'That Italian didapper' : Giordano Bruno and England

Abstract

Those words from the Pensees of Blaise Pascal- 'Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraye,' especially 'ces espaces infinis' in the plural - suggest the profoundly Christian Pascal's acceptance, by the 1660s, of the anti-Christian Bruno's post-Copernican cosmology of an infinite, de-centred universe, as does Pascal's acceptance, possibly via Montaigne, of the notion, variously supposed to have originated either with Empedocles or with the lately discredited Hermes Trismegistus, but which Bruno had emphatically made his own, of the universe as an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Bruno thus, though submerged - burnt as a heretic in 1600, his books placed on the Index, his name buried in almost total silence - keeps resurfacing in unexpected places.