Git for home, Bruno

Ingrid D. Rowland's Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic has me thoroughly excited thus far, though I am reading it with invisible hyperlinks at the blank edge of every paper page. (I have placed discreet check marks in the margins to remind me where to click.)

Even without the mental stirrings of recollection that suggest some of the sources that Rowland should have mentioned, her biography of Bruno is a serious updating for the twenty-first century, one that presents the basic historical context (considerably more subtle in terms of theological disputes than one would think who does not remember the details of the failed options of the Counter-Reformation), alongside piquant extracts from the literature that includes more inventive regional Italian cuss-phrases than one had ever suspected existed. (Many of which make no sense when taken literally, but neither do the cuss-phrases of any English-language vernacular.)

Bruno's gift for soaring lyricism combined with downhome stories in doubtful taste makes him a rival for Rumi in that department. Rowland recovers a Bruno for our time, if one can say that about a figure who, as she rightly points out, is very distant from us in all his assumptions, and who we tend to understand wrongly for that very reason.

More later, one hopes (or actually, I hope; you have probably read more of my commentary than you want to already).