The Academy of Secrets

Name: The Academy of Secrets
Rating: 4.2 (993 reviews)

by S. J. Parris Book 2 in the Giordano Bruno Novels series.

First published 2020

Amazon

4.2(993)

Naples, 1568. The young Dominican Giordano Bruno is invited into the private academy of Giambattista della Porta, where scholars test new ideas in natural philosophy, memory and the hidden properties of the world. The gatherings offer Bruno a freedom of inquiry that his religious order cannot provide.

When danger closes around the academy and its members, Bruno discovers that intellectual experimentation can be treated as conspiracy or heresy. His attachment to della Porta’s circle also deepens his conflict between monastic obedience and the independent life of the mind that he increasingly desires.

Della Porta’s academy occupies the uncertain boundary between accepted learning and subjects that authorities may treat as occult or heretical. Bruno’s curiosity makes him useful but also vulnerable, because intellectual secrecy can hide both genuine experiment and criminal purpose. The mystery uses Renaissance natural philosophy to show how new knowledge develops inside institutions still constrained by religious and political suspicion.