Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Pope and the Heretic: The True Story of Giordano Bruno, the Man Who Dared to Defy the Roman Inquisition
    Unavailable
    The Pope and the Heretic: The True Story of Giordano Bruno, the Man Who Dared to Defy the Roman Inquisition
    Unavailable
    The Pope and the Heretic: The True Story of Giordano Bruno, the Man Who Dared to Defy the Roman Inquisition
    Ebook255 pages4 hours

    The Pope and the Heretic: The True Story of Giordano Bruno, the Man Who Dared to Defy the Roman Inquisition

    By Michael White

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Giordano Bruno challenged everything in his pursuit of an all-embracing system of thought. This not only brought him patronage from powerful figures of the day but also put him in direct conflict with the Catholic Church. Arrested by the Inquisition and tried as a heretic, Bruno was imprisoned, tortured, and, after eight years, burned at the stake in 1600. The Vatican "regrets" the burning yet refuses to clear him of heresy.

    But Bruno's philosophy spread: Galileo, Isaac Newton, Christiaan Huygens, and Gottfried Leibniz all built upon his ideas; his thought experiments predate the work of such twentieth-century luminaries as Karl Popper; his religious thinking inspired such radicals as Baruch Spinoza; and his work on the art of memory had a profound effect on William Shakespeare.

    Chronicling a genius whose musings helped bring about the modern world, Michael White pieces together the final years -- the capture, trial, and the threat the Catholic Church felt -- that made Bruno a martyr of free thought.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061871368
    Unavailable
    The Pope and the Heretic: The True Story of Giordano Bruno, the Man Who Dared to Defy the Roman Inquisition
    Author

    Michael White

    Michael White was a science lecturer before becoming a full-time writer and journalist. He is the author with John Gribbin of the bestselling ‘Stephen Hawking – A Lifetime in Science’. He is a regular contributor to the ‘Sunday Times’, the ‘Observer’,the ‘Daily Telegraph, GQ, Focus’ and ‘New Scientist’.

    Read more from Michael White

    Related to The Pope and the Heretic

    Related ebooks

    Historical Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Michael Wood On...

      Jul 7, 2022

      An Irish writer friend of mine stayed with me recently. At the kitchen table, the conversation ranged from rugby to James Joyce (this year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses in book form) and Sally Rooney, bestselling author of

      3 min read

    • Article

      Grief And Desperation

      Jan 19, 2023

      Grief And Desperation
      4 min read

    • Article

      Not Always Brotherly On The Square

      Feb 25, 2021

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM How Freemasons Made the Modern World John Dickie Hodder & Stoughton 2020 Hb, 454pp, £25, ISBN 9781473658196 Masons, Mysteries and the Founding of America (2nd edn) P

      11 min read

    • Article

      Necrolog

      Jul 14, 2022

      Necrolog
      5 min read

    • Article

      Leibniz And The Flying Monk

      Feb 25, 2021

      I have always enjoyed the alternative time-line genre of ‘What if?’. Factual and fictional speculation on such crucial issues as ‘what if’ Kennedy had lived beyond 1963? What if Socrates died at the Battle of Potidaea in 432 BC? What if Charlemagne h

      11 min read

    • Article

      Necrolog

      Jun 16, 2022

      John Nicholson was the only child of Captain W Ivan Nicholson and Eleanor (Nella) Zollner, daughter of the Danish Consul. In 1946, when John was six, the family moved to Flying Rat Cottage in Great Dunmow, Essex, where they kept poultry, plus a goat

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Dizzying Labyrinth Of Credulity

      Jan 27, 2022

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM From Oracles at Delphi to Spiritualism in America Loren Pankratz Prometheus Books 2021 Hb, £25, 472pp, ISBN 9781633886681 If you have ever asked yourself “How can an

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Church & the Holocaust

      Mar 6, 2020

      The Church & the Holocaust
      3 min read

    • Article

      Metaphysical Influences

      Jan 25, 2024

      Metaphysical Influences
      11 min read

    • Article

      Records From Once-Secret Archive Offer New Clues Into Vatican Response To Holocaust

      Aug 29, 2020

      The Vatican has long maintained that Pope Pius XII did everything he could to save Jewish lives, but newly unearthed papers have renewed accusations of complicit silence against him.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Oct 20, 2020

      Reviews
      3 min read

    • Article

      Sanctuary!

