The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

This edition includes:• New English translation• Critical introduction• 21 editor's notesA god grown old, a heaven hung with the trophies of his own scandals, and a council of the gods summoned to clear it out: with this scene Giordano Bruno turns moral philosophy into theatre, and the theatre into a mirror.Jupiter, coughing and silver-haired, convenes the assembly and admits that the sky has become a family album of seductions, thefts and follies. Momus names the offenders one by one, and constellation by constellation the beasts are evicted and virtues installed in their places: Truth where the Bear stood, Prudence with Dialectic, Law beside her mother Sophia, Judgement with its crown and sword, Fortitude, the Muses. But the heaven being reformed is not only the astronomers': it is the heaven within us, and the triumphant beast is whatever in us tramples the divine part. The dialogues move from sublime oratory to the lowest comedy, from the fate of two melons in a neighbour's patch to the lament of Egypt left widowed of its gods, and they arrive at an ethics of effort: virtue measured by the difficulty it costs, hands and intellect set to work, a cult judged by the life it produces.This edition offers Bruno's Italian prose in a literary translation made to be read today: natural and alive in the language of its readers, faithful to the substance, the voice, the tone and the images of the author. The volume opens with the critical introduction by Giovanni Gentile, which situates the work among Bruno's moral dialogues and guides the reader through its four-day council of the gods, its comic machinery and its argument.Add it to your library, and let the sky be reformed.