Abstract

The essay examines the practice of judgement in Giordano Bruno’s comedy Candelaio. The comic effect of the piece is largely due to the asymmetry between those with poor judgment and those who are intellectually superior to them. Bruno addresses the importance of an untroubled power of judgement both in the prologue and in various passages of the text. The characters’ practice of judgement thus constitutes the plot of Candelaio and is at the same time explicitly thematized throughout the text. The essay shows that the representation of judgment in Candelaio is intertextually connected with the history of comedy in the Cinquecento. Comedy writers such as Bibbiena and Machiavelli already discovered the practice of judgement as a source of laughter. Bruno follows their models but complicates the plot and deepens the reflection on judgment by drawing on ideas from his work De umbris idearum, in which he lays the foundations of his epistemology. In Candelaio, however, Bruno is not interested in spreading philosophical views. It is rather a question of mocking social conventions, the contingency of which is uncovered.