This art requires much less work, industry, and practice than all the others you might read about, so that within three or four months it offers an easier, more certain method for those who choose it than those who follow other methods will attain in three or four years … As for remembering things and phrases, it is plain enough that once anyone has heard the basic teachings of this art, he can use it to the best of his abilities, and no reasonable person can be excluded from competence in it.
The Nolan himself strikes a more sober tone than his friend Regnault. Only a truly dedicated student will succeed, and only with constant practice:
ALBERICUS: I hear that you are skilled in the art, one of Giordano’s inventions, that is described in On the Shadows of Ideas, an art that is not mere playacting, as some accuse, but that many say is extremely difficult, and almost impossible to study on one’s own.
BORISTA: If many learned people do not understand it on their own, it is not for their ignorance, nor a confusion in the art itself … It is because they are occupied with other concerns, and read about the art with scant attention.
The Song of Circe presents a series of systems for storing memories, together with brief explanations and examples; it could have served as an exercise book, but Bruno provides only sketchy instructions about how to use those exercises—like any good advertiser, he whetted his customers’ appetite without satisfying it. On the Shadows of Ideas provides some added clues to what The Song of Circe may be about. Yet a lecture from Bruno would make it all so much clearer, and the whole series of lectures would make The Song of Circe clearer still.
For Parisians, Circe was the enchantress of Homer’s Odyssey who turns Odysseus’s henchmen into animals, as wily Odysseus, protected by Athena, foils the sorceress and spends the night with her in human form, in a human bed, hearing her secrets. For a Neapolitan like Giordano Bruno, however, Circe was more than a literary figure; she was a neighbor whose abode on the promontory of San Felice Circeo he had passed at least three times on the road to and from Rome. Naples abounded in such mysterious, legendary places: the Sirens, whose song lured sailors to their deaths, had given their name to Sorrento, the spit of land that rounded out the Bay of Naples. North of the city, the mouth of hell was said to open into the still, dark waters of Lake Avernus (a volcanic crater); nearby, the Sibyl of Cumae had predicted the coming of Christ from a cave carved into the volcanic rock. In 1499, Giles of Viterbo, the Augustinian friar and future cardinal, had stopped in Cumae and Avernus to commune with the pagan spirits and declared afterward that he was no less pious a Christian for having done so; after all, the classical deities were nothing other than guardian angels. Bruno’s deities were no less rooted in the same real places. And like Giles of Viterbo, Bruno reserved each of these same gods a place in the heavens.
Bruno begins his book by having Circe call upon the gods; as he will explain later, her invocations run through a whole series of categories that can be used to store information. When she summons Apollo, Jupiter, and their companions, she is also summoning the physical bodies of the sun, moon, and planets, listing their names, their attributes, their local titles, their special animals and birds, lining them up in careful categories. Element by element, then, in rigorous sequence, Circe calls the whole universe to order, beginning with the sun:
Sun, who alone bathes all things in light. Apollo, author of poetry, quiver bearer, bowman, of the powerful arrows, Pythian, laurel-crowned, prophetic, shepherd, seer, priest, and physician. Brilliant, rosy, long-haired, beautiful-locked, blond, bright, placid, bard, singer, teller of truth. Titanian, Milesian, Palatine, Cyrrhaean, Timbraean, Delian, Delphic, Leucadian, Tegean, Capitoline, Smintheus, Ismenian, and Latin. Who imparts to the elements their marvelous natures: by whose dispensation the seas swell and are calmed, the air and sky are troubled and soothed, the lively strength and power of fire is roused and repressed. By whose ministry the mechanism of this universe thrives, so that the many qualities of herbs and the other plants and of stones are able to draw the universal spirit to themselves. Appear by the prayers of your daughter Circe …
Again I stretch out my hands to you, O Sun. I am here for you, all yours. Reveal, I pray, your lions, your lynxes, goats, baboons, seagulls, calves, snakes, elephants, and the other kinds of animals that belong to you. Halcyons, swallows, partridges, ravens, crows, sandpipers, cicadas, and scarabs, and all your other flying creatures. The turtle, butterfish, tuna, ray, whale, and all your other creatures of that kind. You who are Ubius, Alexikakos, Phanes, Horus, Apollo by day, Dionysus by night, and called the Day Father. Whose power is administered in your place by gold, hyacinth, ruby, and carbuncle. Worthy of reverence in the center of the planetary system, clearing and showing the way for all: drawing forth, producing, and ripening all things, lord of rulers and counselors, illustrious in your blazing rays. You are the prince of the universe, the eye of heaven, the mirror of nature, the architecture of the soul of the world, and the seal of the Most High Architect.
