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Europe's long sixteenth century - a period spanning the years roughly from the voyages of Columbus in the 1490s to the English Civil War in the 1640s - was an era of power struggles between avaricious and unscrupulous princes, inquisitions and torture chambers, and religious differences of ever more violent fervor. This work argues that this turbulent age also laid the conceptual foundations of our modern ideas about liberty, justice, and democracy. The text shows how these ideas emerged in response to the often violent entrenchment of monarchical power and the fragmentation of religious authority, against the backdrop of the westward advance of Islam and the discovery of the New World

"Europe's long sixteenth century--a period spanning the years roughly from the voyages of Columbus in the 1490s to the English Civil War in the 1640s--was an era of power struggles between avaricious and unscrupulous princes, inquisitions and torture chambers, and religious differences of ever more violent fervor. Ideas of Liberty in Early Modern Europe argues that this turbulent age also laid the conceptual foundations of our modern ideas about liberty, justice, and democracy. Hilary Gatti shows how these ideas emerged in response to the often-violent entrenchment of monarchical power and the fragmentation of religious authority, against the backdrop of the westward advance of Islam and the discovery of the New World. She looks at Machiavelli's defense of republican political liberty, and traces how liberty became intertwined with free will and religious pluralism in the writings of Luther, Erasmus, Jean Bodin, and Giordano Bruno. She examines how the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre and the clash of science and religion gave rise to concepts of liberty as freedom of thought and expression. Returning to Machiavelli and moving on to Jacques Auguste de Thou, Paolo Sarpi, and Milton, Gatti delves into debates about the roles of parliamentary government and a free press in guaranteeing liberties. Drawing on a breadth of canonical and lesser-known writings, Ideas of Liberty in Early Modern Europe reveals how an era stricken by war and injustice gave birth to a more enlightened world."--Publisher description

This book gathers wide-ranging essays on the Italian Renaissance philosopher and cosmologist Giordano Bruno by one of the world's leading authorities on his work and life. Many of these essays were originally written in Italian and appear here in English for the first time. Bruno (1548-1600) is principally famous as a proponent of heliocentrism, the infinity of the universe, and the plurality of worlds. But his work spanned the sciences and humanities, sometimes touching the borders of the occult, and Hilary Gatti's essays richly reflect this diversity. The book is divided into sections that address three broad subjects: the relationshiop between Bruno and the new science, the history of his reception in English culture, and the principal characteristics of his natural philosophy. A final essay examines why this advocate of a "tranquil universal philosophy" ended up being burned at the stake as a heretic by the Roman Inquisition. While the essays take many different approaches, the yare united by a number of assumptions: that, although well versed in magic, Bruno cannot be defined primarily as a Renaissance Magus; that his aim was to articulate a new philosophy of nature; and that his thought, while based on ancient and medieval sources, represented a radical rupture with the philosophical schools of the past, helping forge a path toward a new modernity

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Illustrations -- List of Contributors -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- List of Abbreviations -- Part One Introduction -- 1 Giordano Bruno as Philosopher of the Renaissance -- Part Two Bruno and Italy -- 2 The Image of Giordano Bruno -- 3 Philosophy versus Religion and Science versus Religion: the Trials of Bruno and Galileo -- 4 Giordano Bruno and Neapolitan Neoplatonism -- 5 Images of Literary Memory in the Italian Dialogues: Some Notes on Giordano Bruno and Ludovico Ariosto -- Part Three Bruno in England -- 6 Giordano Bruno and the Protestant Ethic -- 7 John Charlewood, Printer of Giordano Bruno's Italian Dialogues, and his Book Production -- 8 Giordano Bruno's Infinite Worlds in John Florio's Worlds of Words -- 9 Ultima Thule: Contrasting Empires in Bruno's Ash Wednesday Supper and Shakespeare's Tempest -- Part Four Philosophical Themes -- 10 Giordano Bruno and Astrology -- 11 Simulacra et Signacula: Memory, Magic and Metaphysics in Brunian Mnemonics -- 12 Metempsychosis and Monism in Bruno's nova filosofia -- 13 The Necessity of the Minima in the Nolan Philosophy -- 14 Meanings of 'contractio' in Giordano Bruno's Sigillus sigillorum -- Part Five Influence and Tradition -- 15 Giordano Bruno's Mnemonics and Giambattista Vico's Recollective Philology -- 16 Macrocosm, Microcosm and the Circulation of the Blood: Bruno and Harvey -- 17 Monadology and the Reception of Bruno in the Young Leibniz -- 18 Being a Modern Philosopher and Reading Giordano Bruno -- Index.