‘The Giordano Bruno Problem’: Edgar Wind’s 1938 Letter to Frances Yates

Bernardino Branca University of Kent, UK

Volume 1, October 2021

Abstract
In September 1938, Edgar Wind wrote an eighteen-page letter to Frances Yates. In responding to
her queries concerning Giordano Bruno’s relationship with the birth of modern science, Wind
argued that Bruno ‘did not die as a martyr of Modern Science’. Wind saw in Bruno a follower of a
specific feature of the culture of the Italian Renaissance, that is, the ‘allegorical’ method of biblical
hermeneutics. This paper discusses how Wind’s letter deals with ‘the Giordano Bruno problem’ in
connection with Aby Warburg’s theme of the survival of antiquity, and how it eventually impacted
Yates’s seminal 1960s works on Bruno.

Keywords
Aby Warburg; Allegory; Edgar Wind; Frances Yates; Giordano Bruno; Hermetic tradition;
Renaissance magic; Survival of antiquity

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