The Renaissance

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A word that began as a metaphor of springtime came to name an age. The Italians who lived through the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries spoke of a rinascita — a being-born-again — and they meant something precise by it: that the letters, the arts, and the wisdom of Greece and Rome, buried since the fall of the ancient world, were rising into the light a second time. Renaissance is the French rendering of that Italian word, fixed on the period much later, in the nineteenth century, when the historian Jules Michelet and then the Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt turned a participants’ boast into a category of history. Whatever later argument would do to the boundaries of the age, the people inside it were sure of one thing: they were not making something new, they were recovering something lost. That conviction — that the deepest knowledge lies behind, in an antiquity to be restored rather than ahead in a future to be invented — is the master key to nearly everything the period attempted, and it is the conviction on which the traditions gathered here turn.

The naming of an age

The Renaissance is conventionally placed between roughly 1400 and 1600, gathering first in the Italian city-states — Florence above all, then Venice, Rome, Milan, Ferrara — and spreading north over the following century into France, the German lands, the Low Countries, and England. The dates are elastic and the boundary porous, which is itself a lesson the period teaches. Burckhardt’s Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, published at Basel in 1860, gave the age its enduring portrait: Italy between about 1350 and 1550 as the birthplace of the modern individual and of the modern world, where the state was handled as a calculated work of art, where antiquity was revived, and where — in the title of his most quoted section — the world and the human being were discovered. Burckhardt had trained under Leopold von Ranke and brought a source-critical rigor to a thesis that read, at bottom, as a drama of awakening: the long sleep of the Middle Ages broken by the dawn of self-conscious selfhood.

The drama did not go unchallenged. Medievalists answered that the sleep had never been so deep. Charles Homer Haskins, in The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Harvard, 1927), argued that a genuine revival of learning — the Latin classics, Roman law, the new knowledge of the Greeks and Arabs, the first universities — had already flowered three hundred years before Petrarch, and coined the term that has stuck to it. On this reading there were several medieval renaissances — a Carolingian, an Ottonian, the great twelfth-century one — and the fifteenth-century rebirth was the latest and loudest, not the first. The quarrel over where the Middle Ages end and the Renaissance begins has never been settled, because the question assumes a wall where the record shows a slope. What the protagonists experienced as a sharp break from a benighted past was, in the longer view, the acceleration of a recovery long underway. Two truths sit side by side here without canceling: the continuity the medievalists recovered is genuine, and so is the change in self-understanding the Renaissance felt in itself.

The studia humanitatis

The engine of that change was humanism. The word is a nineteenth-century coinage, but it names something the Renaissance defined for itself in a Latin phrase — the studia humanitatis, the studies befitting a human being, a term the Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati was already using by 1369. Paul Oskar Kristeller, whose mid-twentieth-century work fixed the scholarly consensus, insisted that the humanism of the period was not a philosophy or a worldview but a curriculum: by the middle of the fifteenth century it had settled into a defined cycle of five disciplines — grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. It pointedly excluded logic, mathematics, natural philosophy, theology, law, and medicine, the subjects that ruled the medieval university. The humanists were, in the first instance, teachers, secretaries, and chancellors, heirs of the medieval art of letter-writing; their revolution was in the first instance a revolution in language and in the handling of texts. As Kristeller insisted, humanism was not the sum total of Renaissance thought but one well-defined sector of it, a literary and educational program that coexisted with the older scholasticism rather than abolishing it; the new philosophy of the age owed as much to the schoolmen as to the orators.

