The Ash Wednesday Supper Book

"There is naught but one sky, one immense ethereal region where those magnificent lights keep their proper distances in order to participate in perpetual life. These blazing bodies are the ambassadors who announce the excellent glory and majesty of God."

"We ourselves and our possessions come and go, pass and return, and there is nothing of ours which does not become estranged from us, and there is nothing foreign to us which does not become ours. And there is nothing of which we are a part which does not of necessity become part of us at some time, and there is nothing which is a part of us of which we do not of necessity becom a part at some time."

Giordano Bruno was a 16th century Dominican friar who was preaching Copernicanism a few decades before Galileo, who was fixated on Neoplatonism and the resurgent Hermetic tradition of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, who wrote on memory, and who taught that the Sun was simply one of an infinite number of living stars, populating an infinite universe in constant regeneration and motion. He was burned by the Roman Inquisition in 1600 and has been seen by posterity alternately as a martyr of science and free-thinking and as a deluded and arrogant heretic. I think he was probably both.

Bruno is a figure of fascinating and somewhat disconcerting contrasts: he was condescending, intolerant, and likely awful to be around, but he was simulataneously imbued with a genuine and pervasive love for the universe. His cosmology is based on some deeply faulty science (to the extent that it probably can't even really be called science), but he was also, to a large extent, correct.

The Ash Wednesday Supper is a dialogue of four men recalling an Ash Wednesday dinner party at which Giordano Bruno (called only The Nolan) expounds on his Copernicanist cosmology and berates his intellectual opponents, the Oxford dons Nundinio and Torquato. It's a difficult work to classify - in some senses it's a work of Renaissance Hermeticism (Bruno clearly feels he's on a mission to revive an ancient, true philosophy), in others it's a scientific tract, in others it's somewhat farcical dinner party where people will often jump in and tell Bruno to get to the point, or to stop being so overly dramatic in his philosophical presentations. There's even one ridiculous and great scene in which Bruno plunges through the mud-drenched London streets, clearly horrified by the commoners around him, and portrays his journey to the dinner party like it's some kind of grand heroic victory over the earthly mire that surrounds him.

It's not a work for everyone, but it's so weird and distinctive that I'd recommend giving it a shot. At the very least, it does a wonderful job of showing how the Renaissance was such a weird period of overlap, in which everything related to everything else, and in which scientific advancement was nearly always an inherently religious endeavor.