Giordano Bruno and the embassy affair

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Bibliographic Information

Giordano Bruno and the embassy affair

John Bossy

Yale University Press, 1991

Available at  / 11 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [282]-289) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

This book tells a true detective story set mainly in Elizabethan London during the years of cold war just before the Armada of 1588. The mystery is the identity of a spy working in a foreign embassy to frustrate Catholic conspiracy and propaganda aimed at the overthrow of Queen Elizabeth and her government. The suspects in the case are the inmates of the house, an old building in the warren of streets and gardens between Fleet Street and the Thames. These include the ambassador, a Frenchman, his wife and daughter, his secretary, his clerk and his priest, the tutor, the chef, the butler, and the concierge. They also include a runaway friar, the Neapolitan philosopher, poet and comedian Giordano Burno. Others in the cast are Queen Elizabeth, her formidable secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham, and King Henri III of France; poets, courtiers and scholars; statesment, conspirators, go-betweens and stool-pigeons. When not in London, the action takes place in Paris and Oxford; a good deal of it happens on the river Thames. The hero or villian, who calls himself Fagot, does his work most effectively, is not found out, and disappears. In the first part of the book these events are narrated. In the second the spy is identified and his story put together.

Table of Contents

  • Part 1 A dog in the night time: Salisbury court
  • on the river
  • confessions
  • dialogues, and a small riot
  • last days in Arcadia
  • under the volcanoe notes. Part 2 Veritas filia temporis: a coincidence of opposites - a priest in the house, communications with the enemy notes
  • Bruno at large - London, the malcontent, Paris notes
  • Bruno recaptured - man, dog
  • politick, priest notes. Epilogue - Fagot at the stake notes, text
  • two notes - a note on Castelnau's house, a note on Giovanni Cavalcanti
  • sources and literature.

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