V. GIOBDANO BBUNO. By THOMAS WHITTAKER. THE interest excited by the personality of Giordano Bruno must always have prevented his name from being quite for- gotten. But for two centuries after his death his writings were very little known. It was not until 1830 that the Italian works were collected, and no complete edition of the Latin works exists even now. Within the present century, however, not only have the events of Bruno's life formed the subject of more than one investigation, but his philo- sophy also has attracted new attention. This renewed in- terest in Bruno may perhaps be ascribed to the historical spirit of the age. But the study of his works, besides con- firming the impression which his intellectual power and philosophical genius produced at first throughout Europe, and which has perpetuated itself in the history of philo- sophy, will in the end make it clear that his ideas have still a direct bearing on thought. The investigations that have been mentioned above have added much to our knowledge of the life of Bruno. The materials for his biography were till lately, besides the letter of Scioppius written from Home on the 17th of February 1600 (the day when Bruno was burnt in the Campo di Fiora), chiefly the occasional references to events of his life that are to be found in his works. All that could be known at the time was embodied by Bartholmess in the first volume of his monograph on Bruno, published in 1846. Since then, documents have been discovered at Venice, con- taining the records of his examination by the Inquisition there, and have been published along with a new biography by Prof. Berti (1868). The same writer has published more recently (1880) copies with which he had been furnished of the Protocols of the Inquisition at Borne relating to the last year of Bruno's imprisonment. These were obtained by a research in the archives of the Vatican which the Boman revolution of 1848 made it possible to begin but not to finish. The principal facts that have been established by these and other documents are given by Prof. Sigwart in an essay included in his Kleine Schriften (1881). The exact year of Bruno's birth was fixed for the first time by the Venetian documents. He was born in 1548 at
