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Not Just the Tudors
Giordano Bruno: Mystic, Heretic, Spy
00:40:08
Bestselling novelist S.J.Parris talks about the religious radical who took on the church and paid the ultimate price.
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit. With a historyhit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own on Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Brilliant Rivals, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Rome Ash Wednesday, 17th February 1600. The early morning light casts a strange glow over the Campo de Fiori. As the city stirs to life. An unusual procession makes its way through the cobbled streets. In the heart of the throng, riding on a mule, is a man whose ideas have shaken the very foundations of religious thought. This is Giordano Bruno, philosopher, cosmologist, and now condemned heretic. Stripped naked and gagged with a leather bridle to silence his voice, Bruno is led to the center of the square. The crowd looks on intense anticipation as he's bound to a stake atop a pyre of wood, charcoal and pitch. A crucifix is thrust before his face. He defiantly turns his head away. The py is lit, and the man who dared to challenge the church is consumed in flames. Jordan O Bruno's journey to the stake had begun many years earlier, when his insatiable curiosity and radical ideas caught the attention of the Roman Inquisition. A former Dominican friar, he'd spent years traveling across Europe sharing his revolutionary views. Bruno proposed an infinite universe filled with countless worlds, challenging the church's geocentric model. More radically, he espoused pantheistic beliefs that equated God with the universe itself. These ideas, along with his rejection of core Catholic doctrines, sealed his fate. After seven long years of imprisonment and interrogation, during which he steadfastly refused to fully recant his beliefs, the Inquisition found him guilty of heresy. On that Ash Wednesday morning, none could know they were witnessing the execution of a man whose ideas would one day be celebrated as visionary. The death of Giorgiano Bruno would mark not just the end of a life, but a pivotal moment in the struggle between free thought and and dogmatic authority that would shape the centuries to come. To find out more about Bruno on this, the 425th anniversary of his execution. I'm joined by the author SJ Paris, pen name of journalist Stephanie Merritt, whose best selling series of historical crime novels bring Giordano Bruno quite brilliantly to life. I'm Professor Susanne Lipscomb and this is not just the Tudors from History hit. Steph. Welcome to Not Just the Tudors.
- [03:41]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
Hi, thank you for having me.
- [03:43]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I am so excited to talk with you about Bruno. I'm excited to talk with you full stop. But this character is. He's just such a remarkable figure. What first attracted you to him?
- [03:54]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
I came across references to him and I'm always sort of trying to remember when exactly it was that I first came across him. But I think the first time was when I was a student. I studied English. I wasn't a historian, but I was looking into that kind of circle of writers at the Elizabethan court. And that was something that I was very interested in as an undergraduate. And I came across the likes of John Dee, who obviously was a central figure. And through looking into Dee's life and writings, I then came across a number of other thinkers and writers of that period who had sort of tangential connections to him. And I came across repeated references to this Italian philosopher and heretic. And really at that point it was in the context of sort of Renaissance occultism and magic and obviously that blurring between science and magic that was so prevalent at the time. But it was his life that interested me more as I kind of dug deeper into his story and I discovered that he had defied the church, he'd been excommunicated, he'd gone on the run, he had been sort of hunted down by the Inquisition. And in between times, you know, he'd written these whole series of very provocative books setting out these very advanced theories. And I felt there was something incredibly romantic about his life and the fact that he seemed to be such a progressive thinker at a very repressive time. So it sort of had everything, his story. I felt like it had travel, it had adventure, it had kind of intellectual courage, physical courage. He was put in prison several times. And I just sort of fell in love with him a bit and started to read everything I could find about him.
- [05:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And he's become the main protagonist in your series of novels as a result of this fascinating life. You discovered, though I will talk to you about the ways in which you're drawn on the historical record. And then, of course, as is the novelist prerogative, added your own imagination to it. What do we know about his early life?
- [05:51]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
Well, he was born in a little village called Nola just outside Naples at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. And it was obviously a place that held a huge amount of importance for him, because throughout his very peripatetic life, he referred to himself always in his own writings as the Nolan. That identity was really intrinsic to him. He was the son of a mercenary soldier, so not from a wealthy family. He was obviously sort of singled out as being extremely bright at a young age. And he was sent to school in Naples to study at the Dominican school, with a view to entering the order as a novice later on. So that was his sort of path into the intellectual circles of his age. So he came from really quite a humble background.
- [06:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what was it that prompted his interest in challenging the Church's traditional teachings?
