Marsilio Ficino Research Articles

Dante entre o furor e os estudos

ABSTRACT This article analyzes a polemic of Italian Humanism around Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). In that period, intellectuals such as Cristoforo Landino (1424-1498) and Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) interpreted Dante’s writing through the platonic prism of the Phaedrus, that is, as someone who was granted the grace to contemplate the divine and the power to describe it. Decades earlier, however, Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406) and Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) had already attributed to Dante the merit of focusing on formal studies and, with that, being able to develop expressive artifices to his poetry on its own. For the analysis of the different readings, excerpts in which Dante gives evidence of his path and intellectual maturity will be observed, as well as those in which it is possible to observe the poet’s role in the dissemination of formal knowledge in line with his ethical values.

Neoplatonic Nature of Love

Abstract This essay has two sections. The first explores the origin of the universe, the four elements, the knot of love, the third essence, and ‘Primordial Vessel’ by the Florentine Neoplatonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino. The second part interprets Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus of 1485–1486, now at the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, drawing upon Ficino’s Neoplatonic texts. Particularly some of Ficino’s Commentaries on Plato’s Dialogues (published in 1484), Symposium (completed in 1469), Philebus (completed in 1469), and Compendium on Timaeus (1480–1491). To this is added Ficino’s Theologia Platonica (published in 1482), his Letters (published in 1495), his Commentary on Proclus’s Alcibiades I (completed in 1488), and his translation of the Neoplatonic text Corpus Hermeticum, entitled Liber Mercurii Trismegisti de potestate et sapientia Dei (published in 1471). Botticelli’s beautiful painting captures the depiction of the goddess Venus’s birth as described in Hesiod’s Theogony, which Ficino recounted in his Philebus Commentary

Giovanni Pico’s warning against pantheistic implications in Ficino’s Neoplatonism

ABSTRACT The famous controversy between Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is known to regard the proper use of Platonism in humanist and Christian context. With special attention to Pico’s Commentary on a Canzone, the point of disagreement with Ficino, which is not at all obvious, is examined through a close reading. The result is that Pico sees the temptation of a pantheistic and anthropocentric understanding of the relationship between the human realm and God. Whereas Ficino engaged in making pagan philosophy amenable to Christian theology, Pico was concerned with upholding the otherness of the divine. For the humanist agenda, Ficino made plausible that the human world is divinized, while Pico called for the ascent to God. In Pico’s view the Neoplatonists secularized the divine, as was evident in Ficino’s philosophical theology.

A balsamic mummy. The medical-alchemical panpsychism of Paracelsus

ABSTRACT In this paper, I will argue how Paracelsus's concept of the universal ensoulment of nature may relate to his understanding of the self-healing capacity of the body, as shown in his Grosse Wundartzney (1536). Here, his new approach to medicine is visible, focusing not on retaining or restoring the balance of bodily humours but on strengthening the inner “essence” of life (the so-called “balsam,” “mummy,” “astral spirit,” etc.). This is possible by means of life-endowed essences of healing substances which can affect the body’s vital principle by means of inner sympathies. Here, a link is established to medical alchemy as a way to produce more subtle medicines, the “essences” of things. Such an undertaking is possible only in the framework of the natural magic concept with its underlying microcosm-macrocosm analogy. It is my aim to show not only the principles of Paracelsus's new medicine, alchemy, and his worldview in general, but also how his theories may relate to his predecessors, including Marsilio Ficino, one of the few authors who escaped Paracelsus's harsh critique.

Translating Renaissance Neoplatonic panpsychism into seventeenth-century corpuscularism: the case of Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665)

ABSTRACT Kenelm Digby was among the first authors in England to embrace Cartesianism. Yet Digby’s approach to the mind–body problem was irenic: in his massive Two treatises (Paris, 1644), the author advocates a corpuscular philosophy that is applied to physical bodies, whereas the intellectual capacities of human beings remain inexplicable through the powers of matter. The aim of the present article is to highlight the (rather reticent) relationship of Digby’s corpuscularism with doctrines of spirits in connection with the Renaissance Neoplatonic tradition. Not uncommon in seventeenth-century natural philosophies, such “spirits” are notoriously evasive entities: half spirit, half matter acting as mediators between the realms of bodies and souls. This article suggests that Digby sought to preserve the inveterate ideas of a universal spiritus and a world soul and, in particular, that Kenelm Digby translated (rather than “overcame”) Marsilio Ficino’s (1433–1499) spiritus doctrines into the language of seventeenth-century corpuscularism.

