 Bruno’s philosophy, his views on religion and his execution earned him notoriety. “It is reasonable to denounce Bruno”, wrote the French mathematician, philosopher and theologian Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), “as one of the most evil men that the earth has ever borne” (Mersenne 1624 [2005, 173]). What perturbed Mersenne and many others, including Descartes, was not so much Bruno’s doctrines concerning the earth’s mobility, the elemental homogeneity of the universe, the plurality of worlds and other cosmological innovations, but rather the underlying doctrine of the World Soul and its perceived corollaries: pantheism, demonology, magic, metempsychosis, the claim that God’s absolute power necessitated an infinite product, the essential identity of human, plant and animal souls, the elimination of individual responsibility, denial of miracles—in short, “atheism”.