- [06:46]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
I think from what I have read and from what I understand of him, it seems to me to have been a question of intellectual curiosity and a sort of impatience with the doctrines that were set out and the restrictions that those imposed on what he was allowed to know and what he was allowed to study. And, you know, much later, as I'm sure we'll come on to, during one of his trials, he told his inquisitors in Venice that he had started to doubt the divinity of Christ at the age of 18. We know that when he was a teenager in his earliest novitiate, he was going into the other novices cells and pulling down pictures of the Virgin Mary off their walls and telling them that, you know, there was no point in praying to Mary. So it almost the only decoration he was allowed in or he would permit in his own cell was a bare crucifix. So it was almost like a sort of flirting with Protestantism. But he was clearly interested in lots of aspects of the Dominican intellectual tradition, particularly the emphasis on memory and rhetoric. But I think it was those very restrictive ideas about what questions you could ask about the universe and our place in it that seemed to have just kind of chafed with him because he was getting himself into trouble really from a very early age, and was referred several times to the inquisitor within his convent of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples before his final kind of transgression that forced him to flee the order.
- [08:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And his early education seems to be marked by a strong interest in Copernicus theories. Why do you think he was so captivated by these?
- [08:24]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
Well, I think one of his books that he wrote much later, he wrote of his admiration for Copernicus as standing firm against the stupid mob and holding onto the truth of his ideas. So there was Copernicus and then there was also Nicholas of Cusa, who was. I'm not sure if he was the first, but he certainly articulated this idea that the universe was infinite. So Copernicus had posited the heliocentric universe, and Nicholas of Cusa had suggested that the universe could be infinite. And I think both of these ideas clearly really kind of sparked something in Bruno's imagination. This idea that you could. That there was something beyond the sphere of the fixed stars and that you could, you know, access the kind of infinitude of the universe through learning, through, you know, these different arts that he was interested in learning about. And I think it was just that expansiveness. It obviously took hold of his imagination because it was a theme that he continued to expand on throughout his writings.
- [09:20]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I mean, these ideas were revolutionary, quite revolutionary at the time. Copernicus work had been published back in 1543, but these were still not accepted. Can you help us understand why these ideas brought him into conflict with the Church at the time?
- [09:37]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
The most sort of basic way of explaining it is that if we were to accept, or if people were to accept that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, and then, as Bruno suggested, accept the idea that if there were many sons, then there might also be many other possible worlds orbiting around those suns, what does that then make of the Christian story, the story that God sent his son to Earth for the salvation of mankind? If there are other worlds, are there other sons that he sent to other worlds? The whole sort of edifice of Christian doctrine starts to crumble if you suggest that the Earth is not the center of God's creation. And so this was a huge leap to make, you know, in terms of cosmological thought, in terms of theological ideas at the time. But I do think it's interesting that at the time, I mean, it's often sort of suggested that Bruno's downfall was purely because he embraced Copernicanism. And in fact, the Church didn't have an official position on the Copernican theory until after Bruno's death. It was only really the work of Galileo that sort of forced it to, you know, to the top of their entry. And then they then had to kind of make a decree that it was a heretical notion. But it was certainly frowned upon and it was certainly embracing those ideas. And, you know, writing about them and building on them was certainly seen as, you know, a slap in the face to centuries of Church tradition and to, you know, the very bedrock of the Christian faith.
- [11:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Do you think then that he was aware of the dangers he was bringing on himself by positing such theories?
- [11:09]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
I think he must have been. I mean, certainly from what I understand about his time at the convent in Naples, San Domenico Maggiore was a very wealthy convent. It was attended by a lot of the friars who were there were kind of from noble families. And so there was a lot of money around. It had a quite a significant position in the intellectual and civic life of Naples. So it was a relatively liberal order. It wasn't a closed order. The young friars were allowed to go and study with different teachers in different religious institutions in the city. So Bruno had quite a broad based education, certainly more liberal than some religious orders would have allowed. But at the same time, it seems impossible that he could have been unaware, particularly after he received, you know, several warnings about his interest in forbidden books that were banned by the Holy Office. It seems, you know, he must have been aware of the potential dangers and eventually what happened. And this was a detail that I absolutely loved as a writer of fiction. I built. This was too good to leave out. He was eventually kind of defrocked because he was caught reading Erasmus in the privy at his convent. And it was not the first time he'd obviously, somehow he'd managed to get hold of these books that were on the index of forbidden books. He had this copy of Erasmus. One of the other brothers noticed how much time he was spending in the loo, basically, and they sort of kicked the door down. They reported him. The door was kicked down. He was discovered in the there with this volume of Erasmus, which he then threw into the hole of the toilet. Somebody was determined enough to get in there and fish it out. And that was the point at which they said that, you know, you've used up your last chance, that is your last life. You are going to be brought before the Inquisition on, you know, charges of whatever it was going to be disobedience or, you know, reading heretical books. And at that point, rather than face the Inquisition, he escaped over the wall during the night and basically went on the run. And that's just one of those details in his life story that kind of immediately made me want to. To write about him and put that into a story.
