V. Spampanato, Castrovillari, 1899.

' See the reference to II danese, etc. in Bruno's Spaccio, Dial. /., iij.
♦ /. Bruni Oratio Valedictoria.
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE — BOYHOOD 3
The child was christened Fehpe (Philip). Perhaps his father named him after the heir to the throne of Charles V, as it would become a loyal soldier to do. We shall see how he came by the name of Giordano.
Gioan Bruno would seem to have been a caustic critic of life ; for his son tells us that when, after supper, a friend declared that he had never before felt so happy, Gioan retorted : " that is because you have never before been so frivolous." 1 Probably Gioan was a man of parts ; for it is accepted by most of the best authorities that he counted Tansillo, the Neapolitan poet, courtier and cavalier, among his friends.^ Tansillo, although not born at Nola, came of Nolan stock ; he never stayed long at Nola, but made a few hurried visits thither.* Felipe may have seen more of him, later on, at Naples. Anyhow, many works show how deeply Tansillo impressed his mind during the plastic years ; he introduces the poet into his dialogues ; he adopts Tan- sillo's style in his own poems, and he often equals his master, though, usually, he falls short of him in grace, smoothness and elegance; he even incorporates a little of Tansillo's work with his own. Any passing visit paid by Tansillo to Nola would produce a strong impression on the little lad; for the good folk around were of a different order.
In the cottages hard by dwelt certain members of his mother's family.* He tells us of a certain Scipione Saulino
^ Bruno, G ; Eroici Furori, P.I., Dial. II.
^ Mclntyre, for example, accepts it. Cpr. Mclntyre, J. L ; G. B., London, 1903,/. 5.
' Fiorentino ; loc. at. Luigi Tansillo, 1510-1568^ was a favourite of Pedro de Toledo, Viceroy of Spain, and of his son, and was their companion on land and sea. At first he wrote with unbridled licence, whereby he incurred the displeasure of the Church ; but he made his peace with the authorities and produced some excellent poetry, which was disfigured, however, by many faults of the style then in fashion. Before the Viceroy's death he was given a post in the Neapolitan Custom-House. Cfr. Rosalba, G ; Studi di lett., Nap. 1903, pp. 166 sqq. ' Fiorentino ; loc. cit.
4 GIORDANO BRUNO
who went once a year, on Good Friday, to his crony, the curate, to confess. Absolution was freely given, and, when the year came round again, " Father," he would say, " to- day's sins finish up the year " ; whereupon the good priest would reply, "And so does to-day's absolution. Go in peace and sin no more." ^
The rustics of the neighbourhood were a home-spun people, rough and ready of tongue and of caustic wit. They took the facts of life with unsophisticated directness and retained very ancient usages, celebrating the vintage with classic obscenity and shocking the Viceroy thereby.^ Al- though degraded by centuries of misgovernment and oppres- sion, the southern Italian had not lost his intellectual vigour or his readiness to abandon himself to the enjoyment of simple pleasures, as if all creatures were dwelling in the sunrise of eternity. The Nolans were markedly supersti- tious, even for a credulous age. They beheld spirits in deserted places — by an ancient temple and where the bodies of the plague-stricken had been buried ; poltergeists played tricks on them, and Bruno records how, when a child, he him- self beheld spirits on hills where beeches and laurels grew.^
The quick eye of the child noted the peculiarities of his neighbours and the small events of his life ; and he never forgot them. Years afterwards, when in exile, he introduces the honest, kindly folk of Nola, not without irony, as inter- locutors in his dialogues * ; he delights in recalling many details which he had observed — the produce of his father's garden, the melon-plot of Franzino, the smell of burnt hair when Vesta, the wife of Albentio, used curling-tongs, and how she would shake her head ; he remembers hearing the
' Bruno, G ; // Candelajo, Alio V, sc. xix.
" Miccio, S ; Vita di Don P. di Toledo, Archiv. Star, it, ix,p. 23.
' De Magia, Op. Lat. Ill, pp. 430, 431.
* Spaccio; II caballo.
