There is nothing absurd, nothing obscure, nothing impious in this book, except to mules and asses - Ingrid Rowland's Giordano Bruno

In response to Bibliographing Nicole's cruel mockery, this week it's nothing but proper book reviews. Today, Giordano Bruno (2008) by Ingrid Rowland.

OK. How to start one of these things? Joan Acocella, in a New Yorker review, begins with juicy details of Bruno's death, burned at the stake as a heretic on Ash Wednesday, 1600. He rode a mule from the Inquisition prison; he wore a leather gag. Then a bit on the book, then three pages summarizing it, then back to the book itself for a few paragraphs. She has a lot of room and can sprawl a bit. Anthony Gottlieb, in a more compressed New York Times piece, also has to tell us who Bruno was before he can get to the book.

I don't want to do all that. If you're reading this and don't know who Giordano Bruno was, ya got the internet, right? Unless someone printed this out for you, I guess. Or maybe it's being read to you over the phone. Doesn't seem very likely. But that's not my point.

Acocella's summary of Bruno's life is excellent. If it's only worth ten minutes to you, read that, and not Ingrid Rowland's book. The book is first-rate, though. There cannot be many other scholars who have such a comprehensive view of the artistic and intellectual times. Her imaginative conception of Naples and Venice is thorough, completely convincing, but I think she's just as good crossing the Alps with Bruno to Geneva, Paris, London and all over Germany. She never pushes the evidence, and acknowledges the huge gaps in what we know of Bruno's life and travels. Both reviewers seem to find this irritating.

They also both criticize Rowland for "too little examination of [Bruno's] ideas." Can they be serious? They want more space devoted to neo-Platonist conceptions of the celestial spheres, or the influence of the Kabbalah and scholasticism on Bruno's idea of the infinite? Really? Isn't that what the bibliography is for? Rowland's greatest conceptual success is treating Bruno more like an imaginative writer than as a philosopher or proto-scientist. For example, when Rowland discusses, extensively, the metaphor of the forest in neo-Platonist writings, she is talking about ideas. The metaphor is itself an idea.

I can attest that Giordano Bruno is readable. Quite good, actually. I read The Expulsion of the Triumphal Beast (1584) several years ago. It's plenty difficult, but also funny, in the spirit of Lucian. Rowland has convinced me to read The Heroic Frenzies, at least, forthcoming, translated by Ingrid Rowland. Just a taste of Triumphal Beast, also translated by Rowland (although the old Imerti translation I read seems just as good), a bit of earthy satire of omnipotence:

"MERCURY: [Jove has] ordered that today at noon two of the melons in Father Franzino's melon patch will be perfectly ripe, but that they won't be picked until three days from now, when they will no longer be considered good to eat... That from the dung of her ox fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio's foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim's progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung whenever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random." (Dialogue I, Part 3)

And it continues on, with Jove deciding on the number of hairs singed by a curling iron, when a woman loses a tooth, which food will be converted into the semen that impregnates Ambrogio's wife (leeks in millet and wine sauce). In the title of the post, I put a quotation by a student of Bruno's which Rowland found in the margins of a copy of Paracelsus, now in the amazing Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel. Well, when it comes to Paracelsus, I'm a mule and/or an ass, but for at least a few of Bruno's books, he's closer to correct. A few. Closer - still lot's that's absurd and obscure. I think I'll skip On the Scrutiny of Species and the Combinatory Lamp of Ramon Llull, and One Hundred and Twenty Articles Against Mathematicians and Philosophers, and, let's see, much, much more. If you read them, come on back and let me know all about it.

One criticism of my own: the publisher should have sprung for illustrations. I am sure Rowland wanted them, and I blame the publisher. On the other hand, whoever insisted on the extra-short chapters was correct; Rowland uses them with artist's sense of momentum, building up to the single long chapter, when Bruno finds himself in an Inquisition prison. He spent ten years, the rest of his life, in one prison or another.

I have actually, full disclosure, seen Rowland once, from a distance, walking across the University of Pittsburgh campus. This was several years ago.

I'm not so sure that this was really a book review. Tomorrow, a real one.

By the way, a medieval and/or early modern literature blog along the lines of Wuthering Expectations - call it Gargantua Furioso, maybe, or how about Orlando Quixote - would be something I would very much enjoy reading.

The whole world in a book

Landívar's Rusticatio Mexicana is part of a tradition of describing the whole world in a book. Anyway, some enormous chunk of it. Landívar's Latin poem on beavers reminded me that Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton wrote his own ode to the beaver* in his enormous Poly-Olbion (1613/1622), his attempt to describe all of England in verse - the history, the rivers, the animals, everything:

Being bodied like a boat, with such a mighty tail
As served him for a bridge, a helm, or for a sail,
When kind did him command the architect to play,
That his strong castle built of branchèd twigs and clay;

And then it goes on and on like that. And then on some more. Drayton claims the idea for the sled came from watching beavers drag branches across the snow.

The poly-whatever impulse goes back to Pliny, at least, but early modern writers really went to town with it. The all-time champion must be the 17th century German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher,** who wrote numerous books, on China, geology, music, and everything, and planned many, many more, mostly on enormous topics. If I remember correctly, one of his ideas was to write a book cataloguing the heights of all the trees in the world. Not all of the species of trees - all of the individual trees.

The idea is still alive. Here is Borges skewering Pablo Neruda's Cantos, in "The Aleph" (1945):

'Only once in my life have I had occasion to look into the fifteen thousand alexandrines of the Polyolbion, that topographical epic in which Michael Drayton recorded the flora, fauna, hydrography, orography, military and monastic history of England. I am sure, however, that this limited but bulky production is less boring than Carlos Argentino's similar vast undertaking. Daneri had in mind to set to verse the entire face of the planet, and, by 1941, had already dispatched a number of acres of the State of Queensland, nearly a mile of the course run by the River Ob, a gasworks to the north of Veracruz, the leading shops in the Buenos Aires parish of Concepción, the villa of Mariana Cambaceres de Alvear in the Belgrano section of the Argentine capital, and a Turkish baths establishment not far from the well-known Brighton Aquarium. He read me certain long-winded passages from his Australian section, and at one point praised a word of his own coining, the colour "celestewhite," which he felt "actually suggests the sky, an element of utmost importance in the landscape of the Down Under." But these sprawling, lifeless hexameters lacked even the relative excitement of the so-called Augural Canto. Along about midnight, I left.'

* In this case, a species of English (Welsh?) beaver, already extinct when Drayton was writing.

** For more on Kircher, I would go to Ingrid Rowland's The Ecstatic Journey, or the essays in Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, neither of which I have read.