John Bossy, Professor of History at the University of York, is a distinguished historian of Catholicism in England whose Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (1985) was a remarkably original survey of the continuities of practice and feeling across centuries of confessional strife. His latest book is something of a dark jeu d’esprit, plunging readers into the murky waters of Elizabethan politico-religious espionage (waters swum elsewhere by Marlowe). Bossy first sketches the career of the pseudonymous spy “Henry Fagot,” a Catholic chaplain in the house of the French Ambassador in London from 1583 to 1585. “Fagot”—the name alluding to the stacked firewood atop which heretics were burned—was responsible for the delation, torture, and execution of English Catholics charged (some rightly, some not) with plotting the assassination of Queen Elizabeth and the installation of Catholic Mary of Scots upon the throne. Bossy then details the activities, in 1583-85, of Giordano Bruno, the Italian philosophical upholder of Copernicus cum renegade priest cum chaplain at the French Ambassador’s in London. During these years, Bruno wrote his literary masterpiece, La Cena de le Ceneri (Ash Wednesday Supper), a Platonic dialogue that recounts~dashamong much else—an adventurous voyage up the Thames by Bruno and friends (they’re on their way to dine at Whitehall with the poet and courtier Fulke Greville). Bruno liked to play with fire. Besides the improprieties more or less hidden in La Cena, he enjoyed, for example, saying Mass and hearing confession, although “he despised and detested Jesus and
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 10 Number 3, on page 76
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