Giordano Bruno

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So today's subject was a mathematician, a philosopher, and astronomer, and occultist, and, according to the Catholic Church of the sixteenth century Italy, a heretic uh. He was also really comfortable writing pretty scathing critiques of people he disagreed with. We are going to talk about Giordano Bruno today, who spoiler alert met a bad end because of his views. But there's actually been some debate over what exactly was the thing that caused him to be finally found officially to be a heretic uh. And we'll talk about that a bit at the very end. He's an interesting story because he has the trajectory of starting out in a religious career and then because coming a heretic. So we're gonna jump right into how Bruno went from being a friar to his heretical life. Yeah. So Bruno was born Philippo Bruno in and Nola, Italy. That's about thirty kilometers east of Naples. His father was a soldier and at the age of fourteen, Bruno left Nola to travel to Naples for his studies. Among the many areas of education he had focusing on humanities and dialectics, Bruno was also exposed to the work of the Muslim philosopher Ebben Roused more commonly known to European scholars as Avarroas. Avroas had lived in the twelfth century and sought to combine the work of Greek philosophers with the ideologies of Islamic traditions. He had written extensively on the works of Aristotle and Plato and was deeply influential for the philosophers who came after him. Bruno also studied memory and recall and the way humans can teach themselves to remember things using mnemonic devices and other prompts. Yeah, all of this is interesting because he was exposed to it so early on in his life, and these kinds of ideas of like combining science and religious ideology, his his memory, teaching to other people all comes back throughout his life and becomes really important. So while he was studying in Naples, Bruno made an impression on his teachers for his astonishing memory. In fifteen sixty nine, he was sent to perform for the Pope, showing off his recall ability, and then three years after moving to Naples for his education, Bruno joined the Dominican Order and moved into the convent of San Domenico Maggiore. It was at this point that he took the name Giordano. He was ordained as a friar in fifteen seventy two after seven years with the Order, but he continued his studies in Naples, finishing his religious scholarship program in fifteen seventy five. Though Bruno had been ordained and had been encouraged to continue his studies, there had been from the beginnings of his life with the Dominican Order some concerns about his heretical leanings, and he did want to discuss heretical ideas. One that was of interest to him is what's known as the Arian heresy, named for the third century priest from Alexandria named Arius. This heretical doctrine put forth the idea that Christ was not divine, but was an instrument of the divine. Yeah, we'll talk so much more about his his thoughts and writings about Christ and why those upset people. Uh, because you're donno. Bruno openly discussed this idea and others as worthy of consideration, and of course, because questioning the Holy Trinity was very dangerous, he found himself charged with heresy for the first time by the Neapolitan leaders of the Order in early fifteen seventy six, But rather than face a heresy trial, Bruno decided he would just leave the city and he headed to Rome. That only lasted a couple of months because when additional heretical texts were found among the things he left behind in Naples, including works of Erasmus which questioned the powers of the papacy, and the entire structure of the Catholic Church, which Bruno had notated himself in the margins, so they knew he had read it. The search for the heretical fugitive intensified, and Rome was no longer safe, so Bruno was once again on the run. This time he left behind all of his ties to the Catholic Church and his life as a friar. For a couple of years, Bruno was on the move, traveling around northern Italy. He said to have made his way by picking up odd jobs like teaching Latin or basic astronomy to students and interested adults. Then in fifteen seventy eight he left Italy and went to Geneva, Switzerland. For a while, he survived there taking copy, editing and proofing work. But though he had been branded a heretic by the Catholic Church and had left his life in the Naples clergy, he still really sought a religious haven for himself. He briefly thought he might have found it in Calvinism. So for context, John Calvin had been born just a little less than forty years before Bruno, and he had died fourteen years before the former Dominican found himself in Geneva. Bruno saw so much potential in the reformist ideas of Calvin's book, Institute of the Christian Religion, which had first been published in the mid fifteen thirties and had been reissued already many times in the intervening decades. So Gjordano Bruno converted to Calvinism while he was in Switzerland, but he continued to have a questioning nature, and he got into trouble with the Calvinist Church just as he had the Catholic Church. He