I: Introduction

A preliminary survey of the early modern English reception of the Italian Renaissance philosopher

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) was first made by Roberto Weiss half a century ago at the

historic congress on Pico in 1963, held in the philosopher’s hometown of Mirandola, which

commemorated the half-millennium anniversary of Pico’s birth; this paper received many responses

from other prominent Pico scholars in attendance.1 Yet no full-length study of Pico’s reception in

England has been undertaken since, though many links between Pico and various English writers have

been posited. This dissertation cannot claim to be a comprehensive survey of Pico’s reception in early

modern England: such a piece would need to be of greater length, and of much broader scope. Instead,

this study of how various English writers in the first four decades of the seventeenth century read and

used Pico has more specific aims. First, a brief biography of Pico and an outline of his works.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was born in 1463 to a noble family, the counts of Mirandola and

Concordia in Emilia-Romagna.2 His studies took him to Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, Florence and Paris.

Pico is often associated with the circle of Marsilio Ficino, once mistakenly seen a ‘Platonic Academy of

Florence’,3 and the revival of the study of Plato in Mediciean Florence. Pico’s works covered a wide

range of interests. The Commento (1486) is a prose commentary on a canzone of Girolamo Benivieni

and a treatise on Platonic love. The Conclusiones (1486) are a collection of 900 theses, drawn from an

array of ancient and modern sources, for a proposed disputation in Rome, which never occurred due to

Pope Innocent VIII’s clampdown, leading to Pico’s arrest and brief imprisonment in 1487. The famous

Oratio (1486), sometimes wrongly called the Oratio de hominis dignitate or Oration on the Dignity of

Man, is a speech to introduce the disputation. Pico’s subsequent Apologia (1487), a theological

disquisition, defended him from the papal commission’s charges of heresy and error. Heptaplus (1489)

is an allegorical reading of the account of creation given in the first book of Genesis. De ente et uno

(1491) attempts to reconcile Plato and Aristotle on the concepts of being and the one. Finally, the

posthumously published Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem (1491) is an attack on judicial

astrology. Pico’s death in 1494 was most likely a case of poisoning.4

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1 Roberto Weiss, ‘Pico e l’Inghilterra’ in L’opera e il pensiero di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola nella storia dell’umanesimo (2 vols, Florence, 1965), I, pp. 143-52.2 The best introduction to Pico’s life and works in English remains Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘Pico’ in Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (California, 1964), pp. 54-72. Eugenio Garin, ‘Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’ in History of Italian Philosophy, trans. Giorgio Pinton (2 vols, Florence, 2008), I, pp. 295-328 is the most comprehensive, though regrettably, awkwardly translated. 3 See the examination of this ‘myth’ by James Hankins in James Hankins, ‘The Myth of the Platonic Academy of Florence’, Renaissance Quarterly 44:3 (1991), pp. 429-75; ‘The Invention of the Platonic Academy of Florence’, Rinascimento 41 (2001), pp. 3-38; ‘The Platonic Academy of Florence and Renaissance Historiography’ in Forme del neoplatonismo: Dall’eredita ficiniana ai platonici di Cambridge, ed. Luisa Simonutti (Florence, 2007), pp. 75-96.4 Malcolm Moore, ‘Medici philosopher’s mystery death is solved’, The Telegraph (7 Feb, 2008), [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1577958/Medici-philosophers-mystery-death-is-solved.html, last accessed 4 May. 2013].

Fig. 1: Representation of Pico from André Thevet, Les Vrais Pourtraits et Vies des Hommes Illustres (2 vols, Paris, 1584), II, p. 518.

2

On one level, this dissertation hopes to contribute to the study of the reception of Quattrocento Italian

humanism in England. While excellent studies have been made of the intellectual links between early

modern English thinkers and the ancient, classical, pagan and early Christian pasts -- for example, the

Church Fathers --5 less attention has been paid to what they thought of the Renaissance humanists.

Considering the importance made of the survival of the humanist traditions in the Enlightenment,6

including Pico’s contribution,7 neglect of the reception of the Renaissance humanists perpetuates the

view that Renaissance humanism was a transitory moment, populated by airy exegetes like Pico, swept

away by ‘newer men with newer scientific brooms ... from the center stage of Western thought after

1600’.8 It is of course possible that early modern English intellectuals invested figures from the ancient,

classical and early Christian pasts with greater, or at least a different type of, authority from the

Renaissance humanists.9 But this would have to be demonstrated rather than assumed. Similarly, Pico’s

influence in England, though never the subject of full-length study, has often been more assumed than

proven. Interpreters of Pico in the twentieth century have, by conscripting Pico into various traditions,

rigged the outcome of Pico’s influence in early modern England by presupposing how he would or

should have been read. In doing so, areas where Pico was indeed received have been ignored. Rather

than historically reconstructing the encounter between early modern English reader and Pico’s works it

has often been assumed, in circular fashion, that Pico was read in certain ways because these ways were

more significant than others or because this was Pico’s unique contribution to early modern philosophy.

Thus, disentangling the historiography of Pico’s interpretation is inseparable from the task of

investigating his reception, as the former is very much involved in the latter.

