Giordano Bruno and the New World. From Universalism to Universal History

VIDAL, SILVINA P.

The Oxford Handbook of Universal History Writing

Oxford University Press

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2025; p. 1 - 15

The voyages of discovery, and in particular that of America, revealed the existence of unknown continents and societies. This posed a dilemma for early modern intellectuals, namely, how to integrate them in terms of time, space, religion and culture, in the face of a pluralising past and a world whose dimensions were growing considerably.Within this framework, we will argue that the conquest of America played a key role in Giordano Bruno’s philosophical reform, because it allowed him to develop a naturalised anti-Christian idea of universal history out of his cosmological, anthropological and religious universalism in order to explain not only the European religious crisis of the mid-sixteenth century, as is commonly claimed, but the history of humanity as a whole.