wanted to examine doctrine rather than follow it, and while he had believed that approach would be more welcomed in his new church, he was ultimately incorrect. The final straw was a pamphlet he published which openly criticized a prominent Calvinist. Soon he was arrested and excommunicated. He retracted the writing which had caused the rift with the church to get out of any serious repercussions, but once again he was a man with no religious affiliation. After that, strife with the Calvinist Church in Geneva was more or less resolved. Bruno moved on once again, and this time he headed to France. While spending time first and to lose, he continued to be troubled by his rift with the Catholic Church, and to rectify the situation, he formally requested absolution. He wanted to make amends with the church and offer penance in the hopes of being officially forgiven, but he was denied, despite the fact though that he was still considered a heretic, which of course had considerable weight. In the fifteen seventies, Giordano Brune was able to find work teaching philosophy and to lose, and that was something that he did for roughly two years. In fifteen eighty one, Bruno moved on to Paris after escalating tensions between Huguenos and Catholics Interlus made that city too dangerous to stay in. This ultimately led to the fifteen sixty two riots of to Lose, But Jordano Bruno was long gone by the time that happened, and those issues and to Lose were reflective of a bigger issue in France. In the fifteen eighties, France was smack dab in the middle of its wars of religion. At this point, it was actually sort of a perfect time for Bruno to move to Paris. Though the Hugueno massacre at Vassi and the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day were well in the past, the Huguenots had been granted the freedom to worship Henry the Third, who was one of Catherine de Medici's sons and had been one of the conspirators, and the St. Bartholome Use Day massacre, was king of France when Bruno moved to Paris, and Henry the Third really liked Jordano Bruno so much so that he made him a royal lecturer. Bruno had fallen in with the politiques, that's the faction in the religious words that was Catholic but moderate and wanted compromise in religious matters as a means for unity for France, rather than the emergence of any single religion as dominant in ruling. While in Paris, Bruno wrote and published a great deal. He had finally kind of found like where he might have belonged, at least for a moment. He produced several works that were rooted in his study and fascination with memory, which elaborated far beyond the idea of recall and kind of focused on how a person could use their memory to develop a deeper understanding of reality. He wrote a comedy in fifteen eighty two called The Candle Maker. This play, if stage, would run at an estimated five hours, and the author in the original is listed as Bruno the Nolan, the academic of No Academy, nicknamed the Exasperated. His exasperation was with society as a whole. He felt there was corruption all around and that people claiming morality were often lax and upholding it. It was essentially a protest play. We should point out Bruno was kind of exasperated with a lot of people. A lot of the time, if you thought somebody was foolish or frivolous or pompous, he did not hesitate to write scathing critiques of them. Now, he's a little bit of a firebrand in this regard, and I think he kind of liked the conflict like it. It fueled him. That's my speculation. When we come back, we're going to talk a little bit more about political and religious strife in France, as well as Bruno's time in England. But first we are going to pause for a quick sponsor break. In four, Henry the Third's brother, Francis Dudanjou died, and this made Henry of Navarre air presumptive to the throne of France, and that catalyzed a new rise in the conflict among France's religious factions, in what became known as the War of the Three Henry's. But Bruno was lucky enough to have left the country before that happened. In three he had moved from Paris to London, and King Henry the Third had sent along with him a letter of recommendation, which Bruno took to Michele de Caston. Now the French ambassador to Queen Elizabeth the First Court. For a while, Bruno went to Oxford where he lectured on astronomy. But Bruno's views did not go over well at Oxford, so he quickly returned to Court, convinced that the alleged intellectuals of Oxford were beneath him. That cracks me up. Returning to Elizabeth's Court connected him to another recent podcast subject, that was Mary Sidney Herbert, because Bruno became friends with her brother, Sir Philip Sidney. He apparently did not thank Sir Philip Sidney was beneath him, just the so called intellectuals of Oxford. Yeah, it was basically like, um, you know, if you don't believe me, clearly you are a ding dong. Sydney, of course, had a wide circle of intellectual acquaintances, and through them Bruno was invited to speak once again with scholars from Oxford. It once again did not go well. A fight actually broke out in which Bruno called one of the men that he had met with a pig. Bruno started writing a comprehensive