SOURCE: "The Brunian Setting," in The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge: Giordano Bruno in England, Routledge, 1989, pp. 1-34.

In the following excerpt, Gatti tracks Bruno's European wanderings, discussing the influential ideas and writings produced by the philosopher during this period of travel.

Perhaps no writer more than Giordano Bruno has made such large claims for the extraordinary value of his own work. It is enough to remember the opening of his letter to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, written in 1583, where he presents himself as a philosopher whose work is applauded by all noble minds; or the pages of the first dialogue of the Cena delle Ceneri in which he praises his own work glowingly between references to Copernicus as the discoverer of a new cosmology and Columbus as the discoverer of a new geography. Eight years later, after a long and often unquiet period in Germany...