In his lectures, as in his conversations with the king, Bruno would have made it clear that Homer’s Circe may have been a sorceress but his own Circe is simply using orderly thought to align the powers already inherent in nature. He had anticipated possible accusations of magic in On the Shadows of Ideas and dealt with them there in no uncertain terms:
LOGIFER: What will you reply to Mr. Ad Hoc, who thinks that those people who perform memory operations before the crowd are magicians or possessed or some other similar species of man? (You can see how senile he has gone by studying.)
PHILOTHIMUS: I do not doubt that he is the nephew of that ass who was booked on Noah’s Ark to preserve the species.
So, too, Jean Regnault writes in the preface to The Song of Circe that Bruno’s art of memory looks impressive, and is impressive, but it is entirely natural. Designed specifically to exploit a chain of mental associations, it enables a diligent student to master the whole technique in a remarkably short time. There is nothing diabolical or unnatural about it.
There were, however, some controversial aspects to the song of the enchantress. Circe’s invocation implicitly sets the sun within a Copernican cosmos, where it, not the earth, stands at the center of the universe. A central sun, in fact, only enhanced the imagery of divine light that pervades Plato, the Gospel of Saint John, and Saint Augustine, and through them thinkers like Marsilio Ficino and Giles of Viterbo. The Song of Circe is not a book about cosmology, however; it is a book about how anyone can increase the power of memory with the help of imagination, concentration, and diligent practice.
Despite its magical overtones, Bruno’s art of memory was not so far removed from the contemporary efforts of natural philosophers to create schemes by which they could classify plants, animals, minerals, chemicals, peoples, languages, and all the other bewilderingly varied phenomena of nature and culture. All of them, Bruno along with a chemist like Paracelsus or a naturalist like Conrad Gesner (and, two centuries later, a taxonomist like Linnaeus), believed that by organizing the world, they could increase their abilities to understand it, perhaps to control it, and certainly to control their own relationship with it. They were hardly the first to think so: Cicero had noted, as the ancient Roman Republic degenerated into chaos, that the idea of grouping phenomena into kinds and disciplines had marked the beginning of civilization.
By applying his art of memory, Bruno may have been able to call the whole world to attention within his head. Perhaps Henri III could do so, too. But in the troubled Europe of the late sixteenth century, mental mastery of the world did not translate into real mastery. In France, Catholic and Huguenot no more put down their weapons than lions, lynxes, and tuna fish snapped to attention on some Parisian street beneath the benevolent sun. Henri had signed a truce in December 1580 that allowed him to rule over a peaceful France for two years, 1581 and 1582. He kept both sides calm by continuing to make concessions, to the Huguenots and to the powerful Catholic dynasties of de Guise and Lorraine. By 1583, however, the fr
agile truce had begun to come apart, and no song of Circe could put it right again.
Henri responded to the tensions by asserting his own Catholicism more and more aggressively. On March 28, 1583, the English ambassador to Paris, Henry Cobham, reported to Queen Elizabeth’s “principal secretary,” Francis Walsingham, that tolerance of English Catholics had suddenly increased in France, whereas English Protestants had reason to be concerned:
If her Highness endure the evil treatment of her subjects in Italy, she may have in short time the like used in France … Besides, the English papists are allowed to make sermons in Paris; I think heretofore this was not permitted …
Later the same day, Cobham added:
I hear the king is sending M. de San Martin to the King of Navarre, upon the sundry bruits which are spread that those of the Religion were preparing for their defence, being threatened with the publishing of the Council of Trent, and the Inquisition.