explanation of his thoughts on morality and cosmology in the wake of the skirmish at Oxford. This resulted in a six volume set that's referred to as the Italian Dialogues. Three of the volumes, the Ash Wednesday Supper, concerning the Cause Principle in one and on the Infinite Universe and World's Examined the Universe and Our Understanding of It. And the other three, which were The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, Cabal of the Horse Pegasus, and the Heroic Frenzies, work through Bruno's views on morality, often in a way that's highly critical of society. Yeah, he was a critical gent in the Ash Wednesday Supper. Bruno is a character in the writing. He calls himself the Nolan, which we had mentioned him using before that signified his birthplace of Nola, and another character, tail Field, serves as the purveyor of Bruno The writer's ideas, including the idea that there are innumerable worlds. He subscribed to the idea that the universe was infinite and that there could be other solar systems like ours. He wrote of the belief that space could be finite. Quote supposed now that all space were created finite if one were to run on to the end to its furthest coasts and throw a flying dart. Would you have it that the dart hurled with might and main goeth on whether it is sped flying afar, or thank you that something can check and bar its way for whether there be something to check it and bring about that it arriveth not whether it was sped and planteth not itself in the goal, or whether it fareth forward yet it's set not forth From the end. He continued his argument with quote, we cannot deny infinity merely because we do not sensibly perceive it. Ya. So in case that um definitely uh older style of writing was in any way confusing, and blessed Tracy for reading it. He's basically like, if you go to the edge of space and throw a dart, is it gonna doink back and hit you? Like? What do you think happens? Because the we've never found that. So all of this meant that Bruno so supported helio centrism. Now that idea was of course not new in the sixteenth century. As early as the fifth century b c. There were philosophers in Greece that were suggesting that the earth might be revolving around a central fire, but that concept and theories that built on it had not become accepted, in part because it was just so difficult to reconcile the idea of the planet being in motion while we are also able to see what appeared to be fixed objects in the night sky, like star clusters that were observed night after night. By the time Bruno was writing about helio centrism, it had come once again to the forefront of cosmological discussion. In the mid fifteenth century, the German religious scholar Nicholas of Cusa had worked on an idea that Earth was influential in the movement of the universe, but that it was not the center around which other things revolved. Copernicus had published six books can earning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs, just a few years before Bruno's birth. It's really when heliocentrism started gaining a foothold in cosmological circles. So though Bruno's writing was just supporting what other intellectuals at the time were already espousing, he was definitely doing so. When the idea was far from a settled matter, it was still really controversial to put it in context on the historical timeline. Galileo was put on trial by the Inquisition over his support of the Copernical heliocentric theory, almost fifty years after Bruno wrote in support of it. But Bruno's writing integrates this idea of an infinite universe with the idea of a God that held dominion over infinity. This was absolutely not a rejection of Christian beliefs. For him. Bruno wrote in on the Infinite Universe and World quote, so great is God's excellence that it is manifested in the greatness of his empire. It is not glorified in one but in innumerable suns, not in one earth, one world, but in ten hundred thousand, I say, in infinite. A very controversial view that Bruno held and included in the Italian Dialogues is his case that the Bible is great as a guide for a moral life, but it's not a text that should be used as the basis of astronomical information. He made lots of assertions about there being other worlds in the cosmos which would probably support life, none of which had ever been mentioned in biblical writing. He got a lot of things wrong in his guesses about how things might work, but he was able to grasp the idea that the Earth might not be all that singular in the vastness of space. For these ideas and others, Bruno knew the Italian Dialogues would not be welcomed in Italy, so he published them outside of his home country. Yeah, there's some cute additional on that where he kind of still wanted to make it seem like they were published in Italy that we could talk about in the behind the scenes um. In the fall of five, Bruno decided to return to France. But in that short time he had been away, that conflict among the Henry's had started, and he did not find himself in a group of moderates as he had before. His moderate friends had gotten a little more hardline in their beliefs, Henry the Third had taken a stronger stance