In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

humanities 383 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Marsilio Ficino. Platonic Theology: Volume 1, Books IBIV. English translation by Michael J.B. Allen with John Warden. Latin text edited by James Hankins with William Bowen Harvard University Press. xviii, 342. US $29.95 The volume is part of a series of English translations projected by the new I Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard=s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies located near Florence. Under the general editorship of James Hankins, the series is intended to make accessible to a wide readership important texts (literary, philosophical, historical, and scientific) written in Latin during the Italian Renaissance. By the end of the seventeenth century, Latin had lost its prestige, and many Latin works, although widely influential during their own time, have remained untranslated and appreciated by only a small group of specialists. The I Tatti series is both a timely and valuable publishing endeavour. Ficino=s Platonic Theology: Volume I, Books IBIV is the first in a series of five planned volumes; and it is the first of three inaugural works of the series (the others are Giovanni Boccaccio=s Famous Women and Leonardo Bruni=s History of the Florentine People). A Renaissance humanist and leader of the Florentine Platonic Academy whose wide-ranging interests encompassed philosophy, music, medicine, astrology, and magic, Marsilio Ficino (1433B99) is best known for having initiated the Renaissance revival of Plato. The Platonic Theology, in which Ficino reconciles Platonism with Christianity, was written during the early 1470s when he was completing his translation of Plato=s works, during which time he was also preparing for the priesthood, which he entered in 1473. In their introduction to the volume, Michael Allen and James Hankins provide compelling commentary on the philosophical and political contexts of the Platonic Theology, together with incisive analyses of the text=s structural and rhetorical features. The work, they argue, represents Ficino=s >mature attempt to sketch out a unitary theological tradition, and particularly a theological metaphysics= that he firmly believed could be traced from Orpheus to Hermes Trismegistus and Zoroaster, >even as it had culminated in the Christian revelation most luminously articulated for him by the Areopagite, Augustine, and Aquinas.= Ficino thought of the Platonic Theology as his most inspired and independent work. At the heart of it lies not only his affirmation of the soul=s immortality, but also his redefinition and reconceptualization of >the figura, of the human entity.= A text of deeply >personal if not autobiographical apologetics,= the Platonic Theology is also the product of its >Renaissance Italian, specifically Medicean, context= in that it represents >a bold, albeit problematic, attempt to appropriate= late classical philosophy >for the ingeniosi, the intellectuals, the forward wits of xxxxxxx 384 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 the republic and its governing elites.= The work=s dense philosophical and political orchestrations may account for the complexity of Ficino=s style, which on one hand conceptualizes sublimity, after Plotinus, >in an unadorned and apparently artless way= at the same time as it is >rhetorically challenging, with its frequent asyndeton (making the reader work it out), its unbalanced periods (drawing the reader into the mazes of the argument) ... and its intermittent flights of poetic imagery contributing to a sense of allocutionary trance.= Modelled after the Harvard Loeb Classical Library series, the I Tatti translations are in dual-language format (with the Latin text on the left page and the translation on the right), facilitating comparison. Michael Allen=s translation of the Ficino volume is careful and meticulous, as is the editorial apparatus. In addition to the critical introduction, the volume includes two sets of explanatory notes (to the text and to the translation respectively), a selected bibliography of secondary sources, and a valuable author and subject index. The volume promises to become indispensable to Renaissance scholarship in general. (VIVIANA COMENSOLI) William Barker, editor. The Adages of Erasmus University of Toronto Press. lii, 406. $80.00, $29.95 Erasmus=s Adages, surveyed in this new selection by William Barker, is one of the great achievements of Renaissance humanism. A work of astonishing erudition, which recurrently occupied its...

pdf

Share