Intellectual History Review

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From the “Renaissance” to the “Enlightenment”

Francesco Borghesi

To cite this article: Francesco Borghesi (2019) From the “Renaissance” to the “Enlightenment”,
Intellectual History Review, 29:1, 1-10, DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2019.1546426

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INTELLECTUAL HISTORY REVIEW
2019, VOL. 29, NO. 1, 1–10
https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2019.1546426

From the “Renaissance” to the “Enlightenment”

Francesco Borghesi
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This essay introduces the collection of articles contained in this Global intellectual history;
special issue, explaining their necessity and contextualizing them comparative political theory;
within the historiographical debates around “ancient theology” and renaissance philosophy;
enlightenment; ancient
“civil religion”. It does so by referring to well-known influential
theology; civil religion
figures in Renaissance and Enlightenment studies such as Daniel
P. Walker, Frances A. Yates, Charles B. Schmitt, Eugenio Garin,
Cesare Vasoli and Franco Venturi, as well as to more recent studies
such as that by Dmitri Levitin. It further provides a brief overview of
each contribution and places the special issue within the
disciplinary context of global and comparative intellectual history.

The essays presented herein partly originate from a symposium titled “From Ancient
Theology to Civil Religion, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment”, which was
held under the aegis of the Sydney Intellectual History Network at the University of
Sydney, Australia, 9–10 November 2015. Six of the papers – those by Vasileios Syros, Fab-
rizio Lelli, Miguel Vatter, Umberto Grassi, Daniel Canaris and Jennifer Mensch – were
presented there and have been subsequently significantly revised for publication in this
special issue, while Maurizio Campanelli, Giacomo Corazzol and Jeremy Kleidosty were
invited to join the project at a later stage with original contributions. In order to begin
to summarize the papers and the special issue as a whole, the diversity of methodological
approaches adopted by each author should be emphasized. The widely differing
approaches relate to how Martin Mulsow describes “global intellectual history” as a disci-
pline in the making
which not only displays many of the characteristics of already existing forms of intellectual
history – from conceptual history to network analysis, from the history of political languages
to the philological study of texts – but which ultimately amount[s] to innovative approaches
to an old subject. The extension of the perspective into the global creates new and unique
problems that require imaginative solutions.1

This special issue should be considered a contribution to such a notion of intellectual

history.

1.
Recent scholarship on the “radical Enlightenment” has emphasized the theologico-political
strategies adopted by this philosophical movement to bring about a conception of the state

CONTACT Francesco Borghesi [email protected]

© 2019 International Society for Intellectual History
2 F. BORGHESI

that is “neutral” or “tolerant” in relation to religious (and perhaps also non-religious) world
views. However, while one of the important concepts employed in this strategy revolves
around the idea of a “civil religion”, the prehistory of this civil or political conception of reli-
gion remains less well explored. This special issue aims to bridge this gap by exploring the con-
nections between the Renaissance idea of “ancient theology” and the Enlightenment idea of
“civil religion”. Although influential scholars such as Daniel P. Walker, Frances Yates and
Charles B. Schmitt have argued that the Renaissance idea of “ancient theology” proved funda-
mental to the development of the European and Anglo-American Enlightenment, and in par-
ticular led to a republican conception of civil religion that inscribes religious tolerance into the
political constitution, the precise nature of this filiation and its meaning has until recently
remained to be explored.2 Moreover, not enough attention has been given to the ramifications
of this movement in relation to early eighteenth-century theological writings, which –
although resisting the secularist currents of the Enlightenment – similarly drew upon and
reacted to the Hermetic tradition in an attempt to accommodate other religions within a
Christian theological framework. This collection of essays has been created in order to
provide a contribution to fill such lacunae.