These interpretations have thus clouded the scene, making a clear view of Pico’s reception in early

modern England difficult. One interpretation of Pico with particular longevity is the idea that Pico

promoted the dignity of man in his Oratio. Others have exposed the problems of this line of

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5 For example Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and English Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2009); N. J. S. Hardy, ‘The Ars Critica in Early Modern England’ (Unpublished D.Phil. Dissertation, University of Oxford, 2012). 6 As exemplified in Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: Traditions of Scholarship in An Age of Science (Cambridge, Mass.; 1991) as laid out in the introduction, pp. 1-22. See also Dmitri Levitin, ‘Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1650-1700’ (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2011), p. 215.7 Anthony Grafton, ‘Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Trials and Triumphs of an Omnivore’ in Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor, 1997), pp. 93–134.8 Grafton, Defenders of the Text, p. 3.9 See the reading advice of Johannes Mombaer (Mauburnus) in his Tabula librorum praecipue legendorum, where authorities are accorded different weight. Contemporary authors like Pico, Petrarch and Reuchlin are, in his words, ‘not so much to be read as glanced through’ (non tam legendi quam percurrendi). Nikolaus Staubach, ‘Memores Pristinae Perfectionis: The Importance of the Church Fathers for the Devotio Moderna’ in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Backus (2 vols, Leiden, 1997), I, pp. 426-7.

interpretation;10 only the issues concerning Pico’s reception need to be rehearsed here. This

interpretation of Pico sees him as a champion of the dignity of man, a particular spirit of the

Renaissance,11 reviving Origenism12 or Pelagianism against the ‘severe bondage of Augustinian

dogma’.13 Thus the Oratio was described by Eugenio Garin as a manifesto of the Renaissance and

celebrated by Ernst Cassirer for its ‘modern pathos of thought’.14 Cassirer’s interpretation of Pico was

much influenced by his neo-Kantianism.15 For him, Pico exhibited

the polarity ... characteristic of the Renaissance. What is required of man’s will and knowledge

is that they be completely turned towards the world and yet completely distinguish themselves

from it.16

Meanwhile, Garin’s interpretation of Pico was coloured by Sartre’s philosophy of the 1950s. Garin

drew an analogy between Pico’s supposed freedom of man and existentialist angst.17 This view of Pico

as supposed championing of man’s freedom and dignity still exercises tremendous influence: the most

recent translation of the Oratio still bears the spurious title ‘on the dignity of man’.18 This presupposes

how Pico was read. As Brian Copenhaver has noted, in the seventeenth century Pico was sometimes

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10 William G. Craven, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Symbol of His Age (Geneva, 1981); Brian Copenhaver, ‘Magic and the Dignity of Man: De-Kanting Pico’s Oration’, in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century: Acts of an International Conference, Florence, Villa I Tatti, June 9-11, 1999, ed. A. J. Greico et al. (Florence, 2002), pp. 295-320.11 The famous ‘myth of the Renaissance’ can be traced back to Jakob Burckhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) and even further. For more see Robert Nisbet, ‘The Myth of the Renaissance’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 15:4 (1973), pp. 473-492; Peter Burke, The Renaissance (Atlantic Heights, 1987); and J. B. Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford, 1994).12 Edgar Wind, ‘The Revival of Origen’ in Edgar Wind, The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Oxford, 1993), pp. 42-55. 13 Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England, trans. James P. Pettegrove (New York, 1970), p. 102. 14 Craven, Symbol of His Age, pp. 21- 2. 15 Copenhaver, ‘De-Kanting Pico’s Oration’, pp. 306-7. 16 Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, trans. Mario Domandi (Chicago, 2010), p. 86. This was originally published in German as Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance in 1927. 17 James Hankins, ‘Garin and Paul Oskar Kristeller: Existentialism, Neo-Kantianism, and the Post-War Interpretation of Renaissance Humanism’ in Eugenio Garin: Dal Rinascimento all'Illuminismo, ed. Michele Ciliberto (Rome, 2011), p. 492. 18 The running title of the Oratio in the first Opera omnia is given as ‘Oratio in coetu Romanorum’ (Oration in the Roman Assembly). See Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Opera omnia (Bologna, 1496). A letter from Pico to Girolamo Beniveni suggests that one title Pico had in mind was ‘Oratio ad laudes philosophiae’ (Oration in Praise of Philosophy). See S. A. Farmer, Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486) (Tempe, 1998), pp. 18-19, n. 50; 40 and also Brian Copenhaver, ‘ De-Kanting Pico’s Oration’ for a discussion of the title of this work. The most recent English translation is Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, eds. Francesco Borghesi, Michael Papio and Massimo Riva (Cambridge, 2012). One of its editors, Riva, justifies the continued use of this subtitle, which he admits to be ‘spurious’ (p. 8), by referring to ‘the contemporary fortune of Pico’s text ... the current revival of interest in Pico’s thought’ (p. 9). For more, see Massimo Riva, ‘Preface: History of the Pico Project and Criteria for the Current Edition’, pp. 3-9.

read for his perceived anti-Pelagian stance on grace and works.19 It has also often been assumed, due to

this elevated view of man, that the so-called Cambridge Platonists in the latter half of the seventeenth

century were significantly influenced by Pico.20 But there is very little evidence to show that Pico

exercised much influence over the loose collection of thinkers known as the Cambridge Platonists. This

assumption is strengthened by the idea that Pico was part of, often together with Marsilio Ficino, what

has been variously termed ‘Platonism’, ‘Renaissance Neoplatonism’21 or ‘Florentine Platonism’,22 a

compound that could be easily received by English thinkers. Cassirer endeavoured to ‘indicate the

threads which bind Cambridge Platonism to the past in the whole philosophical movement of the

Italian and the English Renaissance’.23 While for Cassirer Pico’s contribution to English thought was

philosophical, for many literary scholars, Pico was notable for his explication of Platonic love in the

Commento. Therefore, with little hard evidence, Pico has been seen as the source for the ‘Platonism of

much English poetry’.24 With the floodgates thus opened, Pico has been posited as an inspiration for

