Introduction: hic sunt dracones 1. The history of truth: recovering ancient wisdom 2. The history of error: exorcizing Paganism 3. The error of history: imagining the Occult 4. The truth of history: entering the Academy Conclusions: restoring memory.

Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture

In this book, Christopher Celenza provides an intellectual history of the Italian Renaissance during the long fifteenth century, from c.1350–1525. His book fills a bibliographic gap between Petrarch and Machiavelli and offers clear case studies of contemporary luminaries, including Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Lorenzo Valla, Marsilio Ficino, Angelo Poliziano, and Pietro Bembo. Integrating sources in Italian and Latin, Celenza focuses on the linked issues of language and philosophy. He also examines the conditions in which Renaissance intellectuals operated in an era before the invention of printing, analyzing reading strategies and showing how texts were consulted, and how new ideas were generated as a result of conversations, both oral and epistolary. The result is a volume that offers a new view on both the history of philosophy and Italian Renaissance intellectual life. It will serve as a key resource for students and scholars of early modern Italian humanism and culture.

https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/renref/article/download/32470/24869

The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance: Language, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning

Printing had a huge impact on the development of religion and politics in sixteenth-century Europe. Harnessing the printing press is generally regarded as a key factor in the success of the Reformation. The positive role played by printing in Catholic cultural policy, by contrast, has not been sufficiently recognized. While scholars have focused on ecclesiastical censorship, the employment of print by Catholic authorities – especially the Roman curia – has been addressed only sporadically and superficially. The aim of my dissertation is to fill this gap, providing a detailed picture of the papacy’s efforts to exploit the resources of the Roman printing industry after the Sack in 1527 and before the establishment of the Vatican Typography in 1587. 

After a brief introduction (Chapter 1), I provide an exhaustive account of the papacy’s attempts, over sixty years, to set up a Roman papal press (Chapter 2). I then focus on two main Catholic printing enterprises. Part I is devoted to the editorial activity of Cardinal Marcello Cervini, later Pope Marcellus II. I discuss the extant sources and earlier scholarship on Cervini (Chapter 3), his cultural profile (Chapter 4) and the Greek and Latin presses which he established in the early 1540s (Chapters 5 - 6). Part II concentrates on the projects for a papal press involving the Venetian printer Paolo Manuzio. After an overview of the sources and previous studies (Chapter 7), I analyse Manuzio’s attempts to move to Rome, the establishment of a papal press under his management and the committee of cardinals which supervised it (Chapters 8 - 10). Chapter 11 examines the printing of the first edition of the Tridentine decrees, undertaken in 1564. 

Chapter 12 contains the overall conclusion to the dissertation. Documentary Appendixes A and B list the publications sponsored by Cervini and the books printed by Manuzio’s Roman press.

Publishing for the Popes: The Cultural Policy of the Catholic Church towards Printing in Sixteenth-Century Rome

