Legacy: From Bruno to the Enlightenment

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), a former Dominican friar who spent much of his life as a wandering philosopher across Europe, pushed Copernican cosmology to a far more radical conclusion than Copernicus himself had ever drawn. In works such as De l'infinito, universo e mondi (1584), Bruno proposed that the universe was infinite, containing countless stars each potentially the center of its own planetary system, many of them possibly inhabited. Bruno was tried by the Roman Inquisition over roughly eight years on a wide range of theological charges, including denial of core Catholic doctrines such as the Trinity and transubstantiation, of which his cosmological speculation was only one strand among several; he was burned at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori in 1600. His later reputation as a martyr executed specifically for defending heliocentrism, while containing real elements, is generally regarded by historians as an oversimplification of a far more tangled theological trial.