The first public debate in the history of Hungarian philosophy? Ioannes Pannonius' letter to Marsilio Ficino on divine providence

AbstractThe present paper has in its focus a letter written in Buda in the mid-1480s by a mysterious Hungarian author, Ioannes Pannonius, whose figure is shrouded in obscurity. After a brief overview of the letter, the paper summarises the misconceptions and uncertainties surrounding the identity of the mysterious author and then attempts to outline his biography on the basis of fragmentary information. Contrary to the Anglo-Saxon scholarly literature, it argues that the Hungarian author is neither a fiction nor an intellectual “avatar” of Ficino, whom he could challenge in the public ring of contemporary intellectual space in order to defend his own Platonic theory. And if he is not a fictional author, the significance of the short letter is not only that the head of the Florentine Platonic school, Marsilio Ficino, anticipating the later theological debates around Platonism in the 16th century, replies to the letter, but also that it is perhaps the first known, highly publicised debate in the history of Hungarian philosophy.

„Jis verkė dėl Jeruzalės“: apie galimus pranašo Jeremijo graviūros Pranciškaus Skorinos Rusėniškojoje Biblijoje šaltinius

The article discusses the possibilities of understanding the woodcuts of Francysk Skaryna’s Bivlia ruska from the perspective of the intellectual ‘cosmos’ in the Renaissance Europe. We shall focus on the engraving “Jeremiah the prophet of the Lord weeps while looking at Jerusalem” (árámia púrr¼k7 g³dán6 pla+át6 glád3 na árusali, Скорина Ф. Книжка рекомая плачь Еремиинъ, hereinafter: The Book of Lamentations) putting it in the context of the iconography of this biblical character in the Renaissance. The article warns against ‘inscribing’ Skaryna’s image of Jeremiah in already-prepared schemes. Leaving open the solution of the possible visual sources of Skaryna’s engravings, we would like to avoid its traditional reading, based mainly on classifications, too often subjective and artificial. Our reading of Jeremiah is based on the study of his visual representations widespread in the Renaissance Europe in the late 15th and the early 16th centuries (Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut St. Anthony Reading from 1519; Hartmann Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum, 1493; Biblia vulgare istoriata, 1490, translated by N. Malermi; Biblij Czěská, w Benatkach tisstěná, 1506; Bernard von Breydenbach’s Sanctae peregrinationes, 1486; Werner Rolewinck’s Fasciculus temporum omnes antiquorum cronicas complectens, 1473/74 and its Venetian reprints by E. Ratdolf in the 1480s, etc.). The article emphasizes the importance to frame this iconography in the philosophical and aesthetical contexts of Francysk Skaryna’s epoch (by appealing to such sources as Dürer’s diaries, the works of Marsilio Ficino, quotations of F. Skaryna himself, etc.). We shall examine the plot, the characteristic features of Jerusalem landscape, architecture, religious symbols, and clothes represented at Jeremiah’s engraving in Bivlia ruska to seek the possible sources and inspirations of this engraving, while emphasizing its original character.

Death and immortality in "Dracula's Diary": readings through "Corpus Hermeticum"