2.
As emphasized by one of the volume’s reviewers, Guido Giglioni, the body politic – like the
bodies of all living beings – is inherently vulnerable and exposed to the possibilities of
decline and destruction. Within this traditional way of representing the nature of
human commonwealths, Giglioni continues, religion can be seen as both the pathogen
and the antidote (as, for instance, addressed by Miguel Vatter’s essay on Machiavelli).
Between the late medieval and early modern periods, when religious divisions were
often the cause of or trigger for political and social unrest, reflections over the essence
of divine creation and governance of the world represented an integral part of the political
thinking of the times (an example of this is Jeremy Kleidosty’s article on Hobbes, who built
his theory of political sovereignty on the experience of the English Civil War and the
notion that religion had a fundamental public role on which the stability of a common-
wealth depended).
This collection of articles engages with this theologico-political predicament, moving
from the assumption that some of its more original and innovative features originated
from the way in which Renaissance authors (such as Leonardo Bruni, Jochanan Alemanno,
Georgios Gemistos Plethon, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico and Niccolò Machiavelli, among
others examined in the volume) recovered and reinterpreted themes belonging to the tra-
dition of Greco-Roman historiography and political thought, as well as to biblical exegesis,
historical narratives of ancient wisdom and travel reports on Indian and Chinese cultures.
Bringing together specialists in the conceptions of religion, politics, literature and phil-
osophy between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries and a variety of methodological
and disciplinary approaches (such as textual criticism, political science, history of philos-
ophy and intellectual and cultural history), the volume aims to present its readers with
fresh historical research and new ideas while also addressing a number of interrelated
issues. It establishes links between the notion of civil religion and the complementary
ideas of ancient theology, poetic theology and natural theology, the uses of prophetic
knowledge in the elaboration of political strategies, the role of cosmology in the
 INTELLECTUAL HISTORY REVIEW 3

development of a civil use of religion, the discourse of prophetology from Machiavelli to

Kant and the application of Hermetic theories to the shaping of a number of theological
debates involving European encounters with Islamic, Jewish and Chinese civilizations. Not
only is the spectrum of positions outlined throughout this volume wide and diverse, but
the temporal and spatial coordinates are also well represented, ranging from the antiquity
through the Middle Ages to the early modern period, analysing the Zoroastrian, Greco-
Roman, Jewish, Christian and Muslim civilizations and including heterodox and orthodox
perspectives alongside popular and learned traditions.

3.
Although such feeling cannot be assumed for all contributors, I felt the urgency to assemble a
collection of critical perspectives to engage with traditional accounts of the connection
between the “Renaissance” and the “Enlightenment” periods and integrate them with more
recent interpretations of the early modern period in Europe. At first, my interest was
sparked by Italian historian of philosophy Eugenio Garin’s notion of a long Enlightenment,
which spans from Petrarch’s fourteenth century to Rousseau’s eighteenth century, and
which Garin himself problematized further after borrowing it from Delio Cantimori’s work
on the periodization of European history.3 Such a notion, in short, considers the French Revo-
lution as the end of the age of Renaissance Humanism, enclosing in one ideal world scholastics
and humanists and the revolutionary thinkers of the early Enlightenment “from Petrarch to
Rousseau”. The most influential Italian historian of the Enlightenment, Franco Venturi
(1914–1994), reacted to this interpretation in his “Trevelyan Lectures” delivered at Cambridge
University in 1969, in which he protested against the tendency of scholars such as Peter Gay
and Ernst Cassirer to match philosophy and history of the Enlightenment, and in particular
against Cantimori, “one of the men for whom the age of humanism ended with the French
revolution. He too enclosed in an ideal world scholasticism and the humanists up to the
dawn of the Enlightenment, from Petrarch to Rousseau”.4
Venturi was reacting to such an interpretation, which he claimed had been Cantimori’s own
since the late 1930s and which Garin had begun to embrace in his early work on the English
Enlightenment published in 1942,5 emphasizing it once again thirty years later in his 1970 Dal
Rinascimento all’Illuminismo in clear opposition to Venturi’s “Trevelyan Lectures”, in which
Cantimori had been attacked. Garin pointed out that he still considered fruitful Cantimori’s
representation of a connection between the “humanistic renewal” and the “start of the Enlight-
enment”.6 The difference between Cantimori’s and Garin’s interpretations was that while Can-
timori was interested in the political history of groups of heretical and revolutionary
intellectuals, Garin rather emphasized a philosophical theme – that of the “consciousness of
rebirth [la coscienza del rinascere]”. In this sense, for Garin the theme originally proposed
by Cantimori was morphing into a notion of a long Enlightenment divided into two
different moments: the “moment of the rebirth [il momento della rinascita]” (when the light
comes back after a period of darkness) and that of Enlightenment (when the light spreads
out).7 Garin, thus, was without hesitation including the idea of modernity in the centuries
spanning from Petrarch to Rousseau. It should be noted, however, that Garin’s main interests
were never devoted to the autonomy and specificity of the age of the Enlightenment, while
Venturi opposed such a philosophizing conception as he considered it a major obstacle to
4 F. BORGHESI

