, near Naples, he became a Dominican friar but was too unorthodox to stay in the order, and fled to Geneva (1578). He travelled widely, lecturing and teaching, in France, Germany, England and Italy. His pantheistic philosophy - whereby God animated the whole of creation as 'world-soul' - and his sympathy with Copernicus's theory of the universe brought him into conflict with the Inquisition. He was arrested in 1592 in Venice and after an eight-year trial was burned at the stake in Rome. His most famous works are De l'infinito universo et mondi (1584, 'On the Infinite Universe and Worlds') and Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (1584, 'The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast').

Bibliography: Giovanni Gentile, Giordano Bruno e il pensiero del rinascimento (1991)