      Jul 2, 2019

      Sanctuary!
      7 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Sep 6, 2018

      Reviews
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Strange Invention Of Late Antiquity

      Jul 26, 2023

      What makes a good historian? A new book, Journeys of the Mind, by one of the best of the past 50 years, Peter Brown, promises some answers. Brown is the pioneer of a whole way of looking at a historical period, ‘late antiquity’, between the fall of R

      3 min read

    • Article

      Anniversaries

      Apr 13, 2023

      Anniversaries
      5 min read

    • Article

      Casting Light In Dark Corners

      Mar 30, 2023

      IN 1956 YOUNG PETER BURKE, BETWEEN school and university, was doing his military service in Singapore. The officers were only on base from six in the morning till four in the afternoon. After that, Her Majesty’s Service was replaced by self-service:

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Vivid Chronicle Of Chroniclers

      Feb 24, 2022

      AS A PUBLISHING executive, Richard Cohen edited authors such as Jeffrey Archer, John le Carré, and Fay Weldon. As a fencer he competed at three Olympic Games, wrote a history of swordsmanship, and appeared as an extra in the James Bond movie Die Anot

      5 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Nov 26, 2020

      It is always my favourite time of the month when BBC History Magazine arrives on the doorstep, and I was pleased to see some ancient history making an appearance in the November issue. I enjoyed Andrew Bayliss’s account of Leonidas and the battle of

      4 min read

    Reviews for The Pope and the Heretic

    3.5/5

    3 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      While White's portrait of Bruno is interesting, he commits a fundamental fallacy in dealing with history; he evaluates events from a contemporary perspective. In doing so he not only does the Church and society of the 16th century a severe disservice, but in effect, does so to Bruno as well. Bruno has been quasi-canonized by the same anti-church sentiments that make of Galileo a far more colorful martyr than the facts support, and White's work only continues this trend. Bruno had elements of brilliance in his work, certainly, but it was buried amidst a mish-mash of self-aggrandizing, convoluted and almost schizophrenic ramblings. His prosecution by the church resulted less from his ideas in and of themselves, and more from his general tendency to cause trouble wherever he went; Catholic, Protestant - he seemed to offend all equally. White, in addition to his post-enlightenment condemnation of history, also has an unfortunate tendency to over-dramatize. He is not alone in this; there seem to have been a spate of highly novelized histories recently, of which some are impressive and others considerably less so. This is of the latter ilk, the sort which imposes purely speculative dialog and other such details (which are utterly impossible for us to know) onto the facts at hand. It may be that the result is more entertaining than the facts themselves; however, this volume cannot really be called history. I submit that if the author's wish is to entertain, perhaps he would be better advised to stick to fiction writing (at which he seems to have some skill) and leave history in the hands of those who will treat it responsibly.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A fairly engrossing account of the life of this philosopher and occultist who perceived an infinite universe and tried to establish a new religion, a fusion of pre-Christian beliefs and original Christianity, shorn of what he perceived to be the corruption of the official Catholic church. Bruno's persecution and eventual death are described in horrific detail, but also with a certain breathless novelistic embellishment that I found irritating. Many people might also say the author has rather a simplistic view of the history of Catholicism and the role of the Inquisition, following a resolutely modern viewpoint that cannot adequately be used to understand a 16th century view of religion, with its single minded and exclusivist attitude on both sides of the Reformation divide. He frequently refers to Church figures as "evil", for example, which, while it would be very accurate as a description of someone now who carried out such acts of persecution, is somehow inadequate when describing the 16th century. Bruno emerges as a highly intelligent and imaginative thinker, but also as arrogant and, ironically in view of the vast breadth of his vision, narrow minded and naïve in terms of the sharing and practical application of his views. He does not emerge as a sympathetic and pro-science figure as does Galileo. Some of the author's views on the longer term influence of Bruno on modern computer technology also did not convince me. Worth a read, but not as good as Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter, which I read immediately before this.