The Life and Works of Tolomeo Fiadoni (Ptolemy of Lucca), and: The Worldview and Thought of Tolomeo Fiadoni (Ptolemey of Lucca) (review)

It is James Blythe’s ambition that his previous translation of Tolomeo’s sections of the De regimine principum (Philadelphia, 1997) and now his two volumes on Tolomeo himself should make clear his originality and importance, much as Alan Gewirth’s translation and commentary brought Marsilius of Padua to a wider audience. Blythe argues that Tolomeo’s work will show us a complex worldview created out of biblical traditions and Augustinian theology influenced by the newly available Politics of Aristotle. This worldview was crafted out of Tolomeo’s firm belief in a papal hierocratic theory and an equally firm admiration for the civic culture of the northern and central Italian city-republics. He further argues that the positive public values of the fifteenth-century civic humanists can be found in Tolomeo and, by extension, in other late-Scholastic writers. He makes his case by showing that Tolomeo’s understanding of St. Augustine and Aristotle evolved between his first writings and his important continuation of the De regimine principum left incomplete by St. Thomas Aquinas. In the course of doing so, Blythe challenges Hans Baron’s reading of Scholastic political thinkers and J. G. A. Pocock’s subsequent use of Baron to argue that the idea of historical decline that was at the heart of Edward Gibbon’s history was lacking before the civic humanists of the fifteenth century.

Blythe faces two tasks. First, he needs to make Tolomeo and his works— especially their dating—better known. After establishing an understanding of the contours to Tolomeo’s life and works, he will explicate the worldview. The first volume on the life and works is, in effect, a series of monographic studies or excursuses that establish the groundwork for the second volume.

This merchant’s son from Lucca was Tolomeo and not Bartolomeo or Ptolemy—later inventions that have no basis in surviving documents. The Fiadoni were well established in Lucca, and various public documents of the thirteenth century do identify him as Tolomeo Fiadoni. Blythe argues forcefully that now he should be known by his family name, Tolomeo Fiadoni. Blythe recounts both the history of Lucca and Tolomeo’s interest in Lucca’s history since, he argues, Tolomeo’s experiences there and elsewhere were keys to his later thought. Blythe documents, to the extent possible, Tolomeo’s movements to Rome (which is where Blythe thinks Tolomeo met Aquinas, but did not formally study with him), Florence, and Avignon. In addition to dating De iurisdictione imperii (c. 1278) and De regimine principum (c. 1300), Tolomeo’s key political writings, he also analyzes and dates Tolomeo’s Historia ecclesiastica nova, Annales of Lucca, and numerous lesser works. This is a technical volume meant to establish details critical to the arguments of the second. Perhaps for this reason Blythe has not been as careful as he is in the second. There are numerous typos and slips with names of people and places. He writes Montecatino for Montecatini (p. 110), Pelavisinus for Palavicinus (p. 50), and he assumes the Cattani mentioned in the thirteenth century are a single family rather than the designation for a group of noble families who dominated the Garfagnana (p. 59). Yet these seem to be slips caused by haste to move quickly to larger issues. They do not undermine his main purpose in this volume—to reconstruct Tolomeo’s life and provide, to the extent it can be done, clear historical introductions to his works.

Using the information established in the first volume, Blythe proceeds in the second to investigate the subjects that reveal a worldview. The volume is organized around topics such as “Women, Gender and the Family...