| Summary: | In his preliminary epistle to his Théâtre du Monde (1552), the moralist Pierre Boaistuau elaborately praises the indomitable desire of knowledge, the better to oppose a classical command of ‘measure’ to the lack of it in baroque style. He relies on verbal restraint to reassert, by contrast, conservative views of the cosmos as a bounded world around a fixed Earth promised to the final catastrophe. The only knowledge worth having after the Fall is the awareness of one’s frail self, which anticipates Chassignet’s anti-humanist Mespris de la vie (1594) or Sir John Davies’s scorn of all human knowledge in his Nosce Teipsum (c. 1590). Giordano Bruno on the contrary chooses a poetics of exuberance to undermine received ideas, and contradicts this militant preaching of ‘vanity’ by his own militant ‘curiosity’, as befits a new Icarus moving in an infinite universe endlessly on the move, in a cosmos structured like language. Prolixity allows the freeing of language that in turn frees the mind, although the restrained form of a mannerist sonnet can still express the ever moving oxymoronic reality of the world. To the colonialist enslaving discovery of the ‘New World’, Bruno opposes the quest of a phenomenology of the infinite, resting on the very limitation of the senses, the better to assert a limitless plurality of worlds. Such poetics of intellectual heroism paradoxically characterises Bruno as the first philosopher of the Enlightenment, but leads him to be burnt at the stake in February 1600.
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