Italian astronomer and Dominican friar Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), found guilty of heresy by the Roman Inquisition and burned at the stake, has long been an enigma of early modern European philosophy. His central 1586 work On the Heroic Frenzies has shown a particular need for a fresh examination. This vibrant bilingual edition, annotated by celebrated Bruno scholar Ingrid D. Rowland, features the text in its original Italian alongside an elegant, accurate English translation. On the Heroic Frenzies is at once a philosophical dialogue, an anthology of love poetry, and a collection of sonnets, songs, and emblems – sometimes borrowed from other writers, but primarily Bruno’s own. Rowland’s detailed introduction and extensive footnotes highlight the philosophical sources, Biblical allusions, and biographical elements that make Bruno’s work both richly conceived and often challenging to understand. Providing cohesive insights into Bruno’s text, Rowland’s edition of On the Heroic Frenzies is a helpful guide for those new to his work.

This book provides an introduction to topological groups and the structure theory of locally compact abelian groups, with a special emphasis on Pontryagin-van Kampen duality, including a completely self-contained elementary proof of the duality theorem. Further related topics and applications are treated in separate chapters and in the appendix.

Published in London in 1584, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast is Giordano Bruno’s first work of moral philosophy. It is dedicated with a long Explicatory Letter to Elizabeth I’s most cultured courtier, Sir Philip Sidney. It is a book about moral reform, expelling the beasts of evil, and putting virtues in their place. Its theme is presented as an allegorical drama in which ancient myths assume modern meanings questioning the ways in which moral and religious reform have been conceived in both the ancient world and the cultures of Renaissance Europe. This new Italian text, based on the original printed text of 1584 held in the British Library, presents a less modernized version than those presently available, while maintaining a modern page format. The aim is to provide a text closer to the sound of Bruno’s original mix of classical Tuscan Italian and Neapolitan dialectical forms. This edition also presents a new translation designed to render Bruno’s complex and baroque Italian into easily readable modern English. Hilary Gatti introduces The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, underlining Bruno’s meta-literary reflection on the nature of allegory and myth as well as the dramatic structure of his text. Drama, philosophy, and religion combine in this work to give an epic dimension to the perennial cosmic battle between evil and good.