Edmund Spenser,25 George Chapman,26 Ben Jonson,27 John Milton28 and finally, Shakespeare.29 Yet,

for a start, cautionary notes have been sounded about the extent to which Pico should be seen as a

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19 Brian Copenhaver, ‘Studied as an Oration: Readers of Pico’s Letters, Ancient and Modern’ in Stephen Clucas, Peter J. Forshaw and Valery Rees (eds.), Laus Platonici Philosophi: Marsilio Ficino and his Influence (Leiden, 2011), p. 152. 20 See Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘The European Significance of Florentine Platonism’ in Studies in Renaissance Thoughts and Letters III (Rome, 1993), p. 67; Paolo Rossi’s response to Weiss, p. 156; C. A. Patrides, ‘Introduction’ in The Cambridge Platonists, ed. C. A. Patrides (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 17-9; and in particular, Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England.21 Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London, 1979), p. 111, among many other uses. See also D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London, 1972), p. 40 for example. 22 Kristeller, ‘The European Significance of Florentine Platonism’; Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England. 23 Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England, p. 7. 24 Sarah Hutton, ‘Introduction to the Renaissance and the Seventeenth Century’ in Platonism and the English Imagination, eds. Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge, 1994), p. 72. 25 See Yates, The Occult Philosophy, pp. 111-27; Sears Jayne, Plato in Renaissance England (Dordecht, 1995), p. 125; Jefferson B. Fletcher, ‘A Study in Renaissance Mysticism: Spenser’s ‘Fowre Hymnes’’ PMLA, 26:3 (1911) pp. 452-75; Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘The Theme of Spenser’s ‘Fowre Hymnes’’, Studies in Philology 28:1 (1931), pp. 18-57; Marie-Sofie Rostvig, The Hidden Sense and Other Essays (Oslo, 1963), p. 16; Dwight J. Sims, ‘The Syncretic Myth of Venus in Spenser’s Legend of Chastity’, Studies in Philology 71:4 (1974), pp. 427-50; Jon A. Quitslund, Spenser's Supreme Fiction: Platonic Natural Philosophy and The Faerie Queene (Toronto, 2001), p. 84; Thomas Bulger, ‘Platonism in Spenser’s Mutabilite Cantos’ in Platonism and the English Imagination, eds. Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 126-38. 26 Jayne, Plato in Renaissance England, p. 125; Jane Melbourne Craig, ‘Chapman’s Two Byrons’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22 (1982), pp. 271–84.27 D. J. Gordon, ‘The Imagery of Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blacknesse and Masque of Beauty’ in The Renaissance Imagination, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley, 1975), pp. 134-56. 28 Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., ‘Pico and Milton: A Gloss on Areopagitica’ English Language Notes 9 (1971), pp. 108-10; Rostvig, The Hidden Sense, p. 16. 29 Frank M. Caldiero, ‘The Source of Hamlet’s ‘What a Piece of Work is a Man!’’, Notes and Queries 196 (1951), pp. 421-4.

(neo-)Platonist in the first place.30 After all, Pico’s De ente et uno sided with Aristotle over Plato and

quarreled with much of the Neoplatonic legacy of antiquity.31

These interpretations came to a head in one of the most influential readings of Pico, produced by

Frances Yates in her linked studies, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), The Rosicrucian

Enlightenment (1972) and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979). In these books, many of

the former interpretations discussed above were intermixed: in the last book, for example, Ficino and

Pico were said to be ‘founders and propagators of the movement loosely known as Renaissance

Neoplatonism’.32 From there, Pico’s and Ficino’s influence were seen in Spenser, John Dee, Marlowe,

Shakespeare and Chapman, among others. But Yates’s most significant claim was that Pico, by adding

Cabbala to Ficino’s Hermetic magic,

first boldly formulated a new position for European man, man as Magus using both Magia and

Cabala to act upon the world, to control his destiny by science. 33

We have in this interpretation a synthesis of certain claims made before. But Yates’s unique

contribution was to inaugurate a tradition in which Pico was part of a ‘Hermetic-Cabalist’ tradition

initiated by Ficino or even ‘the Neoplatonic-Hermetic-kabbalistic synthesis’,34 in the words of one of

Yates’s students. Pico then influenced others who followed this esoteric tradition, including Dee and

Robert Fludd. The subsequent criticisms of Yates’ claims, even in relation to Pico alone, are too many

to be rehearsed here.35 But, like other interpretations, Yates assumed Pico’s influence would be found in

certain areas without close reference to texts. (Furthermore, in imposing this tradition, Yates arguably

ignored how people who did see themselves as magi imaginatively construed their relation to a

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30 Kristeller in ‘Pico’, p. 55 made such a caveat in as early as 1964, but more recently Brian P. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford, 1992), p. 176. 31 See Maude Vanhaelen, ‘The Pico-Ficino Controversy: New Evidence in Ficino’s Commentary on the Parmenides’, Rinascimento 49 (2009), pp. 1-39; Michael J. B. Allen, ‘The Second Ficino-Pico Controversy: Parmendiean Poetry, Eristic and the One’ in Marsilio Ficino e il ritorno di Platone, ed. Gian Carlo Carfagnini (2 vols, Florence, 1986), II, pp. 419-55; Michael J. B. Allen, ‘The Ficinian Sophist and the Controversy with Pico’, in Icastes: Marsilio Ficino’s Interpretation of Plato’s Sophist (Five Studies and a Critical Edition with Translation) (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 9–48.32 Yates, The Occult Philosophy, p. 19. 33 Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Philosophy (London, 1964), pp. 90-129. 34 Allison Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614-1698) (Leiden, 1999), p. 82. Coudert’s studies at the Warburg were directed by Yates. 35 See Farmer, Pico’s 900 Theses, pp. 115-32; Brian P. Copenhaver, ‘Natural Magic, Hermetism and Occultism in Early Modern Science’ in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, eds. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 261-301; Robert S. Westman and J. E. McGuire, Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution (Los Angeles, 1977); Florian Ebeling, The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca and London, 2008), pp. 67-8; Charles Trinkaus, In our Image and Likeness, Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (Notre Dame, 1995), pp. 398-526.