achieving a satisfactory understanding of the reforming features of the Italian Enlightenment,

which he viewed as much more historically sound.8

4.
In more recent decades, the work of Cesare Vasoli (1924–2013) has surveyed the so-called
myth of the “prisci theologi [ancient theologians]”. Although Vasoli, who was a student of
Eugenio Garin’s, began writing on this subject in the 1960s, studying the influence and
circulation of ancient theology in Symphorien Champier’s sixteenth-century France, he
later returned to the sources of the “myth” – that is, to the Italian humanist movement,
and particularly to Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), and, before him, to the Byzantine philo-
sopher Georgios Gemistos Plethon (1355–1452). In doing so, Vasoli insisted on the close
relation that he saw between the return of the “prisca theologia [ancient theology]” and the
desire for a “renovatio [renewal]” of the Christian religion to be established among huma-
nists on the rediscovery of the ancient roots of a common truth. This truth would be
unveiled with the support of the philological sensibility that was so central to the huma-
nistic attitude towards a cultural “rebirth” such as the “Renaissance”.9
From a different – perhaps reversed, in a sense, and healthily non Italo-centric – per-
spective, the scholarship on ancient theology intended as the history of “histories of phil-
osophy between ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Enlightenment’” is examined in a recent study by
Dmitri Levitin entitled Ancient Wisdom in the Age of New Science,10 which looks at the
same categories but starting from an interest in abandoning the category of “early enlight-
enment” because it “obscures more than it reveals about seventeenth-century scholarship”.
I found it instructive, in the context of the controversy referred to above, to read what
Levitin notes in regard to the need to escape disciplinary history, and “instead examine
seventeenth-century histories on their own terms”:
It emerges that many of the conclusions supposedly unique to the “critical” and “enlightened”
historians – especially the rejection of Jewish and patristic narratives of pagan-Christian syn-
cretism, and new attitudes to the relationship between ancient and modern natural philosophy
– were not only present, but sometimes even commonplace, in the seventeenth-century discus-
sions, and that there was no intrinsic connection between “criticism” and heterodoxy. It is not
only the fetishisation of “enlightenment” that has led to neglect of this; it has been a problem
from the side of Renaissance scholarship also. It remains customary to claim that Renaissance
attitudes to ancient philosophy were “syncretist”, obsessed with developing narratives of a
prisca sapientia or a philosophia perennis. The seventeenth century then falls into the gaps,
as scholars are unsure whether to classify seventeenth-century attitudes to the history of phil-
osophy as “syncretist” or “enlightened”. However useful the terms prisca sapientia or prisca
theologia are for the fifteenth century – and that itself is dubious – they will not be used
here. Take for example the following different views: all philosophy derives from Moses or
the ancient Israelites; certain natural religious truths descended from Noah to his children
and then to the whole world; the Hebrews had vague foreshadowings of Christian doctrines
like the trinity which then spread to some pagan philosophers; all pagans believed in God;
all pagan theists were monotheists. All of these views have been labelled prisca sapientia or
prisca theologia by modern historians, but they are all fundamentally different positions,
and were recognized as such by seventeenth-century men of letters.11

