The Renaissance

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The Renaissance is the name given to the European revival of classical learning that ran from roughly the fourteenth century into the seventeenth, gathering first in the Italian city-states and spreading north. The French word means rebirth, and that is how its own protagonists understood the age: not as something new but as the recovery of an antiquity they believed had been lost. Painters, architects, poets, and scholars went back to Greek and Roman models with a deliberateness that earlier centuries had not, and in doing so reshaped how Europeans pictured the human being, the past, and the reach of knowledge.

For the history this site follows, one episode matters above the rest. In 1462 Cosimo de’ Medici, the ruler of Florence, set his house philosopher Marsilio Ficino to translating Plato — and then interrupted that work to have Ficino translate first a Greek manuscript newly arrived from Macedonia: the Corpus Hermeticum, the dialogues attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Ficino and his contemporaries took these texts to be the work of an Egyptian sage older than Moses, a wellspring of wisdom that Plato himself had only inherited. On that belief they built a current of thought — Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and increasingly magical — that ran through Pico della Mirandola, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, John Dee, and Giordano Bruno.

The belief was mistaken. In 1614 the scholar Isaac Casaubon showed by philological argument that the Hermetic texts were not Egyptian and not ancient, but products of the early Christian centuries — late, not primordial. The dating has held. What the Renaissance had received as the oldest theology in the world turned out to be roughly contemporary with the Gospels. The philosophy built on the older claim did not vanish at once, but its foundation 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 that runs from its mathematics and its anatomy to Galileo. The other, associated above all with the historian Frances Yates, traces it sideways, into the magic, astrology, and Hermetic theology that learned men of the age took with full seriousness, and that the forward-looking story had long preferred to forget. The same figures appear in both: Bruno, burned in Rome in 1600, was a defender of Copernicus and a Hermetic magus, and the period gives no clean way to separate the two.

For the traditions gathered here, the Renaissance is less a phase of art history than the moment the buried material surfaced. Hermetism, the late Platonists, the practice of magic as a serious discipline — these had persisted in fragments through the Middle Ages, but it was here that they were collected, translated, printed, and argued over in the open. Much of what later esotericism inherited as its canon was assembled in this window.

→ In the library: The Divine Pymander of Hermes (Everard, 1650) · Steiner — Mystics of the Renaissance (1910)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus · Magic · The Reformation · Middle Ages · Gnosis