Need help with Homework please!

[Tesserax]

Hi, I'm doing a mini-assignment for English where I need to research general things about Giordano Bruno and do a mini-presentation about him.

However, I'm honestly kind of lost and I don't know what to talk about. What I have so far is below:

He cultivated modern astronomy:
-Went further than Copernicus and proposed that stars were simply distant suns with their own planets, the theory of Cosmic Pluralism
-Insisted that the universe was infinite and consequently had no centre

He went against the church:
-He was against the idea of a hierarchical universe
-Was tried for heresy and burnt at the stake in 1600

In general, I really don't know what else to talk about generally and I was wondering if you guys could help me with some pointers, or even with a bit of research as I'm honestly kind of lost.

Thanks guys!

[yeehaw]

Maybe you could talk more about his personal life and upbringing, and question whether it had any correlation with his thoughts and him going against the church, ie was he born Catholic/Christian?

[Microcosm]

I found this:

Wherever he went, Bruno's passionate utterings led to opposition. During his English period he outraged the Oxford faculty in a lecture at the university; upon his return to France, in 1585, he got into a violent quarrel about a scientific instrument. He fled Paris for Germany in 1586, where he lived in Wittenberg, Prague, Helmstedt, and Frankfurt. As he had in France and England, he lived off the munificence of patrons, whom after some time he invariably outraged. In 1591 he accepted an invitation to live in Venice. Here he was arrested by the Inquisition and tried. After he had recanted, Bruno was sent to Rome, in 1592, for another trial. For eight years he was kept imprisoned and interrogated periodically. When, in the end, he refused to recant, he was declared a heretic and burned at the stake.

Source: http://galileo.rice.edu/chr/bruno.html

You could talk about the extent to which he pissed everyone off everywhere he went and the lifestyle that this brought him.

[Judean Zealot]

Make sure you make it clear that his execution was not the result of his scientific views (the heliocentric model), but rather of his philosophical ones (pantheism, denial of the trinity and incarnation).

The account of his "scientific martyrdom" is wholly inaccurate, and only goes to further a false science vs religion dichotomy.