Levitin’s argument usefully addresses the connection between the historiographical cat-
egories of ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Enlightenment’, and efficaciously exposes the prevalent
 INTELLECTUAL HISTORY REVIEW 5

stereotype of the latter as one that witnessed a move away from humanist modes of thought.
The articles selected for this collection contribute to this concern from a different angle and
show how the “syncretist” attitude so common in Renaissance scholarship could be fruit-
fully substituted by a different focus: to consider “ancient theology” a political category (and
therefore tied with the discourse on civil religion) and not primarily a philosophico-reli-
gious one (and therefore connected to the dubious notion of syncretism).

5.
The contributors to this special issue, although not always directly, engage with these views –
and they do so from a range of different critical and disciplinary perspectives. Thanks to the
research they have produced, a number of scholarly achievements should be recognized: the
acknowledgment that religious experience played an often positive and constitutive role in
shaping political and philosophical reflections; the process of cultural hybridization
issuing from the merging of the essential characteristics belonging respectively to the pro-
phetic lawgivers in Jewish and Muslim traditions with the idea of the philosopher-king of
Platonic origin; and the view of Greco-Roman history and the Bible as repositories of
models and examples to be appropriated by a new political science. Two results of the
inquiry as a whole are to also be appreciated: the efforts made by many of the contributors
to provide an approach to the notion of global or comparative intellectual history; and the
legitimacy and productivity of the “Renaissance” as a historiographical category.

6.
An overview of the articles included in this collection could help to engender a general
sense of the project. Vasileios Syros takes into consideration the “strongman syndrome”
and its long lineage in premodern European and Islamic political thought by analysing
the narrative that Italian humanist Leonardo Bruni (ca. 1370–1444) provides in his
History of the Florentine People of the ascension and downfall of Walter VI of Brienne
in 1342 in Florence and then comparing it with the History of Fīrūz Shāh written one
hundred years earlier by historian and political writer Żiyā’ al-Dīn Baranī (ca. 1285–
1357), who examines the failed leadership of the sultan of Delhi Muh ammad
b. Tughluq (r. 1324–1351). In his exploration of specific variants of autocratic leadership
in Renaissance Florence and the Delhi Sultanate, as recorded in Bruni’s and Baranī’s
respective writings, Syros demonstrates that both authors seek to offer reflections on
the emergence and gradual degeneration of strongman rule that are embedded in a
broader discussion of the didactic value of the study of history and its relevance to
good government. In a detailed examination of premodern modes of envisioning strong-
man rule which provides useful insights into the circumstances that incubate the ascent of
strong leaders, Syros performs a comparative analysis by showing how both Bruni and
Baranī highlight the transience of political authority and the dangers that can arise
when a leader is out of touch with the overall social climate, alienates his constituency
and operates without popular consent.
In Fabrizio Lelli’s contribution, the theme of “Moses legislator” is analysed within the
Jewish context of fifteenth-century Italy and in contemporary Christian authors. Lelli
notes how such an appraisal of the figure of Moses should be understood against the
6 F. BORGHESI