tradition, as Anthony Grafton has attempted to do.)36 Even Yates’ attempt to place Dee as part of this

tradition has been resisted.37 Pico’s influence on Dee, which seems to have been slight, has been rightly

downplayed.38 Nor does Pico seem to have had much direct influence on Fludd, though this awaits

more research.39 This problem is complicated by the fact that terms such as ‘Platonism’, as in Samuel

Parker’s A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (1666), were used pejoratively to

stigmatise certain philosophers and philosophies in this period.40 By uncritically reusing terms such as

‘Platonism’ or ‘Hermet(ic)ism’ we risk perpetuating stereotyped, long-held views of Pico, and falling

into worn-out traps set, in part, by the advocates of the new science in the seventeenth century.

Yet another issue compounds these problems. In all these posited traditions (Pico as Renaissance

champion of dignity, Platonist and Hermetic-Cabalist magus), Pico is seen as being a pupil or follower

of Marsilio Ficino. Kristeller held that Pico considered himself a ‘pupil of Ficino’, who was the

‘undisputed leader’ of the Platonic Academy of Florence.41 Thus many interpreters of Pico treated Pico-

Ficino indiscriminately as a compound, or used Pico to explicate Ficino, as Yates did in Giordano

Bruno. This unsustainable tendency to assume ‘mutual interpretability’,42 has had a distortionary effect

on the study of Pico’s reception, linking Pico too closely to some of Ficino’s commitments and ideas. In

reality, their intellectual relationship was fraught with disagreement from the very off: Pico’s youthful

Commento disagreed with Ficino’s interpretation of Platonic love, and clashes between them continued

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36 Anthony Grafton, ‘Faustus Anatomized: The Magus in Early Modern Europe’, Lecture at Princeton University. [http://www.princeton.edu/~images/courseware/audio/grafton/anthonygrafton.html]. See also Der Magus: seine Ursprünge und seine Geschichte in Verschiedenen Kulturen, eds. Anthony Grafton and Moshe Idel (Berlin, 2001). 37 Notably in William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Boston, Mass.; 1995), esp. pp. 12-3 and Nicholas H. Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (London, 1988).38 Jean-Marc Mandosio, ‘Beyond Pico della Mirandola: John Dee’s ‘Formal Numbers’ and ‘Real Cabala’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 43 (2012), pp. 489-97, Stephen Clucas, ‘Introduction: Intellectual History and the Identity of John Dee’, pp. 1-22 and Stephen Clucas, ‘John Dee’s Angelic Conversations and the Ars Notoria: Renaissance Magic and Mediaeval Theurgy’, pp. 231-273, both in John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought, ed. Stephen Clucas (Dordecht, 2006). 39 William Huffman, Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance (London, 1988), p. 97 finds direct links between Fludd and Reuchlin, Zorzi and Agrippa, but Pico is not named as a direct influence, but as part of a ‘Renaissance Christian Neoplatonist tradition’ and also a ‘hermetic-Cabalist vein’. Similarly, Schmidt-Biggemann’s study of Fludd’s treatment of the cabbala does not mention Pico. See Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, ‘Robert Fludd’s Kabbalistic Cosmos’, trans. Geoff Dumbreck and Douglas Hedley, in Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, eds. Douglas Hedley and Sarah Hutton (Dordecht, 2008), pp. 75-92. 40 Brian P. Copenhaver, ‘Natural Magic, Hermetism and Occultism in Early Modern Science’ in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, eds. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 282-3. Copenhaver here discusses Kepler’s use of ‘hermetic’ against Robert Fludd. 41 Kristeller, ‘Pico’, p. 55. 42 H. Darrel Rutkin, ‘Mysteries of Attraction: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Astrology and Desire’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 41 (2010), p. 120.

to the very end of Pico’s life.43 By examining Pico’s influence without the shadow of Ficino, it is hoped

that this dissertation avoids some of the pitfalls faced in previous works.

There remains one last historiographical problem: the idea that Pico’s Christian beliefs were suspect,

that he was infatuated with the pagan gods and trying to construct a universal, syncretic religion.44

There is little evidence to support this view, as Pico’s beliefs seem to have been orthodox. This chestnut

seems to have come from Walter Pater’s enduring and highly influential portrait of Pico in The

Renaissance. For Pater, Pico’s supposed celebration of human dignity could not be easily accommodated

to Christianity. Pater made the startling (and utterly unfounded) claim that Pico did not ‘even after his

conversion forget the old gods’. In fact, he was ‘one of the last who seriously and sincerely entertained

the claims on men’s faith of the pagan religions’.45 This view of Pico the neo-pagan aesthete -- and the

broader conviction that Neoplatonism could be read into Renaissance art -- would come to exert a hold

over subsequent historical interpretations.46 It features prominently in Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in

the Renaissance (1958).47 Old historiographical myths die hard, and it is surprising to see Diarmaid

MacCulloch claim, in his Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (2004), that

One or two eccentric spirits, like the aristocratic Italian Platonic scholar Giovanni Pico della