Cobham’s first letter also mentioned that two Jesuit priests had just arrived in England from Rome, and that “Il Signor Doctor Jordano Bruno, Nolano, professor in philosophy, intends to pass into England.” Bruno, it would soon transpire, had cast his eye on London and Oxford. Although the “Academic of no Academy” had actually amassed a whole series of excellent academic connections (and evidently aimed at forging yet another one), in matters of religion he truly did belong to no one. For the first time, he must have recognized that his choices in 1576 had determined the rest of his life. Aware, perhaps for the first time, that he was well and truly excluded from the Roman Church, with rumors flying about the Inquisition coming to France, and with his old Neapolitan street sense still as active as ever, the Nolan philosopher looked for a way out, and decided on England, where Queen Elizabeth had earned a reputation for her culture and her tolerance.
Bruno said nothing specific to the Venetian Inquisition about the “tumults that broke out” before he left Paris (or, for that matter, what kind of violence he might have seen in Toulouse, or in Spanish-dominated Naples). Like his hatred of pedophile teachers, his aversion to religious war was strong enough to suggest that his magnificent memory contained images he would rather have forgotten.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Go up to Oxford”
And if you don’t believe it, go up to Oxford, and have them tell you the things that happened to the Nolan when he disputed in public with those doctors of theology in the presence of Prince Alasco, the Pole, and other English nobles. Let them tell you how ably he responded to the arguments; how by means of fifteen syllogisms that poor doctor whom they put forward as leader of the Academy’s comic chorus was left on fifteen occasions like a chick in the chaff. Let them tell you about the churlish discourtesy with which that pig proceeded, and about the patience and humanity of the Nolan, who showed himself to be a real Neapolitan, born and raised under a more benign heaven.
—The Ash Wednesday Supper, dialogue 4
In April 1583, Giordano Bruno touched down in Dover. He describes the experience of crossing the Channel for what it revealed to him about the curvature of the earth, one of the only references to travel that we find in the writings of this unusually well-traveled man. His arrival did not come unannounced. Shortly before, the English ambassador to Paris, Henry Cobham, had written Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s ruthless head of secret services, to forewarn him, “Il Signor Doctor Jordano Bruno, Nolano, professor in philosophy, intends to pass into England, whose religion I cannot commend.”
From Walsingham’s standpoint, Bruno could have been suspect either by association with the Catholic king and the Catholic government of France, by his troubled relationship with Geneva, or because he harbored more peculiar beliefs. But Walsingham was prepared for the Italian’s arrival no matter what the circumstances: he already had a spy installed in the French embassy to keep him abreast of the household’s activities.
From Bruno’s standpoint, England and Germany were the two most logical places to go from France, but England, from the outside, may have had special attractions. Queen Elizabeth’s version of Protestant reform aimed, as best it could, to subdue tension on all sides. It was a task she undertook with Machiavellian practicality, flanked by her secretary, Walsingham, and his network of informers. Still, her willingness to listen to both sides of the Reformation led some of her radically Protestant subjects to suspect her of Catholic sympathies. Despite her occasionally brutal tactics and the virtual cult by which she preserved her own personal power, on the European stage she seemed to be setting out a deliberately moderate middle ground between Calvin, Luther, and the papacy, and in the long term a balance among these branches of Christianity is precisely what she hewed out for the Anglican Church.
On a more personal front, Bruno exchanged a publicly funded position as royal reader for a position under private patronage, as “gentleman of the household.” His sponsor in London, Michel de Castelnau, Lord of Mauvissière, had served for nearly eight years as Henri III’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Like any aristocrat of worth from Paris to Constantinople—or for that matter, like an ancient Roman paterfamilias—Castelnau assembled a court around him that could provide him with entertainment, enlightenment, or reputation according to his tastes. Some contemporaries, like the Gonzaga of Mantua, loaded their palazzi with dwarfs, freaks, and dogs (perhaps to distract attention from the Gonzaga’s hereditary hunchback, just as the dwarfs at the Spanish court took attention away from the Habsburg jaw: as Diego Velázquez was to show more incisively than anyone in his paintings of the Spanish court, monarchs were sports of nature as extraordinary as any of their subjects). Michel de Castelnau collected conversationalists, a skill at which at least one of Bruno’s companions, John Florio, said the Nolan excelled.