The knowledge existent at present, which generates the need for a new approach to the myth of Dracula, refers to an almost unanimous reception based on the novel published in 1897 by Bram Stoker and on the tens of the subsequent portrayals which have induced a social and cultural paradigm standardized as commercial kitsch. Within this fictitious construct Dracula has been expounded in manifold keys. However, to ordinary perception, his figure is reduced to the semi-caricatural vampire character, the living-dead craving for blood. This article aims to answer a series of questions about the representations of Dracula and their relevance to the fields of cultural and literary studies: Which is the “real” Dracula? Which are the psychological, cultural, social and historical impulses determining the actions of the character and the established myth? To what extent the deeds of the personage can be accounted for through the instrumentality of psychological impetus and by the agency of cultural, philosophical, esoteric, and occult principles? Thus can the “real” Dracula be integrated into an ampler context of culture and civilization, where his alienation and his monstrosity belong less to the paradigm of “the other”, of “the stranger” and refer more to the revealing of some of “our” intimately repressed human features? The article proposes a critical examination and reinterpretation of Dracula’s image, starting from the novel Jurnalul lui Dracula (Dracula’s Diary) (1992) by the Romanian writer and academic Marin Mincu. Original responses are being suggested to the questions defined previously – through several writing and literary theory techniques, including references to Corpus Hermeticum. By comparing and contrasting the hermetic philosophical text and the Romanian novel, the essay aims at finding out whether the entire construct of the myth of Dracula can be explained through two cultural and philosophical aspects, namely death and immortality. It also offers a new reading, another conceptualization of a familiar but debatable subject, which reinterprets and even rejects the mainstream view. The work by the extremely well-informed Romanian academic, which was first published in Italy, has nothing in common with Bram Stoker’s (“vampiric falsification”, asserts the author in the preface…), but vividly portrays the “real” Dracula, the Prince Vlad the Impaler, imprisoned in the underground cave of a castle under the Budapest Danube, writing a journal between February, 2nd, 1463 and August, 28th, 1464. In his diary the character recalls his historical fate and legendary destiny through references to aspects of Romanian culture and civilization considered in a European context. For instance, the study approaches topics such as: the religion of Zalmoxis as the philosophical and existential foundation of the Romanians; Dacians’ attitude towards death, as described by Herodotus, which might have influenced Pythagoras, Socrates, the Eleusinian and the Orphic Mysteries; the boycott of history by the Romanian people (an echo from philosopher Lucian Blaga’s writings); the orality of the Romanian culture (as opposed to the written culture of the western Europe); the oral folkloric creations, the ballad Miorița (The Little Ewe) and the fairy-tale Tinerețe fără bătrânețe și viață fără de moarte (Youth without old age and life without death), etc. All of these are put forward within the humanistic, Renaissance context of the epoch, given that Dracula was a friend of Marsilio Ficino, Nicolaus Cusanus, Pope Pius II, Cosimo de’ Medici, etc. Researchers will discover new speculative themes and directions with regard to the seemingly exhausted myth of Dracula.

Reading Theophrastus's Mind: Marsilio Ficino's Reception of Priscian of Lydia

Reading Theophrastus's Mind: Marsilio Ficino's Reception of Priscian of Lydia

Reading Theophrastus's Mind: Marsilio Ficino's Reception of Priscian of Lydia

Reading Theophrastus's Mind: Marsilio Ficino's Reception of Priscian of Lydia

Die vergessene Sympathie: Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart literarischer Wirkung by Verena Olejniczak Lobsien

