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This chapter examines Modena's outrage at the appropriation of Kabbalah by Christians, particularly Pico della Mirandola. It looks at Modena's effort to separate Christian Kabbalah from Jewish theology and to redefine Kabbalah as a uniquely Jewish realm of thought. Modena objected to Christian Kabbalah for a variety of reasons similar to his opposition to Jewish Kabbalah: it was a recent innovation, and the attempt to argue for its antiquity defied both reason and textual evidence. In the very same passages, however, Modena objected to Christian Kabbalah for the simple fact that it was Christian. Ultimately, in criticizing Christian Kabbalah as a perversion of a specifically Jewish set of esoteric secrets, Modena adopted a protectionist and proprietary attitude toward a form of knowledge and set of practices he had spent considerable energy criticizing and had otherwise rejected.

This chapter reviews and contextualizes the early career of Eugenio Garin (1909-2004), who, alongside Hans Baron and Paul Oskar Kristeller, is considered one of the foremost Renaissance scholars of his generation. It tells the story of Garin’s irenic efforts to reconcile the rift in the Italian academy between Gentile’s brand of idealism (philosophy) and the Italian positivistic school (philology) during the Fascist ventennio. As Garin himself suggested, his early scholarship can be read as an exercise in “honest dissimulation,” aspiring, that is, to a covert critique, political and intellectual, of interwar Italy. This trend is visible in Garin’s scholarship in his groundbreaking works on Pico (1937) and the British Enlightenment (1941), and, most famously, in his interpretation of the Renaissance in Italian Humanism (1947), a work originally commissioned by Ernesto Grassi to support the “existential humanism” he was promoting in Germany with the approval (or so he thought) of Heidegger. In this chapter, moreover, Garin’s career provides the context for defining Hans Baron’s interpretation of Quattrocento humanism as a “civic” movement and for reconnecting estranged but strikingly similar philosophers like Gentile and Ernst Cassirer, as well as for understanding the postwar interest in Antonio Gramsci, of whom Garin was an early and enthusiastic reader.

This chapter discusses the first twenty years of the 16th century, which was a time when most humanists were zealously pursuing the programme of Valla's imperialist designs at the practical level. The different views of Paolo Cortesi and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola are also examined in this chapter, with regards to the argument about the Latin language.

Henry Reynolds’s Mythomystes (1632) is a dynamic response to the tensions between Neo-Platonic claims for the divinity of ancient poetry and a Protestant poetics that rejected syncretism and sought to set the truth of Christianity apart. Reynolds draws on Pico della Mirandola to emphasize the divine knowledge of the ancient pagan poets, who were ‘iointrunners’ with Moses and used fables for the secret communication of wisdom. But in other parts of the book Reynolds carefully separates the pagan and Christian traditions in everything but natural knowledge. These different perspectives can be explained by the rising and falling rhetorical pitch of the mythography and can be compared to Philip Sidney’s practice in his Defence of Poetry. In the end, Reynolds’s mythography returns to a Neo-Platonic conception of the ancient fables, and offers a version of the Narcissus myth that rests upon a Pythagorean symbol.

At the end of the 1580s, Nicolaus Copernicus's theory was one alternative amid a proliferating field of representations of celestial order. Copernicus's proponents were distributed among different networks—and also largely separated by them. Yet the Wittenberg interpretation had made certain parts of Copernicus's work both familiar and credible. References to Copernican parameters in academic textbooks were common from the 1550s onward. Heavenly practitioners of all stripes were using Erasmus Reinhold's Copernican planetary tables. Copernican planetary modeling practices had made serious inroads among a small group of unusually capable students of De Revolutionibus. This chapter examines Johannes Kepler's formation as an active adherent of Copernicus's central theory. First, it describes the Copernican situation at the end of the 1580s, and then looks at Kepler's Copernican formation at Tübingen between 1590 and 1594. It also discusses Kepler's shift in the astronomer's role, his physical-astrological problematic and encounter with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, prognosticating (and theorizing) in Graz, Copernican cosmography and prognostication, Kepler's polyhedral hypothesis, and his logical and astronomical defense of Copernicus.

This chapter focuses on one of the most important Jewish intellectuals of the Ashkenazi population during the thirteenth century—Yohanan Alemanno. The family name that he adopted, Alemanno, was the Italian version of “Ashkenazi,” and he was very proud of his extraction. The young Yohanan studied with a famous figure in Mantua, R. Yehudah Messer Leon, and received the title of doctor. For many years, he lived in Florence, where he had an association with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, whom he mentions explicitly in one of his books, and played a role in the life of the Jewish community there. Alemanno left a substantial literary heritage, most of which still survives in autograph manuscripts. It consists of a lengthy commentary on the Song of Songs, titled Hesheq Shlomo (The Desire of Solomon), of which only the introduction has been printed as Sha'ar ha-Hesheq.

Attention to the science of astronomy, already so well sustained in the Wittenberg cultural sphere, received an unexpected boost with the dramatic and unheralded arrival of two apparitions in the skies of the 1570s. One was a brilliant entity—represented variously as a meteor, a comet, or a new star—that appeared in 1572 and remained until May 1574. The other—represented almost universally as a “bearded star” or comet—could be seen for just over two months between November 1577 and January 1578. This chapter explores planetary order, astronomical reform, and the extraordinary course of nature. It discusses astronomical reform and the interpretation of celestial signs, Thaddeus Hagecius's polemic on the new star, Tycho Brahe and his Copenhagen oration, Brahe's relationship with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Valentine Naibod's circumsolar ordering of Mercury and Venus, astrological and eschatological meanings of comets, and the language and syntax of cometary observation. Finally, the chapter considers the views of Maestlin, Brahe, Cornelius Gemma Frisius, and Helisaeus Roeslin regarding place and order, the comet, and the cosmos.