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE — BOYHOOD 5
cuckoo when at Antonio Saulino's, the pupping of his bitch, the spoiling of a gown by Messer Danese, the tailor, and how he saw Paulino,, given to blasphemy, stoop to heave up a great shovelful of earth and break the red string which held his breeches up. Character after character, incident after incident, crowd in on his memory : he may have had personal experience of the bugs which infested the wooden bedstead of Costatino.^ The lad's eye was alive to beauty too ; to the pure sky, tremulous with excess of light, the mystery of the shadowy hills, the bounty of the corn-laden plain. In exile he recalls the glory and glamour of the world which were given to his childhood, and is never weary of thinking of " the golden fields of Nola " ; ^ his birthplace ever remained for him a place " blessed of heaven ; " ' he ranks the rich Campagna with Araby and the garden of the Hesperides,* speaks of himself and was known as " the Nolan," and calls his philosophy the Nolanese.^ Other Nolans felt like Bruno. Ambrogio Leone tells of one who, returning home after only two or three days' absence, cast himself on his native soil and kissed it with unspeakable rapture.
The observant child had often gazed across at Vesuvius from vine-bearing Cicala and noticed how bare and forbidding it looked. But one day his father took him thither, and he found its slopes covered with luxuriant trees and bountiful vegetation, while Cicala, in its turn, had become dark and dim and distant. " Astonished at the strange change," he writes, " I became aware, for the first time, that sight could deceive." * The seed of doubt was sown ; he would soon ask : " What are the grounds of certitude ? "
' Spaccio; Dial. Ill, iij. ^ Eroici Furori, P.I., Dial. II.
' Causa, Dial. I. * Orat. Valedict.
* Cena delle Ceneri. ° Bruno, G ; De Immenso, IV, iij.
6 GIORDANO BRUNO
Influences of the genius loci could not fail to affect an impressionable, imaginative child. To every Italian child the past calls with living voice ; antiquity is real ; some- times it lulls to sleep, sometimes is a rousing force ; it is never, as with the Northern child, a dull dream concerning men who were never really alive, whose voices come as the hollow croakings of Shades. Now, Nola was a poor little place but it had been a great and noble city; it was one of the most ancient in Italy ; it was the Uria of the Etruscans. The citizens boasted loudly of their descent from a Calchi- dian Colony. Thrice had Hannibal been repulsed from the gates. Nola had been the chosen home of Roman wealth and fashion ; the great Augustus died there. True, of its massive walls, its twelve gates and its two amphitheatres nothing remained ; ancient marbles were built into cottage and pigstye and vineyard-wall ; but the labourer's spade often opened up some sepulchre crowded with the famous funeral urns of Nola, and his plough would reveal the long buried treasures of ancient coin and medallion. The little Bruno saw many a classic custom observed at wedding feast and popular festival and even in religious rite. He would hear of famous citizens, of whom Nolans were very proud, such as Ambrogio Leone, the scholar, and Giovanni da Nola, the sculptor.'^ Felipe Bruno moved among a people who derived their life-blood from Etruscan and yet more ancient sources, from Greeks, Romans, Teutons, Moors and Spaniards ; they were quick, astute and versa- tile, very human, as volcanic as their soil, debased, but not so degenerate as they became after three more centuries of misrule.
Such were the influences we know of which moulded the mind of little Felipe in his earliest and most formative years.
' Berti, D ; Vita di G. B., 1889, cap. I.
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE — BOYHOOD 7
We do not know in what manner he was educated at Nola, but he must have been a promising pupil, for, at about the age of eleven, he was sent to Naples " to study humane letters, logic and dialectic " ^ : in other words, Latin language and literature, probably some Greek, philosophy, and the modes of effective reasoning and expression.^ He may have lodged at an uncle's house. One Agostino Bruno was a weaver of velvet in Naples at the time. He attended the public lectures of II Sarnese, probably one Vicenzo Colle of Sarno, who published, later on, a work called " The destruction of the destructions of Baldwin, which, moreover, the destroyer has fulfilled " * — an extraordinary title, de- signed, as was customary, to hit the eye of the reading public. Besides these public lectures, " I received," he says, " private lessons in logic from Fra Teofilo da Var- ano, an Augustinian monk, who afterwards lectured on Metaphysic in Rome."* Bruno also told an acquaintance, in 1585, that an Augustinian monk, whose name the hearer did not catch or did not remember, had been his main teacher in philosophy.^ It is noteworthy that in two of his works ® he calls the interlocutor who expresses his own opinions, Teofilo. Bruno claimed to be a " lover of God " himself ; ' but it would be quite in his manner to discharge at the same time some sense of obligation to Teofilo da Varano ; and Bruno was not one to be unmindful of the few
* Cfr. Bertij op. cit. Doc. vij.
