The Oration by philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), to which later editors added the subtitle On the Dignity of Man, is the most famous text written in Italy at the height of the Renaissance. The Life of Giovanni by Gianfrancesco Pico, his nephew, is the only contemporary account of the philosopher’s brief and astonishing career—Giovanni, who challenged anyone to debate him on nine hundred theses in Rome, whose writings made him a heretic by papal declaration, died at the age of thirty-one. Together, these works record Giovanni’s invention of Christian Kabbalah, his search for the ancient theology of Orpheus and Zoroaster, and his effort to reconcile all the warring schools of philosophy in universal concord. In this new translation, the two texts are presented with ample explanatory notes that transform our understanding of these fascinating thinkers.

“This book is nothing less than the definitive study of a text long considered central to understanding the Renaissance and its place in Western culture.”
—James Hankins, Harvard University

Pico della Mirandola died in 1494 at the age of thirty-one. During his brief and extraordinary life, he invented Christian Kabbalah in a book that was banned by the Catholic Church after he offered to debate his ideas on religion and philosophy with anyone who challenged him. Today he is best known for a short speech, the Oration on the Dignity of Man, written in 1486 but never delivered. Sometimes called a “Manifesto of the Renaissance,” this text has been regarded as the foundation of humanism and a triumph of secular rationality over medieval mysticism.

Brian Copenhaver upends our understanding of Pico’s masterwork by re-examining this key document of modernity. An eminent historian of philosophy, Copenhaver shows that the Oration is not about human dignity. In fact, Pico never wrote an Oration on the Dignity of Man and never heard of that title. Instead he promoted ascetic mysticism, insisting that Christians need help from Jews to find the path to heaven—a journey whose final stages are magic and Kabbalah. Through a rigorous philological reading of this much-studied text, Copenhaver transforms the history of the idea of dignity and reveals how Pico came to be misunderstood over the course of five centuries. Magic and the Dignity of Man is a seismic shift in the study of one of the most remarkable thinkers of the Renaissance.

A revelatory new account of the magus—the learned magician—and his place in the intellectual, social, and cultural world of Renaissance Europe.

In literary legend, Faustus is the quintessential occult personality of early modern Europe. The historical Faustus, however, was something quite different: a magus—a learned magician fully embedded in the scholarly currents and public life of the Renaissance. And he was hardly the only one. Anthony Grafton argues that the magus in sixteenth-century Europe was a distinctive intellectual type, both different from and indebted to medieval counterparts as well as contemporaries like the engineer, the artist, the Christian humanist, and the religious reformer. Alongside these better-known figures, the magus had a transformative impact on his social world.

Magus details the arts and experiences of learned magicians including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Grafton explores their methods, the knowledge they produced, the services they provided, and the overlapping political and social milieus to which they aspired—often, the circles of kings and princes. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these erudite men anchored debates about licit and illicit magic, the divine and the diabolical, and the nature of “good” and “bad” magicians. Over time, they turned magic into a complex art, which drew on contemporary engineering as well as classical astrology, probed the limits of what was acceptable in a changing society, and promised new ways to explore the self and exploit the cosmos.

Resituating the magus in the social, cultural, and intellectual order of Renaissance Europe, Grafton sheds new light on both the recesses of the learned magician’s mind and the many worlds he inhabited.

Here is a major contribution to the history of Christian kabbalism by an eminent authority. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a central figure in Lorenzo de' Medici's Platonic Academy, was the first notable Christian humanist to become learned in the Kabbalah; and the two sets of kabbalistic theses he wrote started Kabbalah on its Christian career. This is a study of those theses, their meaning, and their relation to the Hebrew texts Pico studied.

Chaim Wirszubski establishes which Hebrew texts Pico used and identifies the sources for individual theses. In the process he provides special insight into Jewish Kabbalah and its several schools. Pico's goal was to use Jewish Kabbalah to confirm Christian theology. In his analysis of Conclusiones Cabalisticae, Wirszubski elucidates this Christian kabbalistic doctrine and shows how it was tied to other currents in Renaissance thought, especially platonism and magic. This study will be valued by students of mysticism and of Renaissance thought.