Giordano Bruno was a philosopher during the Renaissance era who advanced the field significantly beyond the expanse of traditional thinking through his more controversial understanding of Christianity and his Hermetic Occultism. Initially raised by religious scholars, and himself becoming an ordained priest of the Dominican Order, Bruno was later deemed a heretic for his controversial beliefs and was found guilty by the Roman Inquisition. In 1600, Bruno was burned at the stake following a trial in Venice.
Bruno was from his very ordination as a Dominican friar considered a controversial religious figure. His interest in Hermeticism and other esoteric traditions, in conjunction with his denial of several Roman Catholic dogmas, led him to be tried by the church for going against their doctrines. Although conventionally people assume he was burned at the stake for his views on cosmology, such as supporting Copernican conceptions of the universe, more recent scholarship disputes this claim and suggests that the cause may have been concerns about theological differences or magic/the occult, rather than his astronomical views in particular.
He remains an enigmatic historical figure to study, with his life being defined by an early entry into the church’s orders, which would at once both nurture him and reduce him to ashes. As a young priest, he found himself gravitating toward forbidden reading material, and would travel from kingdom to kingdom reading, studying, and teaching, until he was kicked out or chose to leave out of personal safety concerns. Besides philosophy and theology, he also had interests in mathematics and how memory functions.