Yet that sector did more than teach grammar. Francesco Petrarca — Petrarch (1304–1374), the figure later centuries crowned as humanism’s father — hunted down forgotten classical manuscripts and recovered, at Verona in 1345, Cicero’s letters to Atticus, restoring a Latin prose modeled on the ancients against the technical Latin of the schools. A generation later the recovery extended to Greek, which the Latin West had largely lost for some seven hundred years: in 1397 the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras, invited by Salutati, took up a public chair of Greek in Florence, and his pupils — Leonardo Bruni, Pier Paolo Vergerio, Jacopo d’Angelo — became the first generation of humanist translators. The method this scholarship forged was philology, the disciplined attention to how a language changes over time, and it had teeth. In 1440 Lorenzo Valla demonstrated, on linguistic grounds alone, that the Donation of Constantine — the document by which the medieval papacy claimed Constantine had granted it dominion over the western empire — was a forgery, its Latin betraying an eighth-century hand, not a fourth-century one. Philology could topple an empire’s title deed. It is the same instrument that would, in 1614, be turned on Hermes himself.

Florence, the Medici, and the return of Plato

Recovery needs patrons, and the Renaissance found its archetype in Cosimo de’ Medici, the banker who governed Florence without holding office and who spent a fortune in returning antiquity to circulation. The city had been primed for the Greeks. At the Council of Ferrara–Florence in 1438–39, convened to reunite the Latin and Greek churches, the Byzantine philosopher Gemistos Plethon lectured the Florentines on the differences between Plato and Aristotle and kindled in the Medici an appetite for the ancient wisdom of the East. That appetite was satisfied when Cosimo set his house philosopher, Marsilio Ficino, to the task that gives the Florentine revival its center of gravity. Ficino was to render the whole of Plato into Latin for the first time, and around him gathered the loose circle of scholars — Pico, Cristoforo Landino, Angelo Poliziano — that posterity, on Ficino’s own usage, calls the Platonic Academy. The fruit was the Platonism of the West reborn: Ficino’s complete Latin Plato of 1484, his vast commentary, and his Latin Plotinus of 1492 made the Greek Neoplatonists available to Europe as a living philosophy rather than scattered fragments — the Renaissance Neoplatonism that would feed every later current of Christian Platonism.

One episode within that project matters here above all the rest. Around 1460 a monk, Leonardo da Pistoia, delivered to Cosimo a fourteenth-century Greek codex carrying fourteen treatises of the collection called the Corpus Hermeticum, the dialogues attributed to Hermes Trismegistus — the thrice-great Egyptian in whom Greek antiquity had recognized its god Thoth. In 1462 Cosimo ordered Ficino to set Plato aside and translate Hermes first; the old man wanted to read it before he died. Ficino’s Latin version, titled Pimander after its opening treatise, was finished by April 1463, and Cosimo died the following year, having read it. Ficino and his contemporaries took these dialogues to be the work of a sage older than Moses, a wellspring of wisdom that Plato himself had only inherited. Following the early Christian writers Lactantius and Augustine, Ficino set Hermes at the head of the prisca theologia — the ancient theology passed down a chain of sages from Hermes through Orpheus and Pythagoras to Plato — so that the wisdom of Egypt and the truth of Christianity ran as a single stream, the pagan sage a witness to the Gospel before the Gospel was written.

On that belief the period built a current of thought, at once Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and increasingly magical, that runs through Pico, Cornelius Agrippa, Johann Reuchlin, Paracelsus, John Dee, Francesco Patrizi, and Giordano Bruno. It is treated in its own right as Renaissance Hermetism — the world of correspondence and dignity the recovered Hermes underwrote — and its operative arm as Renaissance magic and the astrological magic of Ficino’s De vita libri tres (1489).

The dignity of the human being

If the Renaissance had a single theme that ran through philosophy, art, and the new estimate of the human creature alike, it was dignity. The Hermetic Asclepius had called man a magnum miraculum, a great miracle, a being of two natures with no fixed station, free to rise toward the divine Mind or sink below the beasts. That note sounds across the age. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) gave it its most famous statement. The nine hundred theses he printed in 1486 for a planned disputation at Rome drew on pagan, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish authorities at once, and joined Hermetic and Jewish Kabbalistic material to Christian Platonism — the graft from which Christian Kabbalah grew. Pope Innocent VIII blocked the disputation and condemned thirteen of the theses, among them the claim that magic and Kabbalah prove the divinity of Christ; Pico fled and was briefly imprisoned. The speech he wrote to open the event — he gave it no title; posterity calls it the Oration on the Dignity of Man — takes up the Asclepius’s miracle and casts the human being as the one creature without a fixed nature, placed at the world’s midpoint to fashion itself upward into an angel or downward into a brute. The same conviction animated the wider current; when Lodovico Lazzarelli came to write his own Hermetic dialogue, the Crater Hermetis, he subtitled it De summa hominis dignitate, on the supreme dignity of man. Pico’s later years bent toward the apocalyptic preaching of the friar Girolamo Savonarola, and he died in 1494, the day French armies entered Florence — a reminder that the age of dignity was also an age of invasion, plague, and the bonfire.

