Giordano Bruno's Infinitely Numerous Worlds and ‘Lunar’ Literature

Abstract

This paper analyses Giordano Bruno's dialogue De l’infinito universo e mondi (The Infinite Universe and Worlds), written during his stay in England (1583–85), in the context of his philosophical works and, particularly, within the context of scientific and imaginative writings such as Cyrano de Bergerac's Other Worlds (published posthumously in 1662) and Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638). The article also discusses the contemporary speculations of Galileo and Kepler regarding the existence of a plurality of worlds and the presence of creatures on the moon and their rapport with humans. Besides the imaginative, fantastic and pseudoscientific elements, attention is also given to religious implications and attitudes, especially in the case of Godwin, who, like his countryman John Wilkins—author of The Discovery of the Worlde in the Moone (1638)–was a bishop and therefore wanted to avoid any controversy with the church.

Notes

NOTES

1.  Titles and translations of Bruno's works are from Dorothy W. Singer, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950); all subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the text.

2.  Bruno seems to be unaware of the work of the English astronomer Thomas Digges published in 1576; for Digges's views of Copernican's theories, see F. R. Johnson and S. V. Starkey, “Thomas Digges, the Copernican System, and the Idea of the Infinity of the Universe in 1576,” The Huntington Library Bulletin V (1934): 69–117.

3.  Karl Guthke, The Last Frontier: Imagining Other Worlds from the Copernican Revolution to Modern Science Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 69.

4.  Cusanus, De docta ignorantia, in Opera omnia (Basilea, 1565), bk. II, chaps. 8–12.

5.  There are known to be two editions of John Wilkins's book, followed by others in 1640, 1684, 1707, 1802 with reprints of the first edition in 1972 and 1973 as well as translations into French in 1655, Le monde dans la lune, and into German in 1713. For this information and other valuable comments on Godwin, I have followed Guthke, The Last Frontier, 144–58. For Godwin's text I have consulted John Anthony Butler's edition for the Barnabie Riche Society (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1995); all quotations are from this edition.

6.  Godwin, The Man in the Moone, 71.

7.  Ibid., 91.

8.  In her essay Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought, Singer suggests that Gonzalez is a portrait of Bruno and that the passages in Godwin's work on salvation of the soul can be related to De l’infinito, universo et mondi (183–84).

9.  Godwin, The Man in the Moone, 103.

10.  On this subject, see The Man in the Moone, 60, nn. 17–18.

11.  Of the numerous studies on Cyrano, in addition to the study cited by Guthke (187–98), are the following monographic volumes from which invaluable information was drawn: W. De Spens, Cyrano de Bergerac (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1989); G. Mongrédien, Cyrano de Bergerac (Paris: Éditions Berger-Levrault, 1964); Madeleine Alcover, La pensée philosophique et scientificque de Cyrano de Bergerac (Genève: Droz, 1970); Edward W. Lanius, Cyrano de Bergerac and the Universe of Imagination (Genève: Droz, 1967); Haydn Mason, Cyrano de Bergerac: L’autre monde (Valencia: Grant & Cutler, 1984).

12.  On this subject, see Jean Rocchi, Giordano Bruno après le bÛcher (Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe, 2000), 174, n. 1, and Helen Védrine, La conception de la nature chez Giordano Bruno (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1967), 243–49. For Jacques Prévot Cyrano is the disciple of Giordano Bruno (Cyrano de Bergerac: Poète & Dramaturge [Paris: Belin, 1978]).

13.  For the French edition I have consulted M. Alcover, L’autre monde ou les estats et empires de la lune (Paris: Société des textes français modernes, 1996), which also provides an exhaustive study of the genesis of the text and some valuable comments on Bergerac's relation to Gassendi and Descartes (58–67, 93–107, 137–39, 167–8); on this relationship, see also Erica Harth, Cyrano de Bergerac and the Polemics of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 99–108. Bergerac mentions both philosophers in L’autre monde.

14.  Rocchi, Giordano Bruno après le bÛcher, 221.

15.  Bergerac, Other Worlds: The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and the Sun, trans. Geoffrey Strachan (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 33; all subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the text.

16.  Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper, ed. and trans. Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner (Connecticut: Archon Books, 1977), 91.

17.  Guthke expands this argument in The Last Frontier, 195–98.