background of the revival of Platonic thought in the West. Said revival led Jewish scholars
– especially those active in Italy – to emphasize the Platonic trends which had long charac-
terized Jewish medieval thought, while, at the same time, the Jewish authors’ involvement
in intellectual debates with non-Jews caused them to engage with some of the classical and
scholastic sources available at the time to Christians. This adaptation of Arabic–Jewish
Platonic texts to Aristotelian humanistic thought eventually gave rise to a new understand-
ing of politics, which stressed its practical more than its theoretical aspects. According to
Lelli it also created a new attitude towards political thought, which allowed fifteenth-
century Jewish and Christian scholars to interpret the Mosaic legislative corpus not only
as a divinely revealed collection of moral and religious precepts but also as the paradigm
of a modern legal system that would be employed for motivating the different forms of
government of early European nation states on the basis of the political exegesis of Biblical
institutions. Lelli’s interpretation, thus, sheds much-needed light on the growing impact
that the scholarly study of the Bible had on political thinking during the early modern
period, in particular with respect to the figure of Moses as a lawgiver.
Maurizio Campanelli tackles Ficino’s Latin translation of the Greek Corpus Hermeti-
cum, which was carried out in 1463 at Cosimo de’ Medici’s request and was first
printed – without the translator’s consent – in Treviso in 1471. Ficino’s translation,
together with his preface detailing Hermes Trismegistus’s life and writings, is analysed
by Campanelli as the starting point of modern hermeticism, emphasizing – among
forty extant manuscripts, twenty-four editions printed by the end of the sixteenth
century and a number of translations in many vernacular languages – that one of the trea-
tises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the Pimander, was by far the most widespread of
Ficino’s work. Before Ficino’s translation, a profile of Hermes Trismegistus could be found
only in Arabic Hermetic literature translated into Latin during the late Middle Ages. Rich
in philological information, the article reveals the multilayered nature of Hermes Trisme-
gistus’s persona and should be read as an introduction to Campanelli’s superb critical
edition of the Pimander, published in 2011.12
Giacomo Corazzol provides an original contribution to the study of Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola’s relation to Hebrew sources by providing an account of how, in the summer of
1486, he came into possession of what he regarded as the original Chaldean text of the
Chaldean Oracles, superseding the Greek text known to him thus far. In his Nine
Hundred Theses [Conclusiones nongentae], printed in Rome in 1486, Pico della Mirandola
(1463–1496) devoted to the Chaldean Oracles fifteen conclusions, which Corazzol analyses
in the first part of the article, pointing out the kabbalistic themes and symbols derived
from the original text. In the second part, an in-depth analysis of one of these conclusiones
demonstrates that Pico della Mirandola’s reading implies that the Greek translator had
missed the kabbalistic content of the original. Corazzol convincingly shows that the
Nine Hundred Theses aimed at proving that the transmission of kabbalah to Zoroaster
and from Zoroaster to the Greek world – in other words, the existence of a divinely
revealed prisca theologia transmitted through the ages – could be demonstrated on the
basis of philological analysis. Furthermore, Corazzol, in concluding, shows how – accord-
ing to Pico della Mirandola – the Nine Hundred Theses should be considered as the cul-
mination of the studia humanitatis, thus establishing a connection between the studia
humanitatis and studia divinitatis of great importance in the development of any under-
standing of how the history of humanism is to be conceived.
 INTELLECTUAL HISTORY REVIEW 7

Miguel Vatter’s contribution, to be read as a follow-up to his recent “Machiavelli, ‘Ancient

