The Heroic Frenzies

De gli eroici furori is the last of the six Italian dialogues Giordano Bruno published in London during his stay in England. It was printed in 1585 by John Charlewood under a fictitious Paris imprint and dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. The work is a sequence of philosophical dialogues built around sonnets and emblems, in which interlocutors comment on poems describing the soul’s passionate pursuit of divine truth. Bruno adapts the conventions of Petrarchan love poetry and Neoplatonic theories of furor, the divine madness praised by Plato and Ficino, but he directs desire not toward a woman but toward the infinite divinity manifest in nature. The most famous image is his reworking of the myth of Actaeon, the hunter who glimpses the goddess Diana and is transformed into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds: for Bruno, the seeker who contemplates the divine in nature is transformed into what he seeks, and his thoughts consume his former self. The dialogue closes with an allegory of nine blind men healed through the waters of Circe’s vessel. The Heroic Frenzies is less technical than the memory treatises but is often regarded as Bruno’s most beautiful and personal statement of his mystical philosophy. The archive offers the 1964 English translation by Paul Eugene Memmo, presented in substantial part.

What it contains

• Dedicatory argument to Sir Philip Sidney
• Apology addressed to the women of England
• Part One: five dialogues on the soul’s heroic love, with sonnets and emblems
• The myth of Actaeon and Diana as an image of mystical transformation
• Part Two: five dialogues ending with the allegory of the nine blind men