" Cfr. Mclntyre ; op. cit.,p. I2i, note i.
' Destructio destructionum Baldovini, quas quidem destructor adim- plevit. Neap., Matth. Cancer, 1554.
• Doc. vij.
' Auvray, L ; Mdm. d. I. SocUti d. Vhist. d. Paris et d. File de France, t. xxiv,pp. 288-299, sub Dec. 7.
° Cena; Causa.
' Triginta Sigillorum explicatio ; Ad excell. Oxon. Acad. Pro- cancellarium.
8 GIORDANO BRUNO
benefits he received. It is clear that the very young scholar received an impetus towards speculative thinking from Fra Teofilo. But independent thinking had well nigh ceased to be in Italy; and in most of the Protestant centres of learning also. The contests between the Papacy and the Reformers had led to the vigorous enforcement of opposed dogmas throughout Europe, and throughout Italy the edicts of Trent ran under the protecting shadow of the neigh- bouring Vatican.
Bruno tells us that, when a boy, he studied the works of Peter of Ravenna on memory.* The scholars of the Renaissance had discovered how much the ancient orators employed dodges for remembering, and they studied the mnemonics of Quintus Cornificius, which they and Bruno attributed to Cicero.* They directed their attention to the subject ; for a good memory was a precious possession even after the art of printing by type was discovered, since books were very dear and, owing to a want of developed organi- zation in the book-trade, were hard to come at and often had to be fetched from afar. Peter of Ravenna's " Phoenix " ^ went through several editions. Cornificius and all the older writers made use of visual memory, since that is stronger than auditory memory in most people, and taught how to imagine some vacant space, such as a temple, and fill it with suggestive images, thus using the principle of the association of ideas,* which Aristotle had written of.^ Later, Bruno interwove the mnemonics of Peter Ravenna
' Triginta sig. explic, sub Tabula.
" Cantus Circaus. But P. Manutius, who published the Rhetoricunt ad C. Herennium lib. iv. at Venice in 1564, declared the authorship to be uncertain.
" Foenix Dom. P. Ravennatis tnemoriae magistri Ven. 1491.
' Cfr. Middleton, A. E ; Metnory systems, old and new. N, V. 1888.
"■ Aristotle, De mem etremin., c. 2, 451^, i8 ; 452a, 14.
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE — BOYHOOD 9
and other authors, who followed Cornificius closely, with his own psychological and metaphysical conclusions, and his knowledge of the subject proved to be useful as an introduction and means of livelihood in city after city, and especially in France and Germany, where much attention was given to the subject and where fresh books on memory were produced for each generation, at least, during the 16th century.-*-
What career should he follow ? Education was difficult to obtain and very expensive. The times were troubled. Neapolitans were beggared by the heavy taxes imposed to put down the Protestant revolt against Philip in the Low Countries ; the civil administration was abominable ; the police and even the judges were corrupt ; brigands infested the country-side and increased the desolation which earth- quake, famine and pest had brought about. What Bruno now witnessed or heard of branded itself in his memory. " If [Hydra] long for carrion," said he, when in England, " let him go stay in the Campagna or the highway between Rome and Naples, where so many robbers are quartered ; for there at every step he will have more sumptuous ban- quets of fresh flesh than in any other part of the world." ^ Even high society was infested by cheats and thieves ; the kingdom was riddled with heresy, and heretics were pur- sued and exterminated with barbarous cruelty. Turkish buccaneers raided the coast, burning and slaying and capturing women and children for the slave-market.^
The lad was in love with learning ; thought he had caught a glimpse of the " high white star of Truth " ; there
1 Vide Allgemeine Encyclopddie d. Wissenschaften u. Kiinste. Hrsq.