Theology’, and the Problem of Civil Religion”,13 asks whether or not Niccolò Machiavelli’s
political and religious thought should be considered aligned with Epicureanism, addressing
the recent scholarship that has identified him as the foremost representative of such a phil-
osophy in sixteenth-century Florence. Vatter offers a new reading of the incomplete epic
poem The Ass (L’asino, 1517), laying bare a Machiavelli close to a Platonic variant of classical
naturalism linked with the idea of a natural virtue modelled on the lives of animals. In
reading the poem through the lens of Plutarch’s Life of Numa, the author recovers –
through the studies by Alison Brown and Gennaro Sasso – Arthur Lovejoy’s and Franz
Boas’s notion of “animalitarianism” (i.e. the thesis of the moral superiority of non-human
animals over human animals) to show that Plutarch’s discussion of that topic in Gryllus
influenced Machiavelli. Vatter, perhaps in a Straussian vein, argues that in the poem Machia-
velli adopted the view of history and political change typified by the ancient theology of
Platonic origin. Vatter’s article provides a powerful argument against Alison Brown’s
interpretation of The Ass, and is concerned to show that the link to Lucretius and a Lucretian
heritage in Machiavelli’s thought is not as strong as the link to Plato and Platonism.
Umberto Grassi examines the inquisitorial trials of a number of heretics whose ideas are
reminiscent of the heresies of Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, the miller from
Friuli studied by Carlo Ginzburg in his groundbreaking The Cheese and the Worms, first
published in 1976. In a learned and original inquiry into forms of popular religiosity
centred on the interplay of inquisition, heresy and sexuality, the author bases his interpret-
ation on trial proceedings of the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily and the Roman Inquisition in
Naples, Pisa and Venice. Grassi’s analysis, which brings to light previously unexplored
archival material, is based on twenty-six cases spanning from the second half of the six-
teenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth. The general interpretative framework
is of a comparative nature, and Ginzburg’s Menocchio works as a point of reference in
the discussion of topics such as the Eucharist, resurrection, ecclesiastic hierarchy and uni-
versal salvation. Grassi adopts a broadly comparative approach enhanced by several poss-
ible connections between Christianity, Gnosticism and Islam. The interpretation proposed
by Grassi, in addition to providing an original contribution to the history of religious
dissent in Italy, sheds new light on the history of religious toleration in the early
modern period, unveiling hitherto unnoticed connections between the belief in universal
salvation and the quest for sexual freedom.
Daniel Canaris’s article contributes to an understanding of the way in which China
figured within the European philosophical imaginary by tackling the question of how
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) viewed China and concentrating on the way in which
he responded to the Jesuit theory of cultural accommodation. Canaris, without denying
the importance of China to Vico’s polemic against libertinism, argues that his represen-
tation of China is best understood in view of its theological significance to contemporary
Jesuit accommodations of Confucianism. Demonstrating extensive knowledge of the lit-
erature on the relationships between Europe and China in the early modern period
(Ricci, Kircher, Hornius, Vossius, Martini), Canaris provides a comprehensive account
of Vico’s position, from the Diritto universale to Scienza nuova in its different editions.
Furthermore, he argues the link between Vico and the Hermetic tradition in a convincing
way, successfully situating Vico’s work in a global context by referring to instances of con-
crete and historical borrowings and appropriations.
8 F. BORGHESI

Jeremy Kleidosty’s article examines the relationship between politics and theology in
Parts 3 and 4 of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), introducing it with a general over-
view chronicling the main stages in the development of the Western and European
notion of civil religion. The author argues that Hobbes’s attempt to divest religion of its
civilizing power is one of the most original and radical features in the Leviathan. Following
an overview of a long line of pagan and later monotheistic Christian and Muslim thinkers
who advance the position that religion is a way of civilizing or uniting the masses, includ-
ing Thucydides, Cicero, Augustine, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Pom-
ponazzi, Kleidosty suggests that Hobbes turns this notion on its head by arguing that
religion can contribute to the de-civilizing of the masses and foment civil war. Such a
view leads Hobbes to the solution of separating belief from practice, with the former
becoming a solely private matter and the latter the exclusive purview of the state. Kleidosty
investigates the distinction between the public and the private in a very fruitful way,
drawing attention to the fact that the “great divorce” of belief and practice – rather
than a call for tolerance or pluralism – is the necessary sacrifice for creating the religious
homogeneity required to sustain the body politic in the form of the great Leviathan.
In the final paper, Jennifer Mensch sets out to show how vocabularies of life have been
employed by philosophers to explain all manner of cosmological, theological and epis-
temological events. Mensch’s study explores the ideas of the natural history of humankind
and self-forming faculties in Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), showing that some of the roots
of these kinds of philosophical investigations can be traced back to Marsilio Ficino’s recov-
ery of Stoic and Neoplatonic themes – in particular, the doctrine of the logoi spermatikoi.
The author also demonstrates that the use of seeds as a metaphor to explain the trans-
mission of truths can be reconnected to the subject of the prisca sapientia and the idea
of a self-forming power in the mind developing in history. Narrowing her focus to the
eighteenth-century legacy of a particular set of discussions that was begun by Plotinus
and other Neoplatonists, and later reinterpreted by Ficino, Mensch persuasively advances
an interpretation of Kant as the proponent of a natural history of the unfolding of reason
across the ages, which she defines as an “epigenetic” development of reason, and some-
thing rather different from the Platonic belief in a pristine self-revelation of reason.
In congruously concluding the set of articles selected for this special issue, Mensch
shows how, like Ficino, Kant was focused on the role of education – particularly in the
lives of future leaders – and on the task which educators faced in their cultivation of char-
acter in both citizens and statesmen alike. However, in Kant’s formulation it was man-
kind’s special vocation as a whole to pursue perfection, a pursuit made possible insofar
as each person contained a germ of the good, a claim which the author pursues to its
first appearances in the Italian Renaissance.