Reviewed by: Die vergessene Sympathie: Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart literarischer Wirkung by Verena Olejniczak Lobsien Katja Haustein Die vergessene Sympathie: Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart literarischer Wirkung. By Verena Olejniczak Lobsien. Paderborn: Brill and Fink. 2022. xvi+497 pp. €59. ISBN 978–3–7705–6706–5 (ebk 978–3–8467–6706–1). In recent years, sympathy and other relational feelings, such as empathy and compassion, have received a surge of scholarly attention (see e.g. Eric Schliesser, Sympathy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Fritz Breithaupt, Kulturen der Empathie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2009) and Die dunklen Seiten der Empathie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2017); Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (New York: Vintage, 2018); and Katherine Ibbett, Compassion's Edge: Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017)). But while sympathy tends to be discussed as a particular mode of intersubjective affection with certain social, ethical, and moral-philosophical implications, Verena Olejniczak Lobsien offers a timely and refreshing contribution to the debate by reminding us that sympathy has not always been understood in the sense of a 'fellow feeling' predominantly, if not solely, associated with humans (Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London: printed by W. Strahan for J. and P. Knapton; T. and T. [End Page 239] Longman; C. Hitch and L. Hawes; A. Millar; and R. and J. Dodsley, 1755), s.v.). Focusing on the time period between 1200 and 1700, Lobsien reconstructs early modern conceptions of sympathy that do not restrict the term to human relations, but use it to describe the idea of a general connectivity between animated and (seemingly) inanimate nature, the human and the divine, the soul and the body. As natural sympathy the concept appears as a universal principle, understood as an 'alles mit allem verklammernder organischer Weltzusammenhang' (p. 207: 'organic interrelation that connects every aspect of the world'). Lobsien's study, which is the fruit of the interdisciplinary research project 'Transformationen der Antike: Sympathie. Zur Transformations- und Funktionsgeschichte des Mit-Fühlens zwischen 1600 und 1800', is carefully researched, impressively detailed, and comprehensive, offering an illuminating discussion of sympathy in early modern philosophy, literature, and music, reading less familiar European thinkers alongside canonical writers and composers, including Hildegard von Bingen, Philip Sidney, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Marsilio Ficino, Anne Conway, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. The substantial bibliography contains a useful and wide-ranging overview of relevant research in English and German. (However, and this is especially unfortunate for a book of this weight and ambition, there is no subject index that would have helped the reader to navigate more comfortably the wealth of information provided.) Lobsien portrays the history of sympathy as the radical transformation from natural sympathy as a form of oneness with the world to sympathy as a predominantly social affair. In so doing, and in contrast to most of the scholars listed above, she does not critically dissect the concept, but rather embraces it as a particular mode of 'Allteilhabe' ('universal sharing') that we moderns have, if not entirely lost, at least temporarily forgotten. Consequently, the overall tone of the book is nostalgic, with Lobsien establishing a direct link between the loss of natural sympathy (roughly around the turn of the seventeenth century) and the current state of Western civilization, contemplating the Covid crisis and climate change as two outcomes of a process she describes as marked by a growing sense of alienation between us humans and the natural world. In this way, Lobsien's argument resonates with path-breaking accounts of the civilization process as a distancing process, exemplified by the works of Benjamin, Elias, Adorno, and, more recently, Albrecht Koschorke in Körperströme und Schriftverkehr: Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 1999). But in contrast to her predecessors, Lobsien remains vague when it comes to identifying and explaining what may have caused this process. The question what exactly triggered the 'entscheidenden Einbruch' ('critical decline') in the history of sympathy (p. 68) in cultural and mental-historical terms remains largely unanswered, as does the question of how we might retrieve what we have lost (if this is what...

Eros and Etiology in Love’s Labour’s Lost

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the creation of an academe where study is posited as the antidote to the diseases of the mind caused by worldly desire results in an epidemic of lovesickness. Lovesickness, otherwise known as ‘erotic melancholy’ or ‘erotomania’, was treated in contemporary medical documents as a real, diagnosable illness, a contagious disease thought to infect the imagination through the eyes, which could be fatal if left untreated. Such representation of love as a communicable disease is drawn, I suggest, from a neoplatonic tradition led by the work of Marsilio Ficino, particularly his fifteenth-century treatise Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Ficino’s construction of eros as a kind of ‘vulgar love’, distinctive from ‘heroic love’, emphatically denotes lovesickness as a kind of material contagion with the eye as its primary means of transmission, an idea that had a more significant influence in England and on the work of playwrights like William Shakespeare than has previously been acknowledged. For all its lighthearted conceits, Love’s Labour’s Lost takes lovesickness and its etiology very seriously, in ways that have been almost entirely ignored by scholarship on this play.

The “Origini della fameglia Orsina”: Incredible Genealogies Between a Pseudo Ficino and a Pseudo Petrarch

This paper analyses and publishes a diptych of texts on the origins of the Orsini family preserved in the manuscript Florence, BNC, II.VII.82. The texts are fully in line with the trend of ‘unbelievable genealogies’ developing in Italy during the 16th century. The first of the texts recounts the remote origins of the noble family and is attributed to an otherwise unknown son of Marsilio Ficino. The second one narrates Orsine events in the Carolingian era and is instead attributed to Francesco Petrarca.

