“Now Bruno was that Nolan ... a professed Dominican who some twenty-three years agone began to doubt of Transubstantiation ... then forthright to deny it, and likewise the virginity of the Blessed Mary. He migrated to Geneva, ... whence, not approving himself altogether sound in his Calvinism (than which, nevertheless, nothing leads straighter to atheism), he was driven to Lyons, whence to Toulouse, from whence he passed on to Paris, where he was a professor, but extraordinarius, as he found that the professor ordinarius was obliged to attend Mass. Thence to London, where he published a little book called the ‘Beast Triumphant,’ meaning thereby the Pope, whom your party is wont to honor with the name of beast.[2] From here to Wittenberg, where, if I am not mistaken, he lectured publicly for two years. Having gone on to Prague, he published there the works, ‘On the Boundless,’ ‘On the Innumerable Worlds,’ and yet one other, ‘On the Shadows of Ideas,’ in which he taught horrible and moreover most absurd things, as that there are innumerable worlds, that the soul passes from one body into another, ... that magic is a good thing and permissible, the Holy Spirit is nothing but the soul of the world, and that this was what Moses meant when he wrote, ‘The spirit of God moved on the face of the waters,’ that the world is eternal.... In a word, whatever is asserted by the Pagan philosophers, whatever by our older or newer heretics he (Bruno) maintained. “From Prague he went on to Brunswick and Helmstadt, and there for a time is said to have taught. Then to Frankfurt for the publishing of certain books, and later fell into the hands of the Inquisition at Venice, whence when they had had enough of him, he was sent to Rome. Frequently examined by the Holy Office ... of the Inquisition, convicted by the highest theologians, he now besought eighty days that he might consider, now promised recantation, now defended his point anew, now obtained another eighty days; but was really doing nothing but make a fool of the Pontiff and the Inquisition. “So that, nearly eight years after he had come before the Inquisition here, on the ninth of February in the Palace of the Grand Inquisitor, there being present the Most Illustrious Cardinals of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, ... theologians of counsel, and the secular magistrate, governor of the city, Bruno was brought in, and on bended knees heard sentence pronounced against him. And it was in this way: the story of his life was told, of his studies and teachings, and with what diligence and fraternal admonishment the Inquisition had sought to effect his conversion, and what obduracy and impiety he had shown. Then they defrocked him, as we say, and straightway excommunicated him and handed him over to the secular arm to be punished, asking that this be done with clemency and without the shedding of blood.