Giordano Bruno to Sir Philip Sidney: Two Dedicatory Letters

The letters Giordano Bruno wrote to Sir Philip Sidney, prefacing his Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante (1584) and the Eroici furori (1585), are well known to Bruno scholars and have occasionally been studied also by those concerned with Sidney. They are, however, rarely read closely in the light of what was a daring choice on Bruno’s part, given the social chasm that separated him (a mere gentleman attendant on the French Ambassador in London, Michel de Mauvissière) from the illustrious English courtier. Nevertheless, neither letter is couched in the traditional terms of courtly flattery. Rather, Bruno is involved in a complicated balancing act aimed at bringing into agreement a choice of Sidney as his ideal English reader with a clear statement of his own philosophy in its irreconcilable distance from Sidney’s militantly Protestant Christianity. The following essay considers the reasons for Bruno’s choice of Sidney as his dedicatee, underlining the importance of recent studies that are placing a new emphasis on Sidney’s parliamentary and legal activities in the years of Bruno’s stay in London (1583–1585) as preparation for his future as a European magistrate: a prospect that would be curtailed by his untimely death in the Netherlands in 1586. Giordano Bruno’s letters to Sir Philip Sidney raise a number of issues relevant to the works and concerns of Letizia Panizza, such as liberty of thought in an early modern world of newly plural religious beliefs, and the role of women and the Petrarchan tradition in such a world.