Editorial

When considering posthuman issues, scholars have mostly focused on contemporary technologies, works of art, or media phenomena. However, several traces of the great variety of posthuman issues can already be found in our cultural history. I wish to highlight some selected insights concerning the connection between blood and bliss that are of pressing relevance for some posthuman challenges. Thus, I wish to encourage scholars to investigate such issues further and to submit their reflections to the Journal of Posthuman Studies.In the Holy Mass the bread becomes the body of Christ, and the wine his blood. Jesus Christ is present during this ceremony, according to the Roman Catholic faith, and becomes one with us, the bearers of God’s image. Thus, our having been created in God’s image is reaffirmed, and we can hope for eternal life in the afterworld. The blood of Jesus Christ helps us to realize this afterlife. The Holy Mass reminds us of the Last Supper Jesus and his disciples had on the evening before his death. Three days after the crucifixion, God raised Jesus from death. Jesus was resurrected in a glorified body. Blood here has a redemptive power. “Christ’s blood is believed by Christians to cleanse the human soul of mortal sin.”1 Thus, it increases the chance of a blissful afterlife.“Ficino and his contemporaries went further, discussing youth and health as bodily substances which dwelt in the blood and that could be restored through the same liquid: ‘There is a power in human blood to both attract and, in turn, to follow human blood.’”2 Witches play a particularly interesting role when it comes to blood. Most Medieval theologians claimed that the devil was responsible for the work of the witches. “According to the Italian philosopher of the Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino, human blood naturally attracted human blood. The old women, called witches, were believed to drink the children’s blood to have their youth back; they were believed to go down the chimneys of the houses, especially on Thursday night, to suck out infants’ lives. Blood was, then, considered as a remedy for old age and decay as it is testified by a unique case of real vampirism. As in a gruesome fairy tale, during the late sixteenth century the Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory killed more than sixty young girls to drink their blood and reacquire her youth.”3 It might be interesting to note that the cultural origin of the witches can be traced to a night bird of prey from ancient mythology called the strix. The cultural connection between striges and witches can still be seen in the Italian term for a witch, which is strega. A blood-related practice of rejuvenation has already been mentioned in ancient Greek mythology, for example, in Book 7 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: By replacing blood with an herbal juice cocktail and after erecting altars to Hecate, the goddess of magic, and Hebe, the goddess of youth, Medea helps Aeson, Jason’s father, to regain the strength of his youth.A further development of the cultural connection between blood and bliss can be found in vampire stories. The word “vampire” was first used in English in 1732. A vampire is “a deceased person.”4 “Vampires sucked the blood of the living, stopping their normal process of decay as corpses and confusing dangerously the boundaries between life and death.”5 Although accounts of vampires mostly come from eastern and southeastern Europe, during the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century there was an active debate in Western Europe regarding the reality of the vampire. The belief in this kind of creature was, in fact, evidently in contradiction to the Christian doctrine of the resurrection. The uncorrupted “miraculous” body of the vampire was the negative reflection of that of the saint, while its bloodthirstiness could be interpreted as the inversion of Holy Communion, where Christians were materially absorbing the flesh and the blood of Jesus. The vampire constituted the disruption of a divine order according to which the soul should be freed from the corporeal reality and reach the otherworld, or, as in the case of the saints, be able to operate marvelously inside the body thanks to its holiness. According to the description of the eighteenth-century French Benedictine abbot Augustine Calmet, when vampires were taken out of the ground they “have appeared red, with their limbs supple and pliable, without worms or decay; but not without great stench, in contrast with the perfumes and oils issuing from the saints’ corpses.”6In Central and South America, vampire bats exist that can live solely on blood. Vampire bats were mentioned in the Bram Stoker novel from 1897 entitled Dracula, in which Dracula transforms himself into a bat several times. Dracula is deceased but behaves as if he were alive. The term undead is also being employed for human beings who have used cryonics. This description is different from that of related contemporary processes, but certain resonances are striking indeed. Cryopreservation may occur only once a human being is declared brain dead. Brain death does not have to be an irreversible state. It is conceivable that the molecules that are dissolved when brain death occurs can be repaired and reestablished by means of nanorobots, synthetic biology, and bioprinting. If this can be achieved, then the brain can become functional again and consciousness can be regained.This is the cultural background that needs to be considered when considering the biotechnological use of blood in our times. Even though the FDA has doubts concerning the idea of taking blood from the young so that old people can rejuvenate themselves, there is widespread interest in this technology.7 Reports exist that billionaires such as Peter Thiel have expressed an interest in this technology.8 However, when asked about this issue, Thiel explicitly stated that he was not a vampire.9 Whether or not this is the case, there seems to be some scientific evidence in favor of these kinds of technologies. On 31 May 2022, a news item announced that Chinese scientists had found a rejuvenation secret that allowed old mice to live longer on the basis of blood taken from younger mice.10In the Holy Mass, blood is being drunk to increase the chances of living a blissful afterlife. Witches, on the other hand, drink the blood of young people to regain their youth. This time a fulfilled life in this world is targeted. A further alternative is represented by vampires who are undead, and who drink blood to undo their own process of decay, so that they remain dead while behaving like someone who is alive. Contemporary technologies attempt to actually achieve what has been dealt with in magical stories of the past. In the case of cryonics, the goal is to reverse the state of being dead. This option is a new one and has not yet been presented in the examples of the Holy Mass, witches, or vampires. In the case of getting injections of a secret that was derived from the blood of young people, it can be stressed that this example is structurally analogous to what witches have done. Hence, it is not a vampire technology, but rather a witchcraft technology. As Chinese scientists have demonstrated recently, it seems to be a realistic goal. In contrast to the magical attempts of the past, technological innovations might actually enable us to realize the goals of which we dreamed so far only. This is an amazingly fascinating development. There seems to be at least a grain of truth in Arthur C. Clarke’s insight that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”11 Please feel free to submit further such intriguing historical issues to the Journal of Posthuman Studies.