The wisdom of the ancients, says Marsilio Ficino, was a pious philosophy.1 Born among the Egyptians with Hermes Trismegistus-and, according to Ficino's later writings, concurrently among the Persians with Zoroaster-it was raised by the Thracians under Orpheus and Aglaophemus. It later matured under Pythagoras among the Greeks and Italians and culminated in Plato. As is well known, this genealogy was not merely a historical thesis for Ficino and his followers but also a program for revival, a Utopia achieved through restoration. For the assertion of a concordance between these early philosophies and their accordance with Christianity-in the sense of a Christian Platonism-implied the synthesis of fragementary philosophemes into a fully developed doctrine in the service of a uniform and timely philosophia pia.This program was formulated in a variety of ways during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with differing protagonists and with diverse aims. Thus one could supplement the genealogy in a cabalist vein, introduce biblical characters such as Solomon or Moses, or (as was done by Bruno) use it to contest Christian doctrine. The genealogy could be read as culminating in various notable modern figures such as for example, Paracelsus. Aristotle could be included or excluded from it, depending on whether one wanted to assimilate the Aristotelian tradition or to distance oneself from it; and one could leave the end of this genealogical lineage open in order to exhort the necessity of a scientific and moral reform.Here, however, we shall be occupied with the question of what became of this program during the late Renaissance, when two developments took place simultaneously: on the one hand, the Utopia of the prisca sapientia set about to conquer the field formerly reserved to the Aristotelians, namely, natural philosophy; on the other hand, the first doubts arose about the overall validity of the historical-philological foundation of the program, especially the dating of the works of Hermes Trismegistus. The latter began with the publication of the first part of Patrizi's Discussionesperipateticae in 1571, which aimed to rehabilitate, contrary to Aristotle's critique, old presocratic natural philosophies, and in so doing it cleared the way for interpreting the latest advancements in non-Aristotelian natural sciences as resumptions of these very philosophies.2 This initiated a period of complex interaction between late humanist philology, innovative natural science, and speculative metaphysics.This phase, however, not only entailed the grand synthesizing endeavors that one finds in Patrizi's Nova de universis philosophia; it also introduced historical critique-no doubt provoked by Patrizi-of the Hermetic prisca sapientia, understood in Frances Yates's sense, which was performed in careful detail long before Casaubon at the end of the Renaissance.3 Further, it was a phase characterized by an attempt to reevaluate Aristotelian philosophy against its opponents, which paradoxically was also motivated by Patrizi yet which managed to keep the venture open to "esoteric" depths. all of these developments were intertwined, and each effected the articulation of encyclopedic projects at the beginning of the seventeenth century. On the basis of manuscripts, letters, and some neglected texts, I want to introduce two such countercurrents, which illustrate how the migration of arguments from one cultural context to another can lead to wholly divergent and unexpected results. Moreover, these results show the diverse consequences that a prisca sapientia-utopia could have for different visions of encyclopedic scholarship.I. In the bookshop of Paolo Meietti in Padua, Teodoro Angelucci and Antonio Persio met accidentally on an autumn day in 1558. Meietti was the publisher of Angelucci's medical textbook as well as of texts by Patrizi and his colleague Giannini, and it is possible that Persio was out to discuss publishing possibilities for his forthcoming manuscript De natura ignis. …

Ambiguities of the Prisca Sapientia in Late Renaissance Humanism

In 2001, Harvard University Press launched “The I Tatti Renaissance Library” (ITRL). Affiliated to Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) in Florence and unde...

Beyond Latin in Renaissance philosophy: A plea for new critical perspectives

This is the first volume to explore the reception of the Pythagorean doctrine of cosmic harmony within a variety of contexts, ranging chronologically from Plato to 18th-century England. This original collection of essays engages with contemporary debates concerning the relationship between music, philosophy, and science, and challenges the view that Renaissance discussions on cosmic harmony are either mere repetitions of ancient music theory or pre-figurations of the ‘Scientific Revolution’. Utilizing this interdisciplinary approach, Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony offers a new perspective on the reception of an important classical theme in various cultural, sequential and geographical contexts, underlying the continuities and changes between Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This project will be of particular interest within these emerging disciplines as they continue to explore the ideological significance of the various ways in which we appropriate the past.

Sing aloud harmonious spheres: Renaissance conceptions of cosmic harmony

Synoptic Art: Marsilio Ficino on the History of Platonic Interpretation

In 1544 two vernacular versions of Plato's works appeared in Rome from the press of the Florentine humanist Francesco Priscianese: the first was a translation of Plato's Symposium made by Ercole Barbarasa da Terni; the second, a version of Plato's Phaedrus by the Sienese man of letters Felice Figliucci. Each Platonic dialogue was accompanied by Marsilio Ficino's interpretations. Modern scholars have so far focused on Priscianese's activity as a grammarian and promoter of the vernacular, and on the role he played in the debate on language.1 However, the reasons that led him to print these two important Platonic texts have attracted little attention. Similarly, although Michel Plaisance, Brian Richardson, and others have magisterially demonstrated the importance of print in the history of vernacular culture, many aspects of this history, especially outside Florence, still remain to be studied. In particular, there is a need to reassess the way in which the political exiles in Rome, many of whom were prominent artists and scholars, produced and transmitted their works during the first years of the Medici principato, at a time when Duke Cosimo I was launching a vast enterprise of vernacularization that would serve the political ideology of his regime. The purpose of this article is to fill this gap by examining the circumstances surrounding the publication of Plato's works by one such exile: Francesco Priscianese. It will show that Priscianese's press.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/modelangrevi.107.4.1082

‘Cose di Platone fatte Toscane’ : language and ideology in two vernacular translations of Plato printed by Francesco Priscianese

Cosmic harmony, demons, and the mnemonic power of music in Renaissance Florence : the case of Marsilio Ficino

Cosmic Harmony, Demons, and the Mnemonic Power of Music in Renaissance Florence

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