This estimate of the human creature was not the property of the philosophers alone. It is the same conviction that set Florence Cathedral’s unprecedented dome rising over the city, that recovered the proportions and the perspective of the ancients in painting and architecture, and that produced a portraiture attentive to the individual face as the medieval centuries had not been. The recovery of antiquity and the new dignity of the human being were one motion seen from two sides.

The new science and the printed word

The Renaissance is read, with equal justice, as the threshold of the scientific revolution. The same return to ancient sources that recovered Plato recovered Archimedes, Ptolemy, Galen, and the mathematicians; the same attention to the particular that produced individual portraiture produced the anatomical drawing and the botanical illustration. Nicolaus Copernicus, who proposed in 1543 that the earth turns about the sun, was a product of Italian humanist education; Galileo Galilei, tried by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 for defending that proposal, stands at the far edge of the period. The line that runs from Renaissance mathematics and anatomy to Galileo’s telescope is unbroken, and the older histories preferred to tell it alone.

Beneath both the science and the scholarship lay a technology that made the recovery permanent. The printing press with movable type, brought into practical use by Johannes Gutenberg at Mainz around 1450, turned the recovered texts from manuscripts copied one at a time into editions struck off by the hundred. The Hermetic Pimander spread first in manuscript and then, in an editio princeps at Treviso in December 1471, in print; the Latin Asclepius, carried since antiquity among the works of Apuleius, had already become the first Hermetic text ever printed, in the Rome Apuleius of 1469. By the time the Aldine press of Venice was issuing its pocket Greek classics around 1500, a scholar anywhere in Europe could hold the same corrected text as a scholar in Florence. Print is what made the rebirth a public and irreversible event rather than the private enthusiasm of a few courts; it is also what carried the Reformation, the religious rupture that broke over the same Europe in the sixteenth century, across the continent faster than any authority could contain it.

The matrix of Western esotericism

For the traditions followed here, the Renaissance is less a chapter of art history than the moment a buried inheritance surfaced into the open. Hermetism, the late Platonists, the practice of magic as a serious intellectual discipline, the Kabbalah and its Christian adaptation, the Chaldean Oracles and the recovered theurgic Neoplatonism of Iamblichus and Proclus — all of these had persisted in fragments through the medieval centuries, but it was here that they were collected, translated, printed, and argued over as a body. Much of what later esotericism would inherit as its canon was assembled in this window of roughly a century and a half. The Renaissance is where the prisca theologia framework set the pattern that the later perennial philosophy and the Traditionalist schools would inherit, where natural magic acquired a respectable philosophical theory, and where the figure of the magus — the learned operator who works the cosmos by knowing its hidden chains rather than by bargaining with spirits — took the shape that the nineteenth-century occult revival would later return to almost intact, and that flowed on into the modern Hermetic revival and the American metaphysical religion of a later age.

Initiation, the threshold-crossing of the mystery traditions, found its Renaissance idiom not in any surviving cult but in the reading of the Hermetic dialogues as scripts for an inward rebirth — most sharply in Lazzarelli, who took the regeneration of the thirteenth Hermetic treatise for a transformation to be undergone rather than a doctrine to be cataloged. Here the recovered texts were not antiquarian curiosities but a path of gnosis, and of all the Renaissance readings this strand stands closest to the experiential program of the ancient dialogues themselves.