Mirandola, might privately have preferred the gods of ancient Greece and Rome to

Christianity.48

This view of Pico is a serious impediment to a proper investigation of Pico’s reception, as it seems to

preclude any serious appreciation of Pico’s theology --49 which is one of the ways Pico was received in

this period, as will be discussed later. These problems outlined above are not confined to older works: a

recent work by Margaret Healy attempts to revive some of Yates’ claims and draws links between Pico,

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43 See Unn Irene Aasdalen, ‘The First Pico-Ficino Controversy’. in Laus Platonici Philosophi: Marsilio Ficino and his Influence, eds. by Stephen Clucas, Peter J. Forshaw and Valery Rees (Leiden, 2011), pp. 67–88 and the pieces by Vanhaelen and Allen above, n. 31 . 44 See Craven, Symbol of His Age, pp. 89-112 for a critical consideration of this view, and also M. V. Dougherty, ‘Three Precursors to Pico della Mirandola’s Roman Disputation and the Question of Human Nature in the Oratio’ in Pico della Mirandola: New Essays, ed. M. V. Dougherty (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 114–51.45 Walter Pater, ‘Pico della Mirandola’, Fortnightly Review 58 (October, 1871), p. 383. 46 Paul Barolsky, Walter Pater’s Renaissance (London, 1987), pp. 17-8, 2447 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York, rev. ed, 1968). 48 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490-1700 (London, 2004), p. 76. 49 One notable exception is the study by Amos Edelheit, Ficino, Pico and Savonarola: The Evolution of Humanist Theology (Leiden, 2008).

alchemy and Shakespeare’s sonnets.50 The work of Paola Zambelli still treats Pico as part of a tradition

of ‘Neoplatonism, Orphism and Hermetism’.51

These interpretations have thus far attempted to place Pico as part of various traditions, ‘contrived

corridors’,52 and in doing so, have obscured the picture of his influence. Nor have these attempts to

trace Pico’s influence been particularly successful: it suggests that we have thus far been looking in the

wrong places. It must first be said what this study of Pico’s reception will not be doing. Although there

has been no comprehensive survey of Pico’s reception in the sixteenth century, Pico’s reception is well-

served by a number of studies of Thomas More’s translation of Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s

(Pico’s nephew) Vita of Pico.53 Study has also been made of John Colet’s use of Pico,54 and also of John

Fisher’s.55 In the case of John Dee, as stated above, it has now been shown that Pico’s influence on him

9

50 Margaret Healy, Shakespeare, Alchemy and The Creative Imagination: The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (Cambridge, 2011). See, for example, p. 2: ‘the story must emphasize the particular fusions of beliefs and discourses which began under the aegis of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola in the fifteenth-century Florentine academy and which reached a high-water mark in England in the middle of the seventeenth century.’ See the criticisms of Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Review’ in Renaissance Studies 26:5 (2012), pp. 771-3. 51 Paola Zambelli, White Magic, Black Magic in The European Renaissance (Leiden, 2007), p. 2. 52 T. S. Eliot, ‘Gerontion’ in T. S. Eliot, Poems (London, 1920), p. 4. 53 See, among many others, Benjamin V. Beier, ‘The Subordination of Humanism: Young More’s ‘Profitable’ Work, The Life of John Picus’ Moreana 47 (2010), pp. 23–44; Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘Motives of Translation: Reading Sir Thomas More’s translation of Pico della Mirandola’s Life and Works’ in Italian Culture: Interactions, Transpositions, Translations, eds. Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, Corinna Salvadori, and John Scattergood (Dublin, 2006), pp. 105–20; Travis Curtright, ‘Profitable Learning and Pietas: The Life of Pico della Mirandola, ca. 1504–10’ in The One Thomas More (Washington, D.C; 2012), pp. 15–41. W. A. G. Doyle-Davidson, ‘The Earlier English Works of Sir Thomas More’ English Studies 17 (1935), pp. 49-70; Anthony S. G. Edwards, ‘Life of Pico’ in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More. Volume 1. English Poems, Life of Pico, The Last Things, eds. Anthony S. G. Edwards, Katherine Gardiner Rodgers and Clarence H. Miller (New Haven, 1997), pp. xxxvii–lix; Michael P. Foley, ‘Paradoxes of Pain: the Strategic Appropriation by St. Thomas More of Pico della Mirandola’s Spriritual Works’ Moreana 47 (2010), pp. 9–22. Vittorio Gabrieli, ‘Giovanni Pico and Thomas More’ Moreana 4 (1967), pp. 43–57; Myron P. Gilmore, ‘More’s Translation of Gianfrancesco Pico’s Biography,’ in L’Opera e il pensiero di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola nella storia dell’Umanismo (2 vols, Florence, 1965), II, pp. 301–4; Louis W. Karlin, ‘Translation as Conversion: Thomas More’s Life of John Picus’ Moreana 47 (2010), pp. 63–84; Joseph W. Koterski,‘Circe’s Beasts and the Image of God: More’s Creative Appropriation of Pico’s Humanist Spirituality’ Moreana 47 (2010), pp. 45–62; Stanford E. Lehmberg, ‘Sir Thomas More’s Life of Pico della Mirandola’, Studies in the Renaissance 3 (1956), pp. 61–74; Clare M. Murphy, ‘Humanist Values in Thomas More’s Life of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’ in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bariensis: Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies. Bari 29 August to 3 September 1994, eds. Rhoda Schnur, J. F. Alcina, John Dillon, Walther Ludwig, Colette Nativel, Mauro de Nichilo and Stephen Ryle (Tempe, 1998),  pp. 419–25; George B. Parks, ‘Pico della Mirandola in Tudor Translation’ in Philosophy and Humanism: Renaissance Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. Edward P. Mahoney (Leiden, 1976), pp. 352-69; L. E. Semler, ‘Virtue, Transformation, and Exemplarity in The Lyfe of Johan Picus’ in A Companion to Thomas More, eds. A. D. Cousins and Damian Grace (Madison, 2009), pp. 95–113; and J. B. Trapp, Erasmus, Colet and More: the Early Tudor Humanists and their Books (London, 1991), pp. 125-30. 54 See Trapp, The Early Tudor Humanists and their Books, pp. 131-5; J. B. Trapp, ‘An English Late Medieval Cleric and Italian Thought: the Case of John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s (1467-1519) in Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature, eds. Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 233-50; Mahoney, ‘Pico della Mirandola in Tudor Translation’, p. 352. 55 Richard Rex, The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 24, 51, 59-64; H. C. Porter, ‘Fisher and Erasmus’ , p. 89; and Richard Rex, ‘The Polemical Theologian’, p. 117; the last two are both in Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher, eds. Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy (Cambridge, 1989).