against all non Catholics. Uh, it would have been smart on Bruno's part to kind of keep his head down and maybe dial back his constant critiques of just about everyone in an environment like this, But instead he got in a very public argument with Fabrizio mor Dente, an Italian mathematician who was also Catholic and well connected to Catholic political leaders in France at the time. Bruno also made a focused attack on the work of Aristotle in six with the writing of twenty articles on nature and the World against the Peripatetics. Because of his ongoing strife with so many Catholics and his increasingly unpopular views, the politics distanced themselves from Bruno. He next moved on to Germany. He taught and wrote as he traveled the country, and produced the work A hundred and sixty articles in fifty eight. In this he asserted that all religions could coexist peacefully if they would stop attacking one another and foster communication. In early fifteen eighty nine, Bruno was banished from yet another religious sect, this time the Lutherans, who he tried to join up with briefly. So if you're keeping score, he had now been excommunicated by the Catholics, the Calvinists, and the Lutherans, and after his fallout with the Lutheran Church, Bruno worked on a book about the connection between mathematics and magic, although that was not published In his lifetime, he also continued to reiterate his idea is from the Italian Dialogues in new writings specifically three poems that he wrote in Latin, on the threefold minimum and Measure, on the monad number and figure, and on the Immeasurable and Innumerable. Bruno also included some new ideas in these poems alongside the concepts that he was echoing from his previous work, and one of these new ideas was the concept of matter being made up of tiny, tiny particles. This was essentially an early exploration of the idea of Adams. Although he was doing all this writing, he couldn't publish any of it because of all of his fallouts with basically everyone he knew. He couldn't publish in Italy, so in fifteen ninety he asked to be granted residency in Frankfurt, where he hoped to publish his work, but that request was denied. He tried, it seems, to get around that denial by moving into a Carmelite convent in Frankfurt. The head of the convent didn't really seem to love that arrangement because he felt that Bruno was actually religious at all and had become vain and obsessed with quote novelties in his work. In Fife, Bruno traveled once again to Italy, not to roam more Naples, where he still would have certainly been an outcast, but he was just traveling across northern Italy en route to the Republic of Venice, which was not part of Italy at this time. This was a move that was catalyzed by being asked to come to Venice by a nobleman of the city, and this might sound like a pretty rash move to head back through a country where he had been a wanted man for a long time at this point for his heretical ideas, but the circumstances were such that it probably didn't seem all that dangerous for Bruno. Gregory had been pope when Bruno had become a fugitive in the fifteen seventies. He had died in fifteen eighty five and was replaced by Sixtus the Fifth, but six of the Fifth had died in fifteen ninety, and after that there were three popes in rapid succession. Urban the seventh was pope for only twelve days, and then Gregory the fourteenth had become pope in December off and while Bruno couldn't have known it when he made his way to Venice in late summer of Gregory the fourteenth also would not be pope that much longer. He died in October, he would be replaced by Innocent the ninth, who was pope for only twelve months. We're mentioning all of this because it probably would have seemed like any of the concerns about Bruno's heresy would have been lost in the shuffle of just so many rapid shifts in leadership. Additionally, he was going to what was a fairly liberal state. Yeah, Venice at this point was all about exploration and new ideas, and so he thought, like, it'll be cool. I'll just run across artern Italy be fine. And Bruno also had his eyes on a job in this move, the University of Padua, and he did ahead of their mathematics department, and if he could secure it, the position would grant him some stability and it would make it possible for him to publish. So if you are familiar with this time in European history and or with the work of Galileo, you might already know that Bruno did not get the job, because Galileo did. Bruno had really campaigned for it, though he had even given a private lecture series on geometry and other mathematical subjects in Padua to prove his abilities. After the position went to Galileo, Bruno returned to the city of Venice and to the nobleman who had invited him in the first place, which was Giovanni Mochanigo. This is not the Giovanni Mochanigo who was the Doja of Venice in the fifteenth century. This was a later member of the same family. Moenego had been the one to tell Bruno about the position in Padua and had hoped that Bruno would instruct him in the art of memory. But these two had a falling out, and there are a couple of different take on what exactly caused this