This study shows how Giovanni Pico della Mirandola used Neoplatonic and kabbalistic ideas to develop an innovative theory of biblical allegory. Based on epistemology and intellectual ascent, his theory relates to scholastic debate over the action of the intellect.

This handbook offers a new reading of the humanist-scholastic debate over biblical humanism, lending a voice to scholastic critics who have been unfairly neglected in the historical narrative. The investigations cover controversies beginning in quattrocento Italy and spreading north of the Alps in the 16th century.

How the Jewish culture war over Kabbalah began The Scandal of Kabbalah is the first book about the origins of a culture war that began in early modern Europe and continues to this day: the debate between kabbalists and their critics on the nature of Judaism and the meaning of religious tradition. From its medieval beginnings as an esoteric form of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah spread throughout the early modern world and became a central feature of Jewish life. Scholars have long studied the revolutionary impact of Kabbalah, but, as Yaacob Dweck argues, they have misunderstood the character and timing of opposition to it. Drawing on a range of previously unexamined sources, this book tells the story of the first criticism of Kabbalah, Ari Nohem, written by Leon Modena in Venice in 1639. In this scathing indictment of Venetian Jews who had embraced Kabbalah as an authentic form of ancient esotericism, Modena proved the recent origins of Kabbalah and sought to convince his readers to return to the spiritualized rationalism of Maimonides. The Scandal of Kabbalah examines the hallmarks of Jewish modernity displayed by Modena's attack—a critical analysis of sacred texts, skepticism about religious truths, and self-consciousness about the past—and shows how these qualities and the later history of his polemic challenge conventional understandings of the relationship between Kabbalah and modernity. Dweck argues that Kabbalah was the subject of critical inquiry in the very period it came to dominate Jewish life rather than centuries later as most scholars have thought.

Starting with an essay on the Renaissance as the concluding phase of the Middle Ages and ending with appreciations of Paul Oskar Kristeller, the great twentieth-century scholar of the Renaissance, this new volume by John Monfasani brings together seventeen articles that focus both on individuals, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam, Angelo Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino, and Niccolò Perotti, and on large-scale movements, such as the spread of Italian humanism, Ciceronianism, Biblical criticism, and the Plato-Aristotle Controversy. In addition to entering into the persistent debate on the nature of the Renaissance, the articles in the volume also engage what of late have become controversial topics, namely, the shape and significance of Renaissance humanism and the character of the Platonic Academy in Florence.

An account of the astrological controversies that arose in Renaissance Italy in the wake of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, published in 1496.

Based on the history of knowledge, the contributions to this volume elucidate various aspects of how, in the early modern period, artists’ education, knowledge, reading and libraries were related to the ways in which they presented themselves

Christian Hebraism came to its full fruition in the seventeenth century. However, interest in Jewish and Hebraic sources had already increased during the early Renaissance, as an integral part of the renewed attention to ancient cultures, mostly Greek and Roman, as well as eastern cultures – from Egypt to India. This volume presents a selection of papers from the international conference Hebraic Aspects of the Renaissance (University of Haifa, May, 2009), that trace the humanist encounter with Hebrew and Jewish sources during that period. The chapters included in this volume not only illuminate the ways in which Christian scholars encountered Hebraic sources and integrated them into their general worldview, but also present the encounters of Jewish scholars with humanist culture.

This volume aims to assess the longstanding debate over the role played by the Italian Renaissance in the history of European intellectual culture. The authors engage in an interpretative conversation with thinkers such as Jacob Burckardt, Ernst Cassirer, Eugenio Garin, Paul Oskar Kristeller, whose works have influenced critical discourse on modernity and Renaissance Humanism over the last one hundred and fifty years. The studies presented in this collection contribute to this discussion from a variety of perspectives: scientific, theological, political, and literary. The result is a multifaceted illumination of the intellectual history of the Italian Renaissance.

Platonism, Ficino to Foucault explores some key chapters in the history Platonic philosophy from the revival of Plato in the fifteenth century to the new reading of Platonic dialogues promoted by the so-called ‘Critique of Modernity’.