was slight. The choice of the first four decades of the seventeenth century is made to avoid the rise of

the Cambridge Platonists, who, as stated above, do not seem to have been much influenced by Pico.

Furthermore, there are indications that Pico’s star had fallen by the second half of the seventeenth

century: he is mocked by Samuel Parker in his A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie

(1666).56 The rise of a critical history of philosophy in the second half of the seventeenth century in

England and on the Continent often saw Pico sidelined and derided, culminating in Jacob Brucker’s

dismissive treatment of him in his monumental Historia critica philosophiae (1742-4).57 This

dissertation will not discuss Pico’s contribution to the development of astrology and astronomy, which

received a tremendous impetus from his massive, posthumously published attack, the Disputationes.

This provocation and the long story of the response of European intellectuals like Johannes Kepler has

been amply covered.58 Pico’s influence in this regard was very large indeed. According to Robert A.

Westman:

The theme of Piconian skepticism and the responses to it run like a red thread ... providing at

least one major element of thematic unity to the sixteenth-century scientific movement ...

[Pico’s arguments were] the singular historical fulcrum point around which theologians and

natural philosophers rejected astrology.59

In England, this quarrel over astrology is still well-served by the account of Don Cameron Allen,60 and

will not be covered here.

This dissertation will instead look at the interaction of four thinkers with Pico’s work: the theologian

Richard Field, the poet John Donne, the courtier and historian Sir Walter Ralegh and the poet Henry

Reynolds. The works of these four authors seem to contain the most significant citations of Pico in this

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56 Samuel Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (London, 1666), pp. 95-6, 104-6. 57 For more, please see my second M. Phil. essay, ‘The Place of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in Early Modern English Historiography’ and in particular pp. 5-11. See Leo Catana, ‘The Concept “System of Philosophy”: The Case of Jacob Brucker’s Historiography of Philosophy’, History and Theory 44:1 (2005), pp. 72-90.58 Sheila J. Rabin, ‘Kepler’s Attitude Towards Pico and the Anti-Astrology Polemic’, Renaissance Quarterly 50:3 (1997), pp. 750-70; Sheila J. Rabin, ‘Two Renaissance Views of Astrology: Pico and Kepler’ (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, City University of New York, 1987); H. Darrel Rutkin, ‘Astrology, Natural Philosophy and the History of Science, 1250-1700: Studies Toward an Interpretation of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes Adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem’ (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Indiana, 2002); Steven vanden Brocke, The Limits of Influence: Pico, Louvain, and the Crisis of Renaissance Astrology (Brill, 2003); Robert S. Westman, The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism and Celestial Order (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2011).59 Westman, The Copernican Question, p. 11. 60 Don Cameron Allen, The Star-Crossed Renaissance: The Quarrel About Astrology And Its Influence In England (London, 1941) and in particular chapters III-V, pp. 101-246. See also Richard Bauckham, ‘The Career and Thought of Dr. William Fulke (1537–1589)’, (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1973), for the life and works of Fulke, whose Antiprognosticon of 1560 simply repeats many of Pico’s arguments in the Disputationes.

period. Before delving into these four interactions with Pico, however, the next chapter discusses the

importance of reputation and contexts in influencing Pico’s reception. It attempts to answer the

questions: what was Pico known for? And what was he read for? Answering these questions will better

illuminate the interactions the four authors had with Pico. Thus while More’s own use of Pico will not

be examined, his influential Life of Pico, which shaped Pico’s reputation in England, was a crucial piece

of the story of Pico’s reception and will be discussed. By focusing on the precise uses of Pico by English

writers in the first four decades of the seventeenth century, certain calcified lines of interpretation of

Pico will be broken. It is hoped that a greater appreciation of the diverse and unusual ways in which

Pico was read and used in this period will be achieved, laying foundations for a more complete study of

Pico’s reception in early modern England. It is by building upwards from the examination of these

individual interactions of early modern English thinkers with Pico that a larger picture may finally be

obtained, not the other way round.

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II: What Was Pico Known For?

We have long moved away from the picture that ideas simply descend from generation to receiving

generation. Yet the issues that arise when considering the reception of Pico’s philosophy and works -- or

indeed the reception of a Quattrocentro Italian Renaissance humanist in seventeenth-century England

-- still remain largely unproblematised.61 No reader comes to a text or author naked. Rather the very

processes of scholarship, sometimes astonishingly physical and material, have an impact on how we

receive texts and authors. Without considering the contexts of scholarship and reading, it is impossible

to talk about the reception of any author or of any work. It is also important to consider how a writer’s

reputation might affect reception of their work. It would be unusual for a reader then, as now, to read

and absorb the complete works of an author and for this to be the entire story of interaction. Most

copies of Pico’s Opera omnia in the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, for example, show very selective

annotations: only the copy in Corpus Christi, Oxford, bears remarkably full annotations by the

college’s first president, John Claymond.62 (By no means does annotation equate to reading, of course.)

