Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) is one of the great figures of early modern Europe, and one of the least understood. This biography establishes him once and for all as a peer of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Galileo - a thinker whose vision of the world prefigures ours.

Ingrid D. Rowland lives in Rome, where she teaches at the University of Notre Dame's School of Architecture, and is a regular essayist for the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. She is the author of many books, including The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery, also published by the University of Chicago Press.