Notes
1. Mulsow, “New Perspectives on Global Intellectual History”, 1. See also Mulsow, “Reference
Theory of Globalized Ideas”.
2. See especially Walker, Ancient Theology, 1–62; Yates, Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition;
Schmitt, “Perennial Philosophy”; Schmitt, “Prisca Theologia e Philosophia Perennis”.
3. See Garin, Dal Rinascimento all’Illuminismo; Cantimori, “La periodizzazione dell’età del
Rinascimento”; Cantimori, “Valore dell’Umanesimo”. Eugenio Garin (1909–2004) and the
slightly older Delio Cantimori (1904–1966) were both historians; the former modernized
 INTELLECTUAL HISTORY REVIEW 9

the study of the Renaissance and its philosophical culture, especially with the research which
he carried out between the late 1930s and the 1970s, and the latter became the leading figure
in the study of the Reformation in Italy due to explorations of sixteenth-century culture such
as his Eretici italiani del Cinquecento, which influenced an entire generation of Italian Refor-
mation scholars. On Garin’s scholarship, see Rubini, The Other Renaissance, 228–92.
4. Venturi,Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, 5. See also the Italian edition of this book:
Venturi, Utopia e riforma nell’Illuminismo, 13. And see Venturi, Settecento riformatore, I,
xiv–xv.
5. Garin,L’illuminismo inglese. I moralisti, 12.
6. Garin, Dal Rinascimento all’Illuminismo, 11.
7. Ibid., 12.
8. See in particular Ferrone, “Garin”, 270–74. For a wider perspective, see Ricci, “Garin lettore
di Cassirer”.
9. See at least the following three studies: Vasoli, “Il mito dei «prisci theologi»”; Vasoli, “Da
Giorgio Gemisto a Ficino”; Vasoli, “«Prisca theologia» e scienze occulte”. On Vasoli’s scho-
larship on ancient theology, one can now read Gentile, “Vasoli, Ficino e il mito dei ‘prisci
theologi’”. For an excellent study in the footsteps of Garin and Vasoli, see Muccillo, Plato-
nismo, ermetismo e «prisca theologia». On Ficino’s views on the Jewish tradition and
ancient theology, see Bartolucci, “Introduzione”.
10. Levitin,Ancient Wisdom, 1–31. For a different perspective focused on Italy, see Casini,
L’antica sapienza italica.
11. Levitin, Ancient Wisdom, 8.
12. Trismegisto, Pimander sive De potestate et sapientia Dei. On this critical edition, see the
review by Malavasi, “Ficinus redivivus”. Incidentally, it should be noted that Campanelli’s
work provides a valuable integration to the chapter on Ficino in Hanegraaff, Esotericism
and the Academy, 41–53, as well as to Eugenio Garin’s studies on hermeticism: see Garin,
Ermetismo del Rinascimento; Garin, “La sapienza antichissima e l’ermetismo”.
13. Vatter, “Machiavelli, ‘Ancient Theology,’ and the Problem of Civil Religion”.

Notes on contributor
Francesco Borghesi teaches in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Sydney. His
interests are concerned with the development of philosophical ideas in European history, especially
between the thirteenth and the sixteenth century, and places itself at the intersection of the histories
of philosophy, religion, and literature. His current project focuses on the diffusion of the idea of
ethical concord during the Renaissance and among his more recent publications are: Giovanni
Pico della Mirandola, ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’ (Cambridge UP, 2012) and the critical
edition of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s letters (Olschki, 2018).

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