Gee, I feel so much better

by Diane

“The Vatican said Tuesday that fewer witches were burned at the stake during the Inquisition than is generally believed.”

Mmf. All right, this would be good news, if true. What makes it difficult for me to swallow is the source…the same way I had a little difficulty on first hearing the news that “Cromwell didn’t kill nearly as many Irish people as we thought” coming from British scholars.

It’d be interesting to see what some scholars the Vatican didn’t approve might have to say on the subject.

And I’m still waiting for the Vatican to apologize for what they did to Giordano Bruno, but I think I may have a long wait, because he was a Neoplatonist as well as a Copernican, and the Neoplatonism probably annoyed the Renaissance Church a whole lot more than his saying the planets went around the Sun. (He also said that all planets had life, and that they themselves were giant intelligent beings. I suppose that idea, too, could have really gotten under some people’s skins.)

(A fascinating line, too, in the above-linked article: “1591 found him in Frankfurt. Apparently, during the Frankfurt Book Fair, he received an invitation to Venice from one Zuane Mocenigno, who wished to be instructed in the art of memory, and also heard of a vacant chair in mathematics at Padua…” [chuckle] Networking, then as now. But the image of Bruno stalking around the big convention center in Frankfurt gave me a start…)

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