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Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno. Philosopher/Heretic, Parrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, 352 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8090-9524-7.
When the officers of the law took Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) to the stake to burn him, they had to immobilize his tongue with an iron spike because of the terrible things he was saying (per Ie bruttisime parole che diceva, as an eyewitness reported).
Just imagine: one of the most sophisticated masters of the Italian language, as much at home in philosophical speculation as in the almost unbearably colorful tongue of the Neapolitans (he could easily win any competition in Neapolitan cursing) - just imagine such a man placed in a situation where he could make absolutely no use of language at all. Yet, as it turned out, Bruno managed to express with his silence more than he ever could have done with all his rhetorical mastery. By silently dying a martyr's death at the hands of the Inquisition, through the very act of performing such a death, he joined a great tradition that includes Socrates, Hypatia, Thomas More and others, philosophers who could no longer use words, but had only their own bodies, their dying flesh, with which to deliver a philosophical message.
One of the insightful (and delicately ironic) points author Ingrid Rowland makes in her biography of Bruno is precisely to frame his death in the terms of Christian martyrology: "In the prison of the Holy Office, Giordano Bruno found his own Gethsemane. Like the Jesus who, 'sorrowful onto death,'...