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Frankfort.These were the great Latin works he had been writing, perhaps begun in England itself;—the De Minimo, and the De Immenso, with the De Monade as a part of or introduction to the latter. The printing, however, was not begun till the following year: the censor’s permission was obtained for the first of them only in March 1591, and it appeared in the catalogue of the Spring bookmarket. He again sought and found patronage with an old friend of Sir Philip Sidney, one of the Wechels, famous printers of their day, in the house of another of whom (André) Sidney had lived. In the protocol-book of the council of Frankfort, under the date July 2, 1590, a petition of Jordanus Brunus of Nola is mentioned, in which he asks permission to stay in the house of the printer Wechel. This, as the book of the Burgomaster under the same date shows, was roughly refused:—“Soll man ime sein pitt abschlagen, und sagen, das er sein pfennig anderswo verzehre”—“his petition is to be refused and he is to be told go and spend his coin elsewhere.” In spite of this refusal, Wechel found Bruno lodging in the Carmelite Monastery, where he stayed, working with his own hands at the printing of his books, for some six months—until December, perhaps, of that year. Frankfort was the main centre of the book world in those days; to its half-yearly book-marts printers and sellers came from all parts of Europe to see the new books of the world, to dispose of their goods, to stock their houses. Among others in this year came the booksellers Ciotto and Bertano, who afterwards were witnesses before the Inquisition, and who stayed in the monastery probably in September of that year, where they met Bruno. In the dedication of the De Minimo, of date February 13, 1591, Bruno’s publishers wrote that “he had only the last folium of the work to correct, when by an unforeseen chance he was hurried away, and could not put the finishing hand upon it, as he had done on the rest of the work: he wrote accordingly asking us to supply in his name what by chance it had been denied him to complete.” The “unforeseen chance” may, as Sigwart suggests, have been the final putting into effect of the Council’s refusal to allow him to stay in the town, which may till then have remained a dead letter; or it may have been the summons to Zurich. He had made the acquaintance of a young Swiss squire, Hainzel, an Augsburger by birth, at whose castle of Elgg in Switzerland a gay and open hospitality was extended to a number of the bizarre and the learned spirits of the time: Hainzel had leanings towards the Black Arts—Alchemy and the rest—but had interest to spare for any others about which an air of mystery clung, such as Bruno’s Art of Memory and of Knowledge. Zürich, 1591.Bruno spent a few months with him near Zürich and wrote for him the De imaginum compositione, etc.—as a handbook of these arts. Another of the Frankfort pupils would also be in Zürich, the brilliant but erratic Raphael Eglin, who published in 1609 at Marburg (where he was professor of theology), a work Bruno had dictated in Zürich—the Summa Terminorum Metaphysicorum. Eglin suffered along with his friend Hainzel from the trickery of the Alchemists, to whom recourse was had in the hope of repairing the fortunes dissipated by the Squire of Elgg’s hospitality.[99] The Summa is dedicated in a letter of April 1595 (from Zürich) to Frederic a Salices, and in a personal reminiscence Eglin remarks on Bruno’s fluency of thought and speech—“standing on one foot, he would both think and dictate as fast as the pen could follow: so rapid was his mind, so forceful his spirit.”

March, 1591.In order perhaps to print the De Imaginum Compositione for Hainzel, or to complete the other works, Bruno returned to Frankfort about the beginning of March, 1591, and on the 17th of that month obtained permission to publish the De Minimo.[100] It is to this period probably that he referred when he spoke of himself before the Venetian tribunal, as having spent six months in Frankfort (Doc. 9). It was a second period of six months after his return from the Zürich visit, of which he omitted all mention—no doubt he had good reason for that.[101] At the autumn book-market his De Monade, De Immenso, and De Imag. Compositione, were ready[102]—the last works that he published. About the same time, on an evil day for himself, he responded to the invitation of a young Venetian patrician, and crossed over to his fatherland—the last of his free journeyings.

The Frankfort works are fully dealt with in the chapters on Bruno’s philosophy that follow: in their order they were De Minimo.(1) the De triplici Minimo et Mensura:—“On the threefold minimum and measurement, being the elements of three speculative and of many practical sciences”:—dedicated to Duke Henry of Brunswick. It is the first of three Latin poems, written somewhat after the manner of Lucretius, but with prose notes to each chapter or section. The style unfortunately seldom approaches that of Lucretius, either in Latinity or in poetic imagery, but the works are full of vigorous verse, and the force of the ideas suffers little from the fact that they are pressed into the Procrustean bed of rhyme and rhythm. The others were De Monade.(2) the De Monade, Numero et Figura:—“On the Monad, number and figure, being the elements of a more esoteric (secret, or perhaps inward) Physics, Mathematics, and Metaphysics”; and De Immenso.(3) the De Immenso et Innumerabilibus:—“On the Immeasurable and the Innumerable, or on the universe and the worlds.” Both are dedicated to Duke Henry. The three works together contain Bruno’s finished philosophy of God and of Nature, of the universe and of the worlds within it, as well as a criticism of the prevailing and contrary doctrines of the time.