Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair

Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair PDF Author: John Bossy
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300094510
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This book tells a true detective story set mainly in Elizabethan London during the years of cold war just before the Armada of 1588. The mystery is the identity of a spy working in a foreign embassy to frustrate Catholic conspiracy and propaganda aimed at the overthrow of Queen Elizabeth and her government. The suspects in the case are the inmates of the house, an old building in the warren of streets and gardens between Fleet Street and the Thames. These include the ambassador, a civilized Frenchman, his wife, his daughter, his secretary, his clerk and his priest, the tutor, the chef, the butler, and the concierge. They also include a runaway friar, the Neapolitan philosopher, poet, and comedian Giordano Bruno, who wrote masterpieces of Italian literature, who was later burned in Rome for his anti-papal opinions, and who has been revered in Italy for his honorable and heroic resistance to papal authority. Others in the cast are Queen Elizabeth, her formidable secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham, and King Henry III of France; poets, courtiers, and scholars; statesmen, conspirators, go-betweens, and stool-pigeons. When not in London, the action takes place in Paris and Oxford; a good deal of it happens on the river Thames. The hero or villain, who calls himself Fagot, does his work most effectively, is not found out, and disappears. In the first part of the book these events are narrated. In the second the spy is identified and his story put together. John Bossy's brilliant research, backed by his forensic and literary skills, solves a centuries-old mystery. His book makes a major contribution to the political and intellectual history of the wars of religion in Europe and to the domestic history of Elizabethan England. Not least, it is compelling reading.

Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair

Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair PDF Author: John Bossy
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300094510
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book tells a true detective story set mainly in Elizabethan London during the years of cold war just before the Armada of 1588. The mystery is the identity of a spy working in a foreign embassy to frustrate Catholic conspiracy and propaganda aimed at the overthrow of Queen Elizabeth and her government. The suspects in the case are the inmates of the house, an old building in the warren of streets and gardens between Fleet Street and the Thames. These include the ambassador, a civilized Frenchman, his wife, his daughter, his secretary, his clerk and his priest, the tutor, the chef, the butler, and the concierge. They also include a runaway friar, the Neapolitan philosopher, poet, and comedian Giordano Bruno, who wrote masterpieces of Italian literature, who was later burned in Rome for his anti-papal opinions, and who has been revered in Italy for his honorable and heroic resistance to papal authority. Others in the cast are Queen Elizabeth, her formidable secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham, and King Henry III of France; poets, courtiers, and scholars; statesmen, conspirators, go-betweens, and stool-pigeons. When not in London, the action takes place in Paris and Oxford; a good deal of it happens on the river Thames. The hero or villain, who calls himself Fagot, does his work most effectively, is not found out, and disappears. In the first part of the book these events are narrated. In the second the spy is identified and his story put together. John Bossy's brilliant research, backed by his forensic and literary skills, solves a centuries-old mystery. His book makes a major contribution to the political and intellectual history of the wars of religion in Europe and to the domestic history of Elizabethan England. Not least, it is compelling reading.

Under the Molehill

Under the Molehill PDF Author: John Bossy
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300094503
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This absorbing account of Catholic and anti-Catholic plots and machinations at the English, French, and exiled Scottish courts in the latter part of the sixteenth century is a sequel to John Bossy's highly acclaimed Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair. It tells the story of an espionage operation in Elizabethan London that was designed to find out what side France would take in the hostilities between Protestant England and the Catholic powers of Europe. France was a Catholic country whose king was nonetheless hostile to Spanish and papal aggression, Bossy explains, but the king's sister-in-law, Mary Queen of Scots, in custody in England since 1568, was a magnet for Catholic activists, and the French ambassador in London, Michel de Castelnau, was of uncertain leanings. Bossy relates how Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, found a mole in Castelnau's household establishment, who passed information to someone in Walsingham's employ. Bossy discovers the identity of these persons, what items of intelligence were passed over, and what the English government decided to do with the information. He describes how individuals were arrested or fled, a political crisis occurred, an ambassador was expelled, deals were made. He concludes with a discussion of the authenticity of Elizabethan secret operations, arguing that they were not theatrical devices to prop up an unpopular regime but were a response to genuine threats of counter-revolution inspired by Catholic zeal.

Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno PDF Author: Ingrid D. Rowland
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466895845
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Giordano Bruno is one of the great figures of early modern Europe, and one of the least understood. Ingrid D. Rowland's pathbreaking life of Bruno establishes him once and for all as a peer of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Galileo, a thinker whose vision of the world prefigures ours. By the time Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600 on Rome's Campo dei Fiori, he had taught in Naples, Rome, Venice, Geneva, France, England, Germany, and the "magic Prague" of Emperor Rudolph II. His powers of memory and his provocative ideas about the infinity of the universe had attracted the attention of the pope, Queen Elizabeth—and the Inquisition, which condemned him to death in Rome as part of a yearlong jubilee. Writing with great verve and sympathy for her protagonist, Rowland traces Bruno's wanderings through a sixteenth-century Europe where every certainty of religion and philosophy had been called into question and shows him valiantly defending his ideas (and his right to maintain them) to the very end. An incisive, independent thinker just when natural philosophy was transformed into modern science, he was also a writer of sublime talent. His eloquence and his courage inspired thinkers across Europe, finding expression in the work of Shakespeare and Galileo. Giordano Bruno allows us to encounter a legendary European figure as if for the first time.

Candelaio

Candelaio PDF Author: Giordano Bruno
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781537769363
Category :
Languages : it
Pages : 158

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Book Description
Nella commedia, dove Bruno definisce se stesso un «accademico di nulla accademia», è mostrato un mondo assurdo, violento e corrotto, rappresentato con amara comicità, dove gli eventi si succedono in una trasformazione continua e vivace.Lo stesso apparato introduttivo ai cinque atti in cui la commedia è suddivisa risulta inconsueto e articolato, ponendosi in contrasto con i canoni della commedia tradizionale rinascimentale: alla poesia iniziale indirizzata ai poeti e a una dedica alla signora Morgana B. (probabilmente una conoscente di Bruno), seguono un "argumento", dove Bruno riassume la trama; un "antiprologo", dove l'autore capovolgendo subito quanto proposto in precedenza, ironizza sulla possibilità stessa di rappresentare realmente questa commedia; un "proprologo", dove egli polemizza contro le ideologie false, e un "bidello", che finalmente licenzia la commedia.

Galileo in Rome

Galileo in Rome PDF Author: William R. Shea
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195165985
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Two leading authorities on Galileo offer a brilliant revisionist look at the career of the great Italian scientist.

Christianity and Community in the West

Christianity and Community in the West PDF Author: Simon Ditchfield
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351951734
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
How did Christians in early modern Western Europe express their sense of community? This book explores the various ways in which religious identities were defined, developed and defended - within both Protestant and Roman Catholic contexts, in England and on the Continent - over a period vital for the history of Christianity. As such it will be of interest not only to historians of religion but also to students of social and cultural history in general.

Arch Conjurer of England

Arch Conjurer of England PDF Author: Glynn Parry
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300183704
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Outlandish alchemist and magician, political intelligencer, apocalyptic prophet, and converser with angels, John Dee (1527–1609) was one of the most colorful and controversial figures of the Tudor world. In this fascinating book—the first full-length biography of Dee based on primary historical sources—Glyn Parry explores Dee’s vast array of political, magical, and scientific writings and finds that they cast significant new light on policy struggles in the Elizabethan court, conservative attacks on magic, and Europe's religious wars. John Dee was more than just a fringe magus, Parry shows: he was a major figure of the Reformation and Renaissance.

Before Religion

Before Religion PDF Author: Brent Nongbri
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300154178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Examining a wide array of ancient writings, Brent Nongbri dispels the commonly held idea that there is such a thing as ancient religion. Nongbri shows how misleading it is to speak as though religion was a concept native to pre-modern cultures.

Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language

Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language PDF Author: Arielle Saiber
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351933671
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language brings to the fore a sixteenth-century philosopher's role in early modern Europe as a bridge between science and literature, or more specifically, between the spatial paradigm of geometry and that of language. Arielle Saiber examines how, to invite what Bruno believed to be an infinite universe-its qualities and vicissitudes-into the world of language, Bruno forged a system of 'figurative' vocabularies: number, form, space, and word. This verbal and symbolic system in which geometric figures are seen to underlie rhetorical figures, is what Saiber calls 'geometric rhetoric.' Through analysis of Bruno's writings, Saiber shows how Bruno's writing necessitates a crafting of space, and is, in essence, a lexicon of spatial concepts. This study constitutes an original contribution both to scholarship on Bruno and to the fields of early modern scientific and literary studies. It also addresses the broader question of what role geometry has in the formation of any language and literature of any place and time.

The Favourite

The Favourite PDF Author: Mathew Lyons
Publisher: Constable
ISBN: 184901809X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
In The Favourite, Mathew Lyons strips away the myth - and the self-mythologising - to find Sir Walter Ralegh in the one role in which his contemporaries knew him best: the courtier who could win the attention - and the heart - of Elizabeth I, while also being the 'most hated man in England'. Using first-hand accounts, Lyons uncovers the maze of ambition, desire and amorality in which Ralegh lived before he rose to fame - a brutal Elizabethan world riven with crime and corruption and riddled with traitors and spies.