East Meets West: The New Gnoseology in Giordano Bruno and Wang Yangming

This study examines the various explanations of the deliberative humanity, regarding a new gnoseology in the intellectual contexts of Giordano Bruno and Wang Yangming during the 15th and 16th centuries. In a similar way to Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno for the European Renaissance, Wang Yangming is the enlightener among the representatives of Neo-Confucianism in early modern China. Each of these three takes an individual’s mind as the point of departure. They then modify the traditional theory of gnoseology, in search of the good and principle. Nevertheless, behind these similarities on the surface, the metaphorical and theoretical interpretations follow different directions. Marsilio Ficino translates hierarchic Platonism as a transcendent norm. Giordano Bruno and Wang Yangming, however, seem to liberate the individual’s humanity from the traditional norms of gnoseology. In their methodologies, they both have developed a generative gnoseology that differs from the orthodox pattern of knowledge in their respective traditions.

Antonio degli Agli’s Defence of Immortality

In the article, the author briefly explains the popularity of the question of the immortality of the soul in the fifteenth century, presents the intellectual activity and bibliography of Antonio degli Agli, a prominent Tuscan humanist of the Quattrocento, and analyzes the content of Agli’s treatise On the Immortality of the Soul (De immortalitate animae). The short treatise remains only in manuscript and is rarely mentioned by scholars dealing with the history of the problem of immortal­ity; however, it is a witness to the considerable popularity of the issue during the Renaissance. The article shows that the main arguments used by Agli relate to the metaphysics of light and the ontic affinity between the human mind and its most perfect objects of cognition. It is also demonstrated that these arguments largely coincide with those found in Marsilio Ficino’s opuscula theologica and the Platonic Theology.

Two Letters of Marsilio Ficino and Their Translations in Humanistic Bohemia

Two of Marsilio Ficino’s letters among his correspondence—the letter De officiis and the letter Veritas de institutione principis—enjoyed heightened popularity in the sixteenth century. One of the first translations of Ficino into the vernacular is a translation of these two letters into Czech, printed in Prague around the year 1500. Czech humanist Řehoř Hrubý of Jelení (ca. 1460–1514) seems to be a plausible candidate for the authorship. The second translation into Czech was published in 1520 by Oldřich Velenský of Mnichov (1495–1531). This article examines the Czech humanistic translations of Ficino’s letters and places them into the context of the Czech humanistic movement at the begin­ning of the sixteenth century, which emphasized moral topics from Italian Renaissance Platonism. It argues that these letters from Ficino supported the moral claims of Czech pre-Reformation and Reformation thought at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Reading the De anima with Aristotle's Student: Marsilio Ficino on Theophrastus on the Intellect

Reading the De anima with Aristotle's Student: Marsilio Ficino on Theophrastus on the Intellect

Reading and Numerology in the Early French Reform

ABSTRACT French humanists and reformers around 1500 drew upon ancient and twelfth-century practices of reading numerologically, in an effort to recover a rich mode of doing philosophy rooted in Christian scriptures. This article is chiefly exploratory, setting out this programme’s sources, practices, and aims within the circle of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, comparing to the influential projects of the Modern Devotion, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola. The article centres on some examples of how this hermeneutic practice looked in action, before closing with the idea that conceptual ambition made it vulnerable to the mounting pressures of the early French reformation.