- [13:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Absolutely. It's a fantastic story. It's amazing though, isn't it, that Erasmus was seen as heretical and dangerous, given that Erasmus stayed absolutely part of the Roman Catholic Church. You know, it's not like him holding a copy of Luther.
- [13:29]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
No, no. And I Think it sort of just shows. That's the sort of thing that makes me sympathetic to the idea that, you know, he wasn't originally particularly heretical, but he had questions and he wanted to learn. And because, you know, there were obstacles to all of that, he became more and more defiant until it reached the point where he just could not submit to the strictures of that way of life anymore.
- [13:52]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
His metaphysical views were equally groundbreaking. He espoused a form of pantheism. What was that? And again, how did it put him in danger from traditional church interpretation?
- [14:06]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
Well, Bruno's philosophy is. It's quite hard to summarize because it was quite nebulous. And I think he was developing it and working it out all through his life. And in fact, when he was facing his final trials in Rome at the end of his life, he did say that he was working on this book that would bring together all of his ideas with kind of characteristic self belief. He wanted to give it to the Pope as a sort of. In view of his defense, he thought if he could put all his ideas and kind of synthesize them into this one volume that kind of explained his worldview, he would give it to the pope, and then the Pope would be sympathetic and would understand. But this idea, he wrote repeatedly of the idea that God is in all things, that the divinity. So he wasn't an atheist. You know, there were sort of aspects of the Catholic faith that he didn't reject, but he had this idea that the divinity, the animating divinity, which is what might be called God, was present in all things. And he also had this obviously extremely problematic belief that with the right learning and with the right wisdom, men could become like God, that if you could kind of ascend through enough levels of understanding, you could become kind of one with the divine mind. And that was clearly a hugely problematic idea, but just the idea that God was not personified and was present in all the atoms of the universe. And he did write at one point, I can't remember which book it was, but he wrote about the universe being made up of particles, which he calls atoms, which is not an understanding of atoms as we would have it today. But he certainly had this idea that the universe was built tiny particles, and that God was in all of these. So it's a very. I mean, it's almost sort of New Age belief now, but it certainly was extremely complicated in terms of the theology of the time. You know, it was very much a kind of rejection of traditional Catholic theology.
- [15:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And thinking about his writings, what do you think they tell us about him as a thinker, as a man.
- [16:04]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
The thread that, for me, and I do feel that I need to sort of qualify by saying, because I'm a novelist, I'm not an academic historian, and I. I'm very conscious that there are kind of, in my knowledge of Bruno's original writings because I don't read Latin. So I've been reliant on works that have been translated. And although a lot of his works were written in Italian as well. But I think the thread that runs through what I have been able to read of his writings is this kind of insatiable curiosity, but also intellectual courage. I think he's not afraid to pose questions that would have seemed completely outlandish at the time. And to be the first to ask these questions. That's what interests me about his worldview. And also I think what has made him such an enduring figure. The fact that he was determined to write and to publish these books. And that was really one of the reasons why he wanted to stay in England and why he found England so welcoming, in a sense. In one sense, was that he was able to publish books here that he would not have been able to publish in a Catholic country because of the laws around, you know, printing. So I think, you know, it's that courage. I think if you try to drill down into the actual kind of nuts and bolts of his philosophy, it is sort of a bit all over the place and it's confused. And he takes kind of aspects from, certainly from sort of proto scientific thought, but also from magical thinking and from Egyptian, from kind of Neoplatonist thought. And it's a bit of a mishmash, but the overarching thread of it. And this is something that I very much wanted to make. Part of his character in the books is that he was very troubled by the religious divisions that he saw in Europe at the time. And he really believed that if he could persuade people to embrace his philosophy, that we're all part of the universe and God is part of the universe, and that he could somehow bridge these divisions between Catholic and Protestant, which was his kind of ultimate aim. He very much had this idea that peace could be achieved by people understanding, you know, that really that we had more in common to kind of phrase. It was all done kind of with the intention of healing the rifts in Christendom, which kind of interests me about what that says about his character.