Readers bring expectations to bear upon authors and texts. These expectations are shaped by the

author’s reputation, the reader’s intentions, the reader’s construction of a tradition or school and the

reader’s perception of genre. In the case of Pico, this chapter will show that Pico was noted as a biblical

commentator, a Cabbalist and intriguingly, a Protestant hero. These views of Pico were reflected in the

uses made of him by Field, Donne, Ralegh and Reynolds, which will be considered in the next four

chapters.

Pico was noted as a biblical commentator in the Bibliotheca Sancta (1566) of Sixtus of Siena (Sixtus

Senensis), an important reference book. The early modern period saw the rise of such reference books

that organised other books. In particular, bibliographies and bio-bibliographies, often called bibliotheca,

were resources that guided and structured readers’ engagement with authors.63 Sixtus had a vital

position in the history of Biblical scholarship, and wielded tremendous influence over both Catholics

and Protestants. References to his work abound in the early modern period and he was used by many,

including Richard Field, John Donne and Walter Ralegh. While Sixtus’ work is of relevance for the

history of biblical scholarship more generally -- the first book of the Bibliotheca discusses the authority

of the various books of scriptures -- it is these bio-bibliographical sections that concerns us. The fourth

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61 My thinking on reception has been clarified greatly by the valuable methodological observations of Sydney Anglo, Machiavelli -- The First Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility and Irrelevance (Oxford, 2005), pp. 1-16 and also the examples of Peter Burke, The Fortunes of 'The Courtier': The European Reception of Castiglione's ' Cortegiano' (London, 1995); and Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton, 1997), pp. 180-224. 62 For more, see my first M. Phil. Essay, ‘Readers of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century England’. 63 Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, 2010), pp. 161-2.

book of Bibliotheca was a dictionary of all biblical commentators up to Sixtus and their works.64 Sixtus

treated Pico as a biblical commentator because of the Heptaplus, the commentary on the first book of

Genesis.65 Sixtus was to be an important mediating source for notice of Pico’s life, works and opinions.

The title page, as well as the first page of the Heptaplus, of a copy of Pico’s Opera omina in Trinity

College, Oxford, refer to Pico’s entry in book four of the Bibliotheca with the words ‘Vide Sixt. Senes.

Bibliothecam. lib. 4.’66 (See figs. 2a and 2b.) This shows Pico was being read for the purposes of biblical

commentary and exegesis -- as he was with Field, Donne and Ralegh.

Another important intermediary source and context was Christian Cabbalism. Pico was seen as the

inaugurator of this tradition by practitioners like Johann Reuchlin, Francesco Zorzi (Giorgio),

Arcangelo da Borgonovo and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim.67 Christian Cabbalism can

broadly be defined as the use of Jewish Cabbalistic writings to demonstrate Christian truth. Pace Yates’

posited Hermetic-Cabalist tradition, this study of the Cabbala was not primarily about the Hermetic

corpus, nor about magic, but the study of certain Cabbalistic texts, like the Zohar. Pico became noted

as the first Christian Cabbalist, and his Cabbalistic theses in the Conclusiones became subject to study.

Of particular note are Arcangelo’s commentaries on Pico’s Cabbalistic theses, in his Conclusiones

Cabalisticae numero LXXI (1564) and Cabalistarum selectiora obscurioraque dogmata (1569).68

Arcangelo’s volumes, along with the mediation of other Cabbalists, may account for why one of Pico’s

Cabbalistic conclusions shows up in the works of Thomas and Henry Vaughan, although Pico is not

referenced directly.69 But it should be noted that there does not seem to have a significant follower of

Pico in purely Cabbalistic matters in England. Indeed, Pico’s works were not a suitable, convenient go-

to source for Cabbalistic writings, and in time,

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64 John Warwick Montgomery, ‘Sixtus of Siena and Roman Catholic Biblical Scholarship in the Reformation Period’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 54 (1963), pp. 214-33. See also Irena Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (Leiden, 2003), pp. 212-8; Alastair Hamilton, The Apocryphal Apocalypse: The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1999), pp. 95-7. 65 Sixtus Senensis, Bibliotheca Sancta (8 vols, Paris, 1610), IV, p. 268. 66 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Ioannis Pici Mirandulae Omnia Opera (Reggio Emilia, 1506), Trinity College, Oxford, shelfmark I.7.3., title page. The copy was given to the college by Sir Thomas Pope, the college’s founder. These annotations are not his but in a seventeenth-century hand. The book is mentioned in a letter written by Pope listing the books he was giving to the college library and was at Trinity from very early on. 67 The best history of this movement is now Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Geschichte der christlichen Kabbala (4 vols [1 vol published so far], Stuttgart, 2012). See also The Christian Kabbalah: Jewish Mystical Books and Their Interpreters, ed. Joseph Dan (Cambridge, Mass.; 1997); Don Karr, ‘Knots and Spirals: Notes on the Emergence of the Christian Cabala’; Wouter Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 54-60. Chaim Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Cambridge, Mass.; 1989) is the standard work for Pico’s Cabbalistic interests. 68 Schmidt-Biggemann, Geschichte der christlichen Kabbala, I, p. 498. See also Chaim Wirszbubski, ‘Francesco Giorgio’s Commentary on Giovanni Pico’s Kabbalistic Theses’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974), pp. 145-56. 69 See S. Sandbank, ‘Henry Vaughan’s Apology for Darkness’ in Essential Articles for the Study of Henry Vaughan, ed. Alan Rudrum (Hamden, 1987), p. 140 n. 25.

