Bruno was born in 1548 in a small village in the Kingdom of Naples with the name Filippo. He lived a simple life before travelling to the city of Naples to pursue his education. There, he joined the monastery of San Domenico, where he adopted the name Giordano. Bruno was very successful within the monastery, even being brought to Rome in 1571 to speak with the Pope about his philosophy. Eventually, however, the breadth of Bruno’s reading began to move his philosophy more toward what he is known far today: a kind of natural mysticism. His views were seen as heretical and Bruno was forced to flee the monastery in 1576, travelling through Europe and writing the bulk of his works as he did so.
Bruno wandered in Northern Italy, beginning in the Republic of Genoa and moving East into Venice before coming West again and moving into France. In 1581, Bruno reached Paris and continued his writings. Further North, his ideas seemed to be better received, as Bruno had his greatest success in Paris. Only a couple years later, in 1583, Bruno moved once again to England, as described in Dorothea Singer’s biography of Bruno.
While entertainment for a visiting Polish prince was underway, Bruno visited Oxford and, unimpressed with some of the haughty academics in attendance, debated with them vehemently. Bruno eventually settled in London, where he produced some of his best work. While he was only in London for a year or two, Bruno wrote prolifically in Italian, not Latin. Once again, though, Bruno’s radical ideas proved to bring too much negative attention, causing him to return to France when the opportunity arose around 1585. Not long after returning to Paris, Bruno moved once again, this time to the German states (as J. Lewis McIntyre goes into depth on in his book on Bruno), after a seemingly unflattering debate after he published 120 theses arguing against an Aristotelian tradition of philosophy widely taught at Sorbonne in Paris. Bruno then travelled to Marburg and nearly became a student at the university, but decided against it and was subsequently driven out of the city for some form of controversial opinion.
From Marburg, Bruno arrived in Wittenberg, where he took up a professorship for a couple of years, having been allowed to lecture provided he did not teach anything that went against the Lutheran doctrine. He is said to have been well-liked by his colleagues at the university during his time there. Unfortunately, he ended up having to leave Wittenberg as the Calvinist faction of the Protestant Church in the German states took power over the Lutheran faction. The Calvinists labelled Bruno’s ideas, unsurprisingly, as heresy, forcing him to flee once again. In 1588, Giordano moved to Prague, where Bruno attempted to gain the patronage of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, but only got a small sum before moving to Helmstadt to engage with more academia. Bruno continued moving around, producing more writings while in Frankfort and Zurich.
In 1591, after receiving a letter from a Venetian noble interested in tutelage from Bruno, he finally returned to Italy. Bruno went to live with the noble, Giovanni Mocenigo, in 1592, and soon after Mocenigo turned in and denounced Bruno. He was detained and examined, eventually being transferred to Rome in 1593 and executed in February of 1600.