- [18:30]
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SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
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- [18:39]
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- [19:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So you've mentioned he goes to England. We know that he travels extensively across Europe after he leaves the dominican order in 1576. I love the idea of him being chased over the fence. What do we know about his travels?
- [19:35]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
Well, his travels weren't entirely a matter of choice and obviously it was quite unusual for people to travel widely unless they were merchants or diplomats. So his travels were very often of necessity. He traveled through Italy from Naples northwards through the Italian state, earning a living as a kind of itinerant teacher a lot of the time. And we know that in those very early days he was living like a fugitive. He changed his name, or in fact he reverted to his birth name, which was Filippo, because Giordano was the name he took when he entered the Dominican order. So he was kind of in disguise because he'd left his order without permission, there were potential repercussions, so he didn't want to get caught. He was sort of living hand to mouth. And eventually he traveled northwards through Italy, ended up in France and he started giving public lectures and he ended up teaching at the University of Toulouse. And from there he went to Paris and again started giving public lectures. And within a very short time, and this is again one of the things that I find really striking, that I think is very telling about his character. Within a very short time he had gone from someone who was sort of literally living, sleeping in barns and kind of on the run to living in Paris, where his lectures got the attention of people from the Royal Court and he was invited to become personal philosophy tutor to Henry ii, Third of France. All this within about five years of running away from his order. So he clearly had enormous resources and self reliance and also great charisma because he basically just sort of earned his living by kind of talking his way into intellectual circles wherever he found himself.
- [21:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And are there gaps in the story of his travels, spaces where your imagination has been able to take hold and your stories about him have taken root.
- [21:27]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
Yeah, definitely. And I think this is why he's such a good subject for a novelist, because we know quite a lot about where he went, where he traveled to, because there are records of where he turned up and where he gave lectures and where he was put in prison for, you know, heretical thought. But we don't know very much about his personal life. You know, we don't have any letters surviving from him. We don't have, you know, any record of kind of relationships or particular friendships or, you know, we know a few people mention him in passing in letters and correspondence. And so all of that background detail is available to fill in, to color in as a novelist. And as the great Hilary Mantel said, you know, that's where fiction goes to work in those gaps in the record. So he's ideal for that, really, because there's so much that we don't know about him. And what we do know about him and what he's left in his own writings, it lends itself very well to dramatizing. There's one contemporary reference that says, I think of when he was living in France, that says that everybody wanted him at their dinner table, but that he also had this talent for making enemies as much as making friends. So he was clearly kind of very outspoken, very charismatic, perhaps a bit too outspoken at times. And all of those details come together to kind of build up a character.
- [22:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Am I right in thinking that one of the sparks for your series came from reading John Bossi and this idea that maybe Bruno was a spy for Elizabeth I's government? What is the evidence of that?
- [22:51]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
Yeah, absolutely. For a long time, I thought about Bruno and had this idea that his life would make a fantastic novel. But. But so much happened to him. He ended up in so many different places, he kind of found himself on the wrong side of the law in, you know, various different countries. And I started thinking, well, you know, how would you ever make that work as a novel? It would be kind of 900 pages, you know, if you ever tried to get it together. And so I put it to one side and I wrote other things. When I started writing fiction, and then when I came back to thinking about Bruno and I thought, well, I did, perhaps if I just took one episode, and I was interested in his connections with Renaissance magic. And this was all at the time when things like Kate Moss's labyrinth had come out. And there was quite an interest in that sort of occult thought. And I thought, well, maybe Bruno could. But, you know, in some way, set against that backdrop, and I started going back to kind of research him properly. And I came across this book by the late Professor John Bossi called Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair. And it was published in, I think, 91. And in it, Bossi suggests that Bruno, while he was resident in London. So he was in London from 1583 to 1585. We know that he lived as a guest at the French Embassy. We also know that one of the significant plots against Elizabeth, which I'm sure many of your listeners will be familiar with, the Throckmorton plot, was foiled by correspondence that was intercepted in the French Embassy that was traveling between Mary Queen of Scots and her supporters in France. And so Bossy's theory was that Bruno was the mole, that he was the person in the French Embassy who was intercepting this correspondence because he wanted to serve Elizabeth's government against the Catholic cause, because, for his own reasons, he did not want to see England return to Catholicism. It's a really fascinating book. The theory is quite sort of stretched on fairly thin evidence, and it wasn't widely taken up by other historians. And in fact, the addition that I had, Bossy had written a foreword suggesting that actually he would now retract quite a lot of his own argument. But the seeds of a really fascinating idea were there. It was like a key turned in a lock. I immediately thought, oh, that's how I do it. He's a spy. Of course he is. And he's got the kind of ideological motivation because he knows what it's like to live under, you know, the tyranny of a Catholic regime. He feels a degree of liberty in England. He wants to preserve that. Plus, I love a spy story and I love a kind of crime novel. So I thought, I can put all of this into this book, which was the first book. Actually, the first two books in the series were sort of based around that very early period of Bruno's life in England. And I certainly had no idea that I would still be doing it 15 years later. But I think readers seem to have taken to him in the same way that I did when I first discovered him, because he is the historical Bruno is such a great character.