rifted, depending on what Sorcier reading. One version is that the Venetian Mochanigo was not satisfied with the lessons that he had received from Bruno, and he was also irritated that Bruno was talking about his intention to move back to Frankfurt again, something that Mochenego apparently took as an insult. Another version is that in teaching Mochenego about mnemonics and philosophy, Bruno had maybe overshared his ideas and it troubled the Venetian a great deal because those ideas were so at odds with mores of society and especially the Church. Regardless of the specific cause of the friction between the two of them, Motionenego turned his house guest into the Venetian Inquisition in May of two via a letter. He included a list of twenty one alleged instances in which Bruno had committed heresy, including accusations that Bruno had said that the virgin Mary could not have been a mother and that miracles ascribed to Christ were not miracles at all, but magic tricks used to dupe the foolish. I can see how this would have been upsetting. Yes, we're going to talk about Bruno's trials for heresy. That was plural after we hear from some of the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going. So, after Mochenego turned him in, Bruno was formally accused of heresy again and was arrested, and the trial that followed in Venice actually went pretty well for him. Initially, he explained that he was always working from a philosophical viewpoint rather than a religious one, and he did walk back some of the statements he had made about religion, clarifying that he had said some things and error when he really meant to talk about theoretical ideas and just examine them in relation to religion. And the Venetian Inquisition sounds like it was kind of initially receptive to this defense, but even though there had been those several changes in popes, once word reached the Vatican that Bruno was being tried in Venice, it was demanded that he be extradited into Rome to stand trial there for heresy. His charges were even more serious than heresy, though, because he was also accused of converting other Catholics into heretics as well, and total, he was charged with more than four dozen different heresies by the Roman Inquisition, including speaking ill of Catholicism, having contempt for holy relics, practicing divination, apostasy, believing that souls could transmigrate, asserting that there could be other worlds like Earth in the cosmos, and even eating meat on days that it was prohibited. So many accusations of varying degrees of intensity. He arrived in Rome on January and he spent the rest of his life there. His trial spooled out over the next seven years, and while he went with the same philosophy and theory approach to his defense against the heresy charges, that explanation was not as welcomed in Rome as it may have been in Venice. What the inquisitors of Rome wanted was a full retraction of everything he had said about religion, full stop. Bruno, though thought he could maybe convince his accusers that really the things he had said were not in conflict with the teachings of the Catholic Church. He believed that in presenting himself as a philosopher, he would have to be granted leeway to conjecture about just about anything, but that was not appreciated. Attempting to separate philosophy from theology for discussion was actually considered heretical in its own right, according to some writings, because it could lead anyone down the path to heresy, and while Venice had not been quite so finicky on that point, Rome really dug in. This was also in part because he could call himself a philosopher all he wanted, but the inquisition viewed him as a friar who had strayed. A retraction, as we said, was what the Church was after, but Bruno was adamant that he didn't have anything to retract. He said he didn't even understand what they wanted because, in his opinion, he had done nothing wrong, but the latest Pope, Clement the Eighth, did not concur Bruno was found guilty of heresy on February four in a proclamation which read quote, our most Holy Lord decrees and ordains that it be intimated to the Apostate brothers Giordano Bruno of Nola, by the Theologian fathers, namely Father Bellarmine and the Father Commissary, that these propositions are heretical, and not only heretical as now declared, but by the most ancient fathers of the Church and the Apostolic See. There was apparently a list of eight heretical points for which he was absolutely found guilty, but that list has been lost, so we don't know what of the many dozens of accusations were really the ones. But he was given several weeks to recant, like they kind of gave him an out, but he didn't. The inquisitors extended that opportunity to recant several times, but Bruno consistently denied that his work was in any way heretical. Bruno received his death sentence on February eight, six hundred. The inquisitors also condemned all of his writings, and his books were added to the index of forbidden books. While it's often reported that his last words before execution were quote, perhaps you who pronounced my sentence are in greater fear than I who received it, that was actually his reaction to the