The period between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries is a crucial yet neglected period in the reception history of Enochic traditions. The Enoch books were “lost” in the West; Enoch, however, was anything but forgotten in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hermetic circles. The Christian Cabalists (Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin, Guillaume Postel) were the first to actively pursue the search for the lost Enoch. In the mid-sixteenth century with the arrival of the first Ethiopic monks from Ethiopia also came the news that 1 Enoch was there preserved. Rumors about the presence of an Enoch manuscript in the library of Nicolas de Pereics were widespread but proved to be unfounded. While Enoch remained popular in esoteric and visionary circles, the publication of the Greek fragments by Scaliger in 1606 led to the composition of the first scholarly commentaries by Sgambati (1703), Sarnelli (1710), and Fabricius (1713). Eventually, in 1773, James Bruce came back from Ethiopia with four MSS of 1 Enoch. Having emancipated the text from esoteric and magic concerns, contemporary research on Enoch could now begin with the publication, in 1821, of the first English translation of 1 Enoch by Richard Laurence.

This chapter examines an account of moral responsibility given by Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in his “Oration on the Dignity of Man.” According to this account, God bestowed special characteristics upon every realm of His great cosmos. Humans were decreed by God to “share in common whatever properties had been peculiar to each of the other creatures;” therefore, humans obtained the power to make themselves whatever they freely chose to be. This account does not come without problems, and one main problem is discussed in this chapter—the need for miracles. This is a daunting problem for those devoted to a naturalistic world view. Essentially, the claim made here is that moral responsibility cannot survive within a naturalistic environment devoid of miracles.

Johannes Kepler's De Stella Nova had broad appeal for different contemporary groups. As with the 1572 nova, Kepler described a novelty that required no special technical skill to observe. Antonio Lorenzini, the hapless opponent of parallax, was something of a soft target for Kepler—as he was for Baldassare Capra, Alimberto Mauri, and, much later, Galileo. Moreover, Kepler's systematic attack on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and in defense of a reformed, aspectual astrology linked the new star to the science of the stars. In these different ways, therefore, the nova moved out of the domain of the strictly miraculous and became part of the ordinary course of nature. At the same time, Kepler's discussions of heavenly alteration and the size of the universe brought him into explicit engagement with the natural philosophy of the modernizers—especially Giordano Bruno, Tycho Brahe, and William Gilbert. This chapter focuses on how Kepler's De Stella Nova traveled from Germany and Italy to England. In particular, it examines his English campaign hoping for public endorsement of his reformed astrology from King James.

Arias Montano’s magnum opus drew from two genres that were vehicles for discussions about the relationship between the revealed Word, the study of nature and the purpose of natural philosophy: hexameral commentaries and Mosaic philosophies. Using several examples of exegesis about the biblical passage on the celestial waters (Gen 1, 7), this chapter illustrates how controversial aspects of natural phenomena were dealt with in the hexameral commentaries of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Basil of Caesarea, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Agostino Steuco, Antonio de Honcala, and Luis de León. It shows that the scholastic style employed by most commentators was an effective way to propose some radical cosmological re-conceptualizations which were presented as valid alternatives to prevailing natural philosophical explanations. The chapter then compares this genre to early examples of Mosaic philosophies, in particular an early Spanish exemplar of the genre Francisco Valles de Covarrubias’s Sacra philosophia. Although Arias Montano’s work was ultimately very different from these two genres—he despised scholastic language, for one—he shared with their authors some very influential historical ‘truths’ that undergirded both genres: the concept of Hebrew as the Adamic language, the veracity of the Genesis account and the Mosaic authorship of Genesis.

This chapter explores the ethical challenges presented by emerging technologies for biomedical human enhancement. Drawing upon the early humanist vision of Pico della Mirandola, I expose the weakness in the bioconservative ‘argument from dignity’ against transhumanist enthusiasm for enhancement technologies. Yet I suggest that the alternative argument from ‘hubris’ reveals an equally serious flaw in the liberal transhumanist position. In particular, the virtue of technomoral humility helps us to acknowledge that neither transhumanists nor humanity writ large are morally equipped with the virtues needed to exercise the power of new biomedical technologies wisely and well. Working with Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset’s views about our modern technological “crisis of wishing,” I conclude that only by cultivating technomoral wisdom can we resolve this crisis, and harness the genuine promise of biomedical technologies for the future of human flourishing.

The chapter tracks the idea of human dignity to three main sources: the Old Testament’s imago Dei, Pico della Mirandola’s notion of human self-creation, and Kant’s doctrine of the noumenal self. The author seeks to synthesize these sources into a conception of dignity that links up with the meaning-oriented and constructivist view of the self deployed in other parts of the book. The different levels of abstraction to which the self is amenable—from the individual, through the social, to the universal—play a key role. The proposed conception of dignity is contrasted with “dignity-as-rank” recently advocated by Professor Jeremy Waldron. Some potential pitfalls of a morality of dignity are marked.

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the concept of dignity almost invariably connoted elevated social rank, of the sort that marked nobility or ecclesiastic preferment. However, today dignity usually connotes a fundamental moral status belonging to all humans equally, which status is the basis of human rights. How did this radical change in meaning come about? And did anything like our moralized concept of dignity exist before it was named “dignity”? The introduction sketches the way that the chapters in this volume answer these questions, and in turn how they draw the arc of dignity’s conceptual development from Homeric Greek thought to medieval Christian and Islamic theology through eighteenth century enlightenment revolutions all the way to the contemporary era.