Giordano Bruno

(1548 - 1600)

Giordano Bruno earned his doctorate in theology at a Dominican convent in 1575 but was soon investigated for heresy. He spent the following years traveling through Italy, France, Switzerland, and Germany. Upon returning to Venice, his heretical views on the human soul and the Copernican system led to his arrest, and in 1600 he was burned at the stake in Rome. Two and a half centuries later, after reading a biography of Bruno, the Prussian diplomat Christian Karl Josias described him as a “strange, erratic, comet-like spirit, a genius but a Neapolitan, whose life was but a fiery fragment.”