An ardent treatise for the Dignity of Man, which elevates Humanism to a truly Christian level, making this writing as pertinent today as it was in the Fifteenth Century.

"This volume contains Gianfrancesco Pico's Life of his uncle Giovanni Pico and also Giovanni's Oration. Gianfrancesco's Life opens a collection that omits Giovanni's Conclusions but includes the speech that we - unlike Pico - know as an Oration on the Dignity of Man. He wrote the Oration to introduce the Conclusions, but his nephew's editorial decision cut the theses off from the speech that their author had connected with them. Several times in the Oration, the orator mentioned "theorems" to be proposed in the Conclusions: he clearly saw the book and the speech as tools for the same task. Either Gianfrancesco missed his uncle's intentions, which seems unlikely, or he meant to seal off his other writings - including the Oration - from a book that he found embarrassing for himself and his relative and too risky to make public. This is the fact of the matter: Gianfrancesco left the Conclusions unpublished while publishing the Oration in a collection introduced by his Life. Both the speech and the biography are presented here, in this edition, in the same way - apart from the Conclusions: this reflects the situation in 1496 and respects Gianfrancesco's choice, even though his decision blocked understanding of the speech for many years. Today, with access to all the relevant texts in many versions, readers can move from one work to another as needed"--

Oration on the Dignity of Man (De hominis dignitate) The Oration on the Dignity of Man (De hominis dignitate) is a famous public discourse pronounced in 1486 by Pico della Mirandola, an Italian scholar and philosopher of the Renaissance. It has been called the "Manifesto of the Renaissance." Pico, who belonged to the family that had long dwelt in the Castle of Mirandola, left his share of the ancestral principality to his two brothers to devote himself wholly to study. In his fourteenth year, he went to Bologna to study canon law and fit himself for the ecclesiastical career. Repelled by the purely positive science of law, he devoted himself to the study of philosophy and theology, and spent seven years wandering through the chief universities of Italy and France, studying Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic.

Reflecting the broad range of interests of a major Renaissance philosopher and his distinctive brand of syncretism, this anthology offers in their entirety three central works of Pico's. On the Dignity of Man, the quintessential expression of Renaissance humanism, appears in the context of two lesser known but equally representative mature works: On Being and the One, a treatise defending what Pico held to be the agreement between Aristotle and Plato on the relation between unity and being, and Heptaplus, an interpretation, influenced by a blend of cabalism and Christian doctrine, of the first verses of Genesis. New Selected Bibliography.

A new translation of Pico della Mirandola's most famous work, with extensive notes and commentary.

Pico della Mirandola, one of the most remarkable thinkers of the Renaissance, has become known as a founder of humanism and a supporter of secular rationality. Brian Copenhaver upends this understanding of Pico, unearthing the magic and mysticism in the most famous work attributed to him, The Oration on the Dignity of Man.