- [25:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thinking of the historical Bruno, then his ideas eventually attracted the attention of the Inquisition. When did that happen?
- [25:55]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
His books were published in England. They were obviously kind of contraband on the Continent, but they were obviously distributed. People got hold of them, people had read them. What happened towards the end was that Bruno was at the Frankfurt Book Fair. He'd lived in Germany and then he was, I think, living in Switzerland at the time when this happened. He traveled to Frankfurt for the book fair and he received a letter while he was there from a Venetian nobleman who asked him to come, presumably with promises of remuneration, to come to Venice and teach him his memory system. So Bruno had developed this memory system. He was very interested in the art of memory, which a whole other fantastic topic, and people might be familiar with it from the BBC series Sherlock, where he talks about his mind palace. All of that is based on the whole Renaissance art of memory. So Bruno was very interested in these memory systems and had kind of finessed a system that he used to teach to private students and sometimes at universities. So this guy, Mossenigo was his name, invited Bruno to come back to Venice and become a sort of. And to live in his house and teach him this memory system. And lots of Bruno's friends and contacts advised him not to go. And it seems that Bruno had just felt that probably enough time had passed. This would be in 1592, I think, 1591 or 92, I think he felt that enough time had passed that perhaps the Inquisition would have forgotten about him, or that the Republic of Venice, being a little bit more liberal, would have less interest in him. So he went back. And what we don't know is whether it was initially a trap, whether, you know, it was a. Whether the invitation was a trap from the outset, whether Bruno did go. I think he was in Italy for almost a year before he was arrested. So it could be that he then fell out with this moss inigo. But one way or another, he was betrayed to the Inquisition. And it was the full on kind of 3am knock on the door, you know, soldiers bursting in. He was arrested and he was then taken to the prisons of the Inquisition in Venice. He had a trial in Venice. It was inconclusive. They sent him to Rome to face the Roman Inquisition. The short version is he then spent a further seven years, as you mentioned in your introduction, seven years in prison, several more trials before he was eventually convicted. And at that point it was clear that he'd sort of decided that he was not going to recant what he'd written in his book. So obviously the Inquisition had become familiar with his writings and the things that he'd asserted.
- [28:26]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That is so interesting, isn't it, that he is so firm and steadfast in sticking to these beliefs in the face of what must have been peculiarly Intense psychological pressure. What does that tell us about him?
- [28:41]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
I mean, I think that period of his life really fascinates me because there must have been so many opportunities for him to recant or to get himself out of that situation. The fact that he was imprisoned for so long. There are various theories on this, but it seems particularly that in Rome, people were worried about the public reaction that the evidence to convict him was fairly flimsy. And therefore, you know, they were sort of waiting for him to condemn himself further. And he seemed to have believed, you know, right up until quite close to the end that he would be able to make a case for himself and make a case in his own defense. And as I mentioned, he claimed that he was putting together this book which he requested be presented to the Pope in his defense. So whether it was, you know, slight delusional belief that he could convince the forces that, you know, these amassed forces of the Church and the law against him, or whether it was just, you know, that at a certain point he decided, no, I'm gonna just dig my heels in, and if this is it, then this is it. And there's an extraordinary detail which, again, I find incredibly moving and gives me an insight into his character, which is that there's a report by a German diplomat from Bruno's Roman trial, his last Roman trial, when the sentence of execution is passed. This German diplomat writes in a dispatch home that Bruno replied, I think you are more afraid to pass this sentence than I am to hear it. Which kind of gives me shivers, I think that, you know, the fact that he. It's like he's acknowledging that they are wrong, you know, that this trial is a farce, you know, what he has done is not deserving of the sentence that they've passed. And I think, you know, that sort of extraordinary courage tell us a lot about him. And I often, and think again, you know, however many years later, it was 30 years later. But Galileo, when given the same choice, chose to recant and save his own life, and Bruno chose not to. He must have really believed in the importance of what he was asserting.