sentencing. Nine days later, on February seventeen, sixteen hundred, Bruno was taken to the public square known as Camp Defjure in Rome, gagged and burned alive. Okay, we have talked about Bruno's philosophy and religious views in regard to his being judged a heretic, and you will also see accounts of his life that say he was actually executed for believing that there were other solar systems and that ours was not really the center of the universe. Sometimes this is also as like the sun is a star or the sun is one of many stars, and the disparity of whether this was a cosmological issue or a philosophical one has been a matter of debate among historians and scholars for quite a while. In the second half of the twentieth century, most scholars had landed at the conclusion that, yes, issues of cosmology were part of the heresy of Giordano Bruno, but they're really The biggest problem in his work was his assertion that Christ was not divine. You can see with the Church sure would dislike that. But in recent years there has been a deeper look at Bruno's trial that adds a little more nuance and brings the cosmology back into focus, and an article published in Annals of Science in historian Alberto A. Martinez made the case that a many worlds cosmology had been well established as heretical going back through the centuries leading up to Bruno's trial. For example, he notes that the laster who was the Bishop of Brescia, Italy in the fourth century made this very clear, writing quote Another heresy is to say that worlds are infinite and innumerable, following the Assinine opinion of the philosophers, whereas scriptures say that the world is one and it teaches us that it is one. Martinez also points out that closer to the time of Bruno's trial, in the mid sixteenth century, there was a move to define heresy but also debate about it. Long lists of heretical offenses that were punishable by death were published, and the idea of innumerable world was one of them. And in fifteen eighty two, Pope Gregory, for whom the Gregorian Calendar is named and who was Pope when Bruno was first accused of heresy, had an updated edition of Corpus of canon Law published, and appearing in that updated edition was the following heresy quote, having the opinion of innumerable worlds. From the beginning of Bruno's heresy trial in Venice, his belief in the idea of infinite worlds was part of his accusations that had been on the list that Machnego had sent the inquisition, and unlike some of the other accusations, Bruno never denied this one. In fact, he asserted it's verity repeatedly, telling inquisitors quote, I affirm an infinite universe, which is the consequence of the infinite divine power, because I regard it as unworthy of the divine goodness and power that being able to produce, in addition to our world, another and infinitely many others, to produce one finite world. Yes, I have asserted infinite particular world similar to the Earth, which with Pythagoras, I consider a star similar to which is the Moon, other planets and other stars, which are infinite, and that all these bodies are worlds and numberless, which thus constitute the infinite universality in an infinite space, and this is called the infinite universe, and which are innumerable worlds. Thus the fortune that is double from the infinitude and greatness of the universe and the multitude of worlds, but without indirectly meaning to reject the truth according to the faith. Some of that is so poetic, and I know that's a translation, but I love it. According to Martinez's research, at least five witnesses who testified against Bruno and Venice mentioned specifically his cosmological beliefs in multiple worlds as part of his heresy. Four of the five repeated this testimony at the trial in Rome, and when tallied up, it is the accusation of this belief in many worlds that appears most frequently in Bruno's trial Summarine, and the summary also reflects that he was specifically ordered to abandon his quote delusions regarding many worlds. Additionally, a witness to his execution recounted that one of the heresies read aloud before Bruno was killed was his belief that quote, worlds are innumerable. So it does seem that the idea of this sort of plurality of worlds was a significant part of the accusations that led to Bruno's fate and execution. In his time, Bruno became infamous, denounced by philosopher Marin Marcin twenty four years after his death as quote, one of the most evil men that the earth has ever borne. But Bruno's expansive view of the cosmos and religion, and his efforts to create a philosophy that combined the two also fascinated scholars and later philosophers and scientists built on various ideas that he had put forward. Yeah, I mean we talked about many things that are that we're pretty ahead of their time when he was saying them, but unfortunately, very angering to the church. The inquisition did not appreciate. He's another figure that I love, despite the fact that I think I wouldn't enjoy hanging out with him at all. I have a much more delightful listener. Mail from our listener Francis uh it's kind of a long e and Francis even says all the things I've been meaning to tell you as