The Heroic Enthusiasts

Bruno wrote this in London in 1585, dedicated it to Philip Sidney, and was burned in Rome fifteen years later for refusing to recant. It is the strangest of his Italian dialogues: a sequence of sonnets, each followed by speakers arguing about what it means, on the passion that drives a mind past every comfortable limit.

The furore of the title is not madness and not romantic love, though Bruno borrows the whole vocabulary of Petrarch to describe it. His enthusiast is hunting something that will destroy him if he catches it. The Actaeon sonnet, in which the hunter becomes the stag and is torn apart by his own hounds, is the book's centre. Around it Bruno sets out an infinite universe, a divinity spread through matter rather than seated above it, and a soul whose proper business is to stop being comfortable.

This Reclaimed Press edition uses L. Williams's translation of 1887 and 1889, the first in English, in both its parts, with her preface and introduction. The sonnets are set as verse, line for line as printed. Working chapter navigation throughout.

Format: EPUB, DRM-free.