- [31:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Is there a sense that he is in some way successful in taking on the establishment? I mean, obviously not ultimately he is executed, but the fact that it takes so long to try him, the fact that he resists that chilling line you've just delivered, you know, there's a feeling that they found him hard to contend with. And in some ways, he had a victory, at least a moral victory.
- [31:23]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
Yeah, I think so. And I think, you know, that's Very clear. The reports of his execution say that he was gagged. Again, as you mentioned in the introduction, either, with some reports say he had a spike through his tongue, and others say he wore a gag. But it seems clear that his executioners did not want him addressing the crowds on his way to the pyre. And I think, yeah, I think he had a certain popular following, which is, again, you know, suggests that they were worried about kind of civil unrest if he was executed. And I think that's why they felt this compulsion to keep trying to get him to change his statements. And I think. I don't know. It's very hard to know. Obviously, we can't kind of project ourselves into what he was thinking at the time. But when you look at the way that he is now considered to be a kind of iconic figure, a kind of martyr for free thought, a martyr for science, a martyr for, you know, defiance of authority and free speech, and you wonder whether he could have potentially had one eye on whether his writings would survive and, you know, felt that that was more important than saving his own life.
- [32:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
You mentioned that Galileo is just a few decades later. How important do you think Bruno's ideas were in the transformation of scientific thought that would follow in the 17th century and thereafter?
- [32:44]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
I think it's. It's almost more about his willingness to explore those ideas than the actual details of his scientific thought. Certainly, I think it's very telling that I think I'm right in saying the main inquisitor in Galileo's trial was Cardinal Roberto Bellamini, who had been. He was a Jesuit. He had also been one of the inquisitors at Bruno's trial. So clearly he was very worried about those ideas taking root and still having power over the popular imagination and being spread widely almost decades later. So in that respect, I think Bruno's ideas persisted, but certainly the way that he inspired later thinkers, I think rather than the kind of nuts and bolts of his scientific methods, I think it's more about the willingness to question and the willingness to go beyond what we know and to look into the idea of, you know, reshaping the cosmos, which, you know, later thinkers obviously went on to do, you know, building on ideas that he had posited without any sort of ability to measure, you know, without any instruments or without the kind of basic scientific knowledge that people in later centuries then went on to build on. Yeah, I think he did kind of lay some groundwork in that sense.
- [34:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
We've talked about his character as we've gone along, the sense of curiosity and Courage. But have there been other aspects of his personality and his life that have appealed to you as a writer?
- [34:12]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
Yeah, I think he would. Was known to be extremely stubborn, which I think obviously comes across during his trial. One of the lines that the character repeats frequently in the book, whenever he kind of goes to a new place and people have to ask him about his past, was that he managed to get himself thrown into prison for heresy by both the Catholics and the Lutherans and the Calvinists, I think, at one point. So he managed to kind of offend everybody in equal measure with his ideas. I also really like the fact that he was obviously quite solitary, and I find something quite romantic about that. The fact that he lived, really, from the age of 27, he lived in a state of permanent exile. And he was always writing about and thinking about the Bay of Naples, Mount Vesuvius, the skies above his hometown. There was obviously this great longing for the place that he'd had to leave in this very abrupt rupture when he had to go on the run. I think that's something that really kind of caught my imagination, this idea of what it means to live in exile, what it means to know that you can't go back to the place you thought of as home, to try and make a home in a new place. And every time he got close to doing that, he then had to move on, you know, because he was constantly looking for a patron, and because his ideas were so volatile, lots of people were sort of unwilling to kind of support him unequivocally. So he spent his whole life, really, in this state of kind of wandering and looking for a place to call home. And I found that. That very appealing for the protagonist of a novel, but particularly for the protagonist of a novel that is ultimately a detective story and a spy story, because it's having to live that double life as somebody who is spying, having to hide certain aspects of yourself. And it's the classic, kind of quintessential detective hero as well, isn't it? The outsider, the person who just sort of doesn't quite fit, who can't ever sort of quite settle down and find love and find happiness. And, you know, he seems to embody all of those qualities as well as being, you know, just. He seems to be an extraordinarily modern character for his time. And that was something that I wanted to try and capture as well.