The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora by Felipe Valencia

Reviewed by: The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora by Felipe Valencia Andrés Olmedo Orejuela Felipe Valencia, The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), 335 pp. Lope de Vega (1562–1635), dramatic innovator, prolific poet, author of multiple epics, began a great controversy toward the end of his phenomenally productive career. Criticizing the style of poetry popularized by Luis de Góngora's Soledades (1613–17), Lope ridiculed it in one of the most extended and extraordinary contemplations on poetry in the early modern period. Lope had seen the writing on the wall: soon enough Góngora's imitators were legion, and in his final dramatic work, La Dorotea (1632), Lope himself imitates "the new poetry" in such poems as "A mis soledades voy" and "¡Pobre barquilla mía…!" Contrary to this longstanding crisis in the historiography of Spanish literature, Felipe Valencia's erudite and provocative The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora tells another story that places Góngora not at the height of stylistic or poetic achievement, but at the crux of a quarrelsome literary competition between prestigious epic and lyric poetry, for which "melancholy is central" (19). Two main observations emerge: first, that the success of epic poetry swayed Spanish writers of lyric in the second half of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Alonso de Ercilla, Fernando de Herrera, Miguel de Cervantes, Juan de Arguijo, and Góngora; and second, that theories of melancholy define lyric poetry as masculine by representing erotic love as an illness that exalts the violent and creative capacities of melancholic men who fail to consummate their erotic longings. Valencia's monograph is a first-rate contribution to the study of early modern lyric poetry, especially as it developed in Spain. This study builds upon important works in the field—Leah Middlebrook's Imperial Lyric: New Poetry and New Subjects in Early Modern Spain (2009) and Isabel Torres's Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire (2013)—through a novel emphasis on the relationship between epic and lyric, and an examination of the influence of melancholy. Valencia deploys a range of critical approaches, grounding close readings in philology, elucidating cultural developments in medicine, and explicating theories of lyric with clear references to critical theory and historical treatises. The theoretical arguments can be difficult, but specialists and non-specialists alike will discover in this monograph deft discussions of melancholy across historical periods, the development of ancient and modern theories of lyric, and the reception of the classics during the Renaissance. The Melancholy Void consists of an introduction and five chapters. Each chapter is divided into sections that separate its historical, ideological, and theoretical components. The introduction establishes the connection between the arrival of Italianate poetic forms in Spain and accusations of lyric effeminacy. Representations of "the suffering of a beautiful woman"—such as Daphne in Garcilaso de la Vega's sonnet "A Dafne ya los brazos le crecían" (1533) or Dido in his imperial sonnet "Boscán, las armas y el furor de Marte" (1535)—respond to accusations of lyric effeminacy by displaying the creative and violent power of the melancholic and masculine poetic speaker, shifting the focus of the poem [End Page 282] from the experience of the suffering woman to that of the suffering male. Valencia contends that silenced feminine voices, the perspectives of mythical heroes such as Apollo and Orpheus, and the "spoilation of symbolic practices traditionally associated with women and femininity" are masculinist practices through which male artistic prowess is shown (40), transforming women's suffering into great art and tending "to derive aesthetic pleasure from spectacles of female suffering" (14). The masculine speakers of the poems appear as frustrated melancholic lovers. Valencia traces their connection to the gendered theories of melancholy that attribute creativity and violence to frustrated male lovers in works by Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), Alonso de Santa Cruz (d. 1576), Juan Huarte de San Juan (1529–88), and others. Valencia charts the development of this "melancholy and masculinist poetics" (53). Alonso de Ercilla's epic, La Araucana...