The redating and the long argument

The foundation on which so much was built was, on the documentary record, mistaken. In 1614 the scholar Isaac Casaubon, in a Protestant audit of Cardinal Baronius’s church history rather than any hunt for Hermes, demonstrated by the same philological method Valla had used on the Donation of Constantine that the Hermetic texts were not pre-Mosaic Egyptian scripture. The Greek is late, not archaic; the dialogues allude to matters younger than Moses and echo Christian and late Platonic thought. They are products of the early Christian centuries — on the modern dating, roughly the first three centuries of the common era — Greek in tongue and steeped in Platonic and Stoic ideas, though later scholarship has restored to them a genuinely Egyptian milieu as well. What the Renaissance had received as the oldest theology in the world turned out to be roughly contemporary with the Gospels. The dating has held. The philosophy built on the older claim did not vanish at once — Robert Fludd was still building his cosmos on the ancient Hermes a generation later, and Hermetic natural philosophy persisted alongside the new science — but its ground had shifted under it.

Scholarship since has read the period two ways at once, and the readings do not cancel. One traces the Renaissance forward, toward the scientific revolution and the modern world, the line from its mathematics and its anatomy to Galileo. The other, associated above all with the historian Frances Yates and the Warburg Institute, traces it sideways, into the astrology, alchemy, and Hermetic theology that learned men of the age took in full seriousness, and that the forward-looking story had long preferred to forget. The same figures stand in both accounts: Bruno, burned in the Campo de’ Fiori in 1600, was a defender of Copernicus and a Hermetic magus at once, and the period gives no clean way to part the two. Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) welded the sideways reading into a grand thesis — a unified Hermetic tradition acting as an agent of intellectual change, even as a spur toward the new science. The generation of scholars after her dismantled the strong version of that claim while keeping what it had recovered: Brian Copenhaver, whose 1992 critical edition of the Hermetica set the modern standard, holds that the philosophical roots of Renaissance magic are Neoplatonic more than Hermetic; Wouter Hanegraaff has shown how the rejected currents were constituted as a category by the very critics who expelled them. Copenhaver’s double verdict on Yates — that she was at once right and wrong — has become the field’s working settlement. The recovery the Renaissance attempted rested on an error about a date; the correction has ended by sending readers back to the same pages Cosimo set Plato aside to read.

Scholarship and editions

The modern study of the period is built on a small shelf of landmark works, several of them now in the public domain.

• Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basel, 1860), the foundational portrait of the age as the cradle of the modern individual; the German original is public domain. The standard English translation, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, descends from S. G. C. Middlemore’s version of 1878. Penguin’s edition is described at penguinrandomhouse.com.

• Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Harvard University Press, 1927), the work that named the medieval revival and opened the long argument over periodization, catalogued at Google Books.

• Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (Harper, 1961), and his chapter “Humanism” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, which fixed the definition of humanism as the studia humanitatis; the framework is laid out at cambridge.org.

• Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), the source of the Yates thesis, available at doi.org/10.4324/9780203220054.

• Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica (Cambridge University Press, 1992), the standard English edition of the Hermetic corpus from the Nock–Festugière text, at doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107050075, and his synthetic Magic in Western Culture (2015).

• Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012), ISBN 9780521196215, doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139048064, which reframes how the period’s esoteric currents became a category of study.

Among the primary texts of the period, the Hermetic dialogues that Ficino’s Florence received are available in John Everard’s English Divine Pymander of 1650 and in G. R. S. Mead’s scholarly translation of 1906.

→ In the library: The Divine Pymander of Hermes (Everard, 1650) · Steiner — Mystics of the Renaissance (1910) · The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead, 1906) — I. Poemandres

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus · Magic · The Reformation · Middle Ages · Gnosis · Renaissance Hermetism · Renaissance Magic · Renaissance Neoplatonism · Prisca Theologia · Marsilio Ficino · Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola · Corpus Hermeticum · Platonism · Isaac Casaubon