- [36:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And where did you have to take liberties with the historical Bruno in order to allow your fictional Bruno to thrive?
- [36:29]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
I think I've had to make him A lot more aware of, I suppose, more broad minded than he perhaps would have been for a man of his time. Because even though he obviously was very progressive in terms of the way he thought about the world compared to many, many people of his contemporaries, particularly in the religious orders, I don't think that his attitudes to women, for example, were necessarily something that we would want to celebrate today. I mean, I don't think he was particularly anti women, but I had to make him, I suppose, in certain senses more appealing to a contemporary readership. I mean, for example, in the most recent novel Alchemy, he is living in Prague, which the real Bruno did in 1588, traveled to Prague to try and then get the patronage of Rudolph II and Perudolph ii. And in that novel I have him very involved in the Jewish community in Prague at the time. And my agent, after he read it, said to me, do you think this rings true? Is he a bit too modern? And actually Bruno was very interested in the whole history of Jewish thought and mysticism and Kabbalah. And so it's not a huge leap to think that he would have been probably more accepting and more tolerant than other people around him. But I think that's perhaps the biggest, you know, apart from sort of inventing places where he might have visited and inventing conversations, I think it's that aspect giving him more of a kind of broad minded liberal outlook than he probably would have had in reality.
- [37:54]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Steph, finally then, what should we conclude is his enduring appeal both as a historical character and of course as your fictional character?
- [38:03]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
I do think it's this idea of, of defiance and rebellion that appeals to people. A few years ago must have been before the pandemic, I went to a charity event in a London club. It was a concert to raise money for the Belarus Free Theatre, you know, the protest theatre group. And so they had various musicians and writers and people who had experienced censorship in some form taking part in this concert. And they had Nadia Tolakonnikova from Pussy Riots gave us a brief kind of talk and she spoke about her free speech heroes. And the first person she mentioned was Bruno. And I found that I sort of whooped from the back of the auditorium because I found that extraordinary that, you know, here's this young woman who has been, you know, protesting against repression in, in Russia and has been imprisoned for it. And Bruno is the person she holds up as a hero of free thought and defiance. So I think far more than anything he actually wrote, I think the reality of his life and the fact that he was prepared to go to the state for his ideas and for his right to write and publish them. I think people still find that incredibly inspiring. I think it's very telling that all over Italy now you can find schools or, you know, piazzas named after him. There's obviously the famous statue of him in the Campbell de Fiori, where he was executed, which was put up in the 19th century. And, you know, every year on the. The date of his execution, people come from all over Europe and put candles and flowers on his statue. And I think it's that. I really think it's his defiance of repression that is the enduring legacy. And I hope that for my character, there is something of that in the character that I've created, that he is attractive and charismatic, but also that he is unafraid to speak out where he sees injustice. And that, I think, is, you know, without sort of sounding too reachy, I hope that that is a kind of. Of moral that endures with the book and from Bruno's own life.
- [40:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And your books are not at all preachy. They're enormous fun. And if someone was thinking, oh, I'd really quite like to get into this, do you think they should start with Heresy, or should they go to the Dead of Winter?
- [40:13]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
The Dead of Winter. That was a fun one to do because that's sort of the origin story. So that's a collection of novellas that I did, because the series proper starts in 1583 when he comes to England with heresy. The novellas go back and sort of look at Bruno as a young man, because I was very interested in those early days in Naples. So obviously they're short. You could start with those. But the idea with the series is that each of the books is a standalone mystery, so you don't necessarily have to start with the first one, although there are kind of story elements that are mapped throughout the books. But, yeah, really just, you know, pick up whichever one seems most interesting, and.
- [40:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Then you'll find yourself reading and reading and reading. Steph, thank you so much for coming on. It's been an absolute joy to talk about Bruno with you and to get this sense of him as a person and as a thinker and as an iconoclast. Thank you.
- [41:01]
SJ Paris (Stephanie Merritt)
Thanks for having me.
- [41:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher, Alice Smith, and my producer, Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors From History hit.