Lockdown felt like a good time to take on a big reading challenge, but even so Frances Yates’s ‘Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition’ (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964) was heavy going. It traces the progression of Renaissance thought from a magical to a scientific basis, via the influence of the heretical philosopher whose independence of thought eventually led to him being burnt at the stake in Rome in 1600.
As Yates explains, magically-inclined Renaissance thinkers such as Pico Della Mirandola (about whom Yates could not be more enthusiastic) were convinced that the body of writing ascribed to ‘Hermes Trismegistus’ dated back to the time of Moses, and therefore prefigured important aspects of Christianity. After careful literary analysis correctly dated the texts, the intellectual foundations of this school of thought were critically undermined. But the images, systems and cloudy cogitations of the Hermeticists and Cabbalists remain of interest for art history, and have woven their way into popular culture. Just look at how many times the Renaissance magus John Dee pops up in films, novels and even opera.
After staggering to the end of Yates’s magisterial work (she expects the reader to breeze through copious footnotes in ancient Greek, Latin, German and Italian), I remembered the historical crime novels by S J Parris which feature Bruno as hero. ‘Prophecy’ (HarperCollins, £7.99, 2011) is the second in the series after ‘Heresy’ and on picking it up found the weird talk of ‘decans’, gods, astrological signs and animated statues was immediately familiar.
John Dee and his nefarious assistant Edward Kelley crop up in the first scene, as the pair conduct a magical ceremony before Bruno in Dee’s house in Mortlake, Bruno being a regular visitor to Dee’s vast and valuable library of occult books. Parris (the pseudonym of the writer Stephanie Merritt) has obviously consulted Yates as well as drawing from John Bossy’s groundbreaking and absorbing ‘Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair’ (Yale UP, 1991). Bossy examines Bruno’s stay in London in the 1580s, when he was resident in the house of the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, and living under the protection of the French King Henri IV. What was he really up to, asks Bossy, apart from hobnobbing with Sir Philip Sidney and other English intellectuals fascinated by this dangerously subversive Continental thinker.
It’s a terrific milieu in which to set a murder mystery, and Parris certainly doesn’t disappoint with the details as Bruno roams from tavern to Royal palace. Castelnau is promoting the cause of Mary, Queen of Scots and hoping for the restoration of Catholicism in England. Keeping a close eye on events in the French Embassy is spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham (Sidney’s father-in-law), on the lookout for any secret communications with the Catholic queen.
Elizabeth fears assassination plots with good reason, and the murder of a young woman at court, found with an occult symbol carved into her flesh, could be a warning that the Queen is next, or even a ruse to throw suspicion on Mary and her supporters.
It’s deeply worrying for the embassy and the Catholic faction, so brainy Bruno is set to follow the clues and solve the puzzle, while keeping certain secrets of his own. Parris’s pungent, noisy Tudor London, all candlelit interiors, filthy streets and clandestine boat trips, is utterly compelling. Bruno faces peril daily simply for being foreign. French, Spanish, Italian: xenophobes really don’t care which. But since England at the time was the outcast of much of Europe, its monarch an excommunicate and heretic, there were reasons for being inward-looking.
I am generally hopeless at guessing whodunnit but in this case I was on to the baddie by about the halfway mark. Bruno’s narrow escapes from what seems like certain death have a contrived, cinematic quality about them, and how does a mysterious assailant get around seemingly unobserved while carrying a crossbow? It’s not like he can put it in his pocket. Loose threads are presumably taken up in the next book in the sequence, ‘Sacrilege’. Despite a few cavils, this is a cracking read and a worthy escape into a world where the dangers are refreshingly different to those of today.