the subject line, which starts off with, first off, thank you so much for all your work on the podcast, I mean, my friends over the years. I started listening to podcast back in Tleven, Uh, and the podcast helped me through some stuff. I'm I'm paraphrasing because I don't want to give up her personal information. Stuff he missed in history was one of the first I found. And I've loved how the show has evolved over the years. Y'all have brought so much nuance to the show and have been so intentional about representation, and I appreciate it so much. The next thing is, I've been meaning to write since the episode on the Possession Case of Roland Doe. Not because I'm into horror movies, I'm a big baby, but because I live in the city of Mount Rainier. She fixes my pronunciation there. You can tell that I grew up for a time in the Pacific Northwest because I say Rainier, but it's apparently rainier when you're over in the eastern side where this story took place. And there is a duplicate name shred says a story we're all familiar with in the area, and there's a bit of friendly rivalry between all the tiny cities that claimed to be the place where it happened. One of the most read stories in our regional newspaper in was about a couple getting a really good deal on a house that is purported to be the house where it happened. Honestly, with the housing market in the area, I might have snapped up a deal like this in a potentially haunted house to uh. She also mentioned that her family is hosting in a Alion exchange student for the year. She went for a walk through town to find Satan's lot and explore it. She said it was kind of fun to be there. This also brings this email to the story of Feta Cheeni Alfredo Srates. When our exchange student first arrived, I took her to the grocery store to see what she'd like to buy, and because an American grocery store is quite the cultural experience. We were walking through the Italian island when she saw jars of Alfredo sauce on Michelle. She pointed at them in horror and said, is that Italian? That's not Italian. Blew my mind when she told her classmates they were also shocked. Cut to me listening to the third eponymous food episode and starting out with feta chini alfredo. I was so excited to finally understand everything that had been lost in translation. We talked about the Italian name for it, and she said that was something very common, but it was nothing like the American version that she had been served for school lunches, which, to be fair, is a school lunch, so that's not a good representation of anything. Uh. And then this is really why I wanted to read this, because she talks about my favorite charity. Uh. The third thing that forced me to fight my A d h D long enough to actually write an email I've been writing in my brain the Behind the Seeds episode on Edgerton and Nico. When Holly compared Francis Edgerton's chef to Jose Andres cooking for her cats, I laughed out loud. I agree so much with the assessments of his restaurants everything is delicious, and his work as a philanthropist and activist I'm Puerto Rican, and his work on the island after Hurricane Maria. Told me everything I needed to know about the type of person he is. My family went about six to eight months without electricity, and my aunt only had an electric stove. It was virtually impossible for her to get any healthy, hearty food during that time, and it gave me comfort to know he was out there working with local restaurateurs to provide food for so many. I'm also a teacher at a private school that's exclusively for low income students. Our students work at an entry level, white collar job one day a week as part of a work study program that subsidizes their education and provides them with four years of work experience. That means that we are always raising funds. Last school year, jose Andres did a fundraiser for us. It was fantastic and he is now a supporter of our school. UM. I love this so much, and she mentions that he was connected to the school through an alum who has their own restaurant which a small tak area and they now have five restaurants and a few Michelin stars. Um, this is so wonderful, she says. I didn't mean for this email to get so long, but that is what happens when you wait too long to write, I'm attaching a picture of my adorable cats. Epo as in Hiccups in Spanish. That is a great name for a cat, by the way, uh, and Julius as in Caesar. He is the regal striped boy. They are the most doglike cats of all time, which means I've got the best of both worlds and my sweet boys. These cats are like I can't even They're cuddled up in a little heart shape. It's so sweet. Francis, thank you so much for this absolutely beautiful email. And I love when people save it up and give us a big, a big long list of fun things. Um, and I always, like I said, love to talk about Jose Andres because World Central Kitchen remains my favorite charity. Uh. You would like to email us, you can do that. It's easy as pie at History podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History and if you would like to subscribe, that is also super duper simple. You can do that on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.