Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science

Hilary Gatti's Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science, published by Cornell University Press in 1999, argues for the scientific seriousness of Bruno's cosmology, pushing back against the influential mid twentieth century reading by Frances Yates that framed Bruno primarily as a hermetic magician whose interest in an infinite universe was mystical rather than proto-scientific. Gatti is a historian of Renaissance philosophy and science who reads Bruno's cosmological texts closely against the astronomy of his own period. Its strength is that direct textual engagement with Bruno's scientific writing, offered as a corrective to a single very influential earlier interpretation. Its limit is that the Bruno as scientist and Bruno as hermetic magician readings remain a live disagreement among historians of the period, so a claim about what Bruno's cosmology really meant should name whose reading, Gatti's or Yates's, it is following.