Ciliberto writes with insight into Bruno’s state of mind throughout his career, never more so than when in prison; he also notices Bruno’s theatricality, and how it bears on the testimony of his fellow prisoners like Francesco Vaia and Francesco Graziano (lo zoppo, the cripple) who testified against him. “As so often happens to Bruno, the theatrical impulse trumps the instinct for survival, and as a good actor he is ready to perform even before an audience of the shiftless, of other play actors: in those terrible months in prison, the border shrinks between ‘play” and ‘life’”(486).
At the Venetian Inquisition trial at San Teodoro chapel next to San Marco, his Venetian host Mocenigo testified, “I heard him say there is no punishment for sins, …that the Virgin could not have given birth, that our Catholic faith is full of all kinds of blasphemies against the majesty of God…that the Golden Rule suffices for a good life…that he wanted to work on divinatory arts,…finally, he claimed that St Thomas and all the Doctors of Divinity knew nothing compared to him. If he questioned them, they would not know how to respond” (Firpo, Il processo..1993, p143).

Bruno’s Achilles heel, beginning in the Geneva and Toulouse years, was how he questioned others’ learning. Considering why Bruno left his one res University job in Toulouse, where he had been hired by a committee that included students, Ciliberto (p.125) notes that Bruno belittled all the learned: De le Faye in Geneva (which resulted in his being jailed…no academic freedom there), and two at Toulouse, Cujas, Prof of Civil Law, and the physician Dr Sanchez, who praised the Nolan on the title page of his book, Quod Nihil Scitur. Bruno write a marginal attack on the man praising him, maybe because of the physician’s materialism, maybe because of his asceticism. Our Neapolitan was neither ascetic nor materialist.
His idealism was sensualist, based on the Renaissance neo-Platonist Marsilio Ficino, whom he had probably memorized— as he had written a few books on memory, valued by French King Henry III, to whom Cantus Circaeus and others were dedicated. Memory was perhaps the Renaissance equivalent of our national security, a kind of knowing throughly. Bruno includes a Ficinian passage early in his play Candelaio; the conman assistant alchemist and astrological therapist Scaramure (here from the Caribbean) advises the lover Bonifacio,

“to be infatuated wit’ love comes most frequently wit’ a brief brief glance, one eye lock on other (like radar), and reciprocal, a ray of the glancer meet dat of the glanced at, ’n the light copulates wit’ de light, like waves” (I.10, p.17 my trans. 2014)

This magical explanation by a voodoo-obeah practitioner (in my version, a woman) comes after a wonderful scene of psychological analysis and prognosis. The therapist Scaramure asks the lover Boney, “Did dis event occur t’ru infatuation?”

Boney,”How’s that? Infatuation? In what sense?
Scar., “Videlicet, t’ru you havin’ seen her, but her not seein’ you.”
Boney, “Yes, that’s it. Through infatuation. (p.16)

Bruno knew Ficino so well that he was chased out of Oxford after his debate with resident Prof. Underhill, who after the debate had run to his rooms and taken Ficino off his shelf, accusing Bruno of having plagiarized him. Bruno’s academic drubbing at Underhill’s hands only served, through the usual conflict between town and gown, to raise his stature in London, where he came to be fêted by Fulke Greville, Robert Dudley, Sir Philip Sidney, and even Queen Elizabeth (I!).
Then, as in Geneva and Toulouse, Bruno satirized academics in his famous La cena de le ceneri (Ash Wednesday Supper) [See Limentani, Giordano Bruno a Oxford, 1937]. Bruno describes Underhill bedecked with a dozen rings, and like a modern rapper or prize-fighter, wearing a gold neck-chain, “After first contemplating his own gold neck chain, and looking at the breast of the Nolan, which may have been missing a button…twirling his mustache, spitting just a bit, raising his eyebrows, widening his nostrils, putting on a ruinous glance…” (Powers, Worlds of GB, 62).
Underhill was a protégé of both Leicester and Walsingham, who nominated him Bishop of Oxford six years later. The debate had been held to celebrate the visit of the Polish Prince Laski, though why the Queen so honored him is not clear; Ciliberto suggests it may have been a diplomatic attempt to include a fellow Catholic for the Prince (157). [Read in Laterza, 2007, hdback edition] ( )