The ambassador maintained his residence on Butcher Row, a narrow lane that ran from Fleet Street to the banks of the Thames, set between the imposing Gothic convents of the Dominican Blackfriars and the Carmelite Whitefriars. Both the City of London to the east and the royal palace at Whitehall could be reached by road or ferry. High walls protected all these compounds from London lowlife; Castelnau also had to fear disturbances from Protestants, rich and poor, who resented the presence of a French papist living so openly, and so lavishly, on English soil. The Great Fire of 1666, the Victorian world empire, and Hitler’s Blitz have long since destroyed any real trace of Bruno’s London neighborhood except the Inns of Court, whose Gothic windows still grasp after every bit of light from the northern sky, a sky Bruno would come to regard as harsh by comparison with the skies of Naples. But the streets have all been paved now, and their sewage flows underground. The buildings are mostly modern colossi. Electric lights and closed-circuit cameras now dispel the darkness so effectively that the color of the night sky has changed from starry black to foggy brown; in Bruno’s day, the only lights on the street were the torches or lanterns that passersby brought themselves. The pyramidal spire of Charing Cross, a monument from 1290 that once signaled the junction between Fleet Street and the road to the royal palace at Whitehall, survives in a Victorian reproduction. Bridges span the Thames where in Bruno’s day there were only ferries; London Bridge provided the single fixed crossing. Rather than the noise of internal combustion engines and rubber on asphalt, Bruno heard hooves on mud, vendors’ cries, creaking wooden wheels, and night watchmen enforcing the curfew. The smells that reached his nostrils indoors and outdoors were organic smells, from the garbage and slops that sluiced down the streets to the seldom-changed clothing, seldom-washed bodies, sweat, and foul breath that prevailed inside. The climate of Naples meant that people could live outdoors; London winters made that impossible.
Yet life within the household on Butcher Row must have been entertaining, to judge from the liveliness of the books that were produced in its midst. One of Bruno’s table companions, the Anglo-Italian John Florio, became a close friend. Born in England of Italian Protestant parents from Siena, Florio had grown up in Switzerland; he had moved to England in t
he 1570s. He and Bruno shared a sense of humor and a sense of rootlessness. Most of all, they shared a passion for language. Florio now provides one of the most penetrating portraits of their contemporary English culture through his Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes, in its own way as provocative and opinionated as Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, produced only a few hundred yards (and two centuries) away. Four hundred years after its printing, A Worlde of Wordes now provides an indispensable key not only to Bruno’s Italian but also to the Falstaffian richness of English, the English that a young, ambitious actor named William Shakespeare was beginning to bring to London’s theater in precisely those years. The words in Florio’s dictionary, which he describes as an exuberant tumult rather than a sober intellectual enterprise—“no brain-babe Minerva, but a bouncing boie, Bacchus-like, all names”—literally do create a world. The pleasures of the body dominate its lexicon, from the rich vocabulary of “bellie-cheere” to the congress between men and women that could be described, in addition to our surviving terms, as japing, swiving, sarding, sporting, and occupying. Earringed men who wept openly, kissed each other on the mouth, and sniffed at roses (a matter of olfactory self-defense in those days) plied words as deftly as they did their rapiers. Florio himself was no amateur at verbal swordsmanship:
As for critiks I accompt of them as crickets; no goodly bird if a man marke them, no sweete note if a man heare them, no good luck if a man have them: they lurke in corners, but catch cold if they look out; they lie in sight of the furnace that tryes others, but will not come neare the flame that should purifie themselves: they are bred of filth, and fed with filth, what vermine to call them I know not, or wormes, or flyes, or what worse?… Demonstrative rethorique is their studies, and the doggs letter they can snarle alreadie.
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