(Reproduced with the kind permission of the President and Fellows of Trinity College, Oxford)

Fig. 2a: Title page of Pico’s Opera omnia (Reggio Emilia, 1506), Trinity College, Oxford, shelfmarkI.7.3

Fig. 2b: First page of the Heptaplus in Pico’s Opera omnia, Trinity College, Oxford, shelfmark I.7.3

14

others like those of Reuchlin were preferred.70 Nonetheless, Pico was known as a Cabbalist, and the

authors discussed here saw him as such and used his discussion of the Cabbala for their own purposes.

Pico’s reputation affected his reception: he was known as a young genius, given a pious presentation

and most importantly, figured as a Protestant hero. Pico was given pride of place as a young, bold

‘phoenix’ of learning,71 who had a central place in narratives of the Italian Renaissance and the so-called

Platonic Academy of Florence.72 To quote two English accounts of the rise of letters in the first quarter

of the seventeenth century, Pico was variously ‘the miracle and Phoenix of the world’, part of a

movement that ‘wakened vp other Nations likewise with this desire of glory [in letters]’.73 Pico’s

crowning achievement was that he

proposed openly at Rome nine hundred questions in all kinde of faculties to be disputed, inviting

all strangers thither, from any part of the knowne world, and offering himselfe to beare the

charge of their travell both comming and going, and during their abode there.

In doing so, Pico ‘‘deservedly receiued that Epitaph ... bestowed on him’:

Heere lies Mirandula, Tagus the rest doth know,

And Ganges, and perhaps th' Antipodes also.74

His name was a byword for genius, applied to prodigies like John Donne, Thomas Stanley, Virginio

Cesarini and Gianlorenzo Bernini.75 This no doubt increased his attractiveness to readers.

In addition to this reputation as a young genius, Pico’s piety was renowned. In England it was

promoted by More’s influential translation of Gianfrancesco’s Vita in the sixteenth century, often

15

70 Christopher I. Lehrich, The Language of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy (Leiden, 2003), pp. 156-7. 71 The originator of this epithet appears to be Pico’s close friend, Angelo Poliziano. See Angelo Poliziano, Letters, ed. and trans. Shane Butler (Cambridge, Mass.; 2006), pp. 118-9, 208-9. It was a pun on picus, meaning woodpecker. Ibid, p. 335 n. 10.72 This is discussed at greater length in Daryl Lim, ‘The Place of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in Early Modern English Historiography’, pp. 2-5.73 Samuel Daniel, Poems and A Defence of Ryme, ed. A. C. Sprague (Cambridge, Mass.; 1930), p. 142. Daniel’s Defence of Ryme was originally printed in 1602. 74 George Hakewill, An Apologie of the Power and the Providence of God in the Government of the World (London, 1627), pp. 216-17. The epitaph is in the convent of San Marco in Florence, where Pico is buried. The Latin is quoted first and translated by Hakewill:

Iohannes iacet hic Mirandula, caetera norunt Et Tagus, & Ganges, forsan & Antipodes.

75 See Izaak Walton, The Life of John Donne (London, 1658), p. 6. (“That this age had brought forth another Picus Mirandula”); for Stanley, Models of the History of Philosophy: From its Origins in the Renaissance to the ‘Historia Philosophica’, p. 172; for Cesarini, John Heilbron, Galileo (Oxford, 2010), pp. 225-6; for Bernini, Maarten Delbeke, ‘Gianlorenzo Bernini as “La Fenice Degli’Ingegni”, or the History of an Epithet’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 32 (2005), pp. 245-253.

printed with devotional works. This ‘pious manifestation’ was the form in which Pico came cloaked,

and how many readers got to know him.76 (In the Low Countries, Pico came in similar guise.)77 More’s

translation of 1504 was dedicated to Joyce Leigh, a female religious, and was published along with three

letters of Pico, an interpretation of Psalm XV, along with ‘Twelve Rules of John Picus Earl of

Mirandula, Partly Exciting, Partly Directing a Man in Spiritual Battle’, ‘The Twelve Weapons of

Spiritual Battle, Which Every Man Should Have at Hand when the Pleasure of a Sinful Temptation

Cometh to Mind’ and ‘The Twelve Properties or Conditions of a Lover’ and a ‘A Prayer of Picus

Mirandula Unto God’.78 More’s selection and translation sandpapered the more controversial aspects of

Pico’s life, like his esoteric scholarship. Along with the material selected, the portrait presented of Pico

is one in which his intellectual daring and ambition come a poor second to his later piety in life.79

More’s Lyfe was first printed by John Rastell in 1510. It was the first of More’s works ever to be

reprinted.80 The reprint of 1525 by Wynkyn de Worde emphasised the book’s devotional purpose by

providing a specially commissioned frontispiece (fig. 3) featuring a man kneeling before the crucified

Christ, surrounded by instruments of the Passion.81 A transcript of More’s translation of Pico’s prayer

made its way into Robert Parkyn’s commonplace book.82 More’s translation of the Vita was still being

read in the seventeenth century.83 It should be noted that all three duodecalogues (The Twelve Rules,

Weapons and Properties), along with the exposition of Psalm XV, were also available in manuscript in

England, in a French translation with the title ‘XII reigules adressantes al battayle spirituel’, presented as

a New Year’s gift to Henry VII.84 A similarly devotional Pico is found in the library of Christ College,

Cambridge, where Pico’s hymns to the Trinity, Christ and the Virgin Mary are accompanied by a

commentary: these were given by Richard Foxe to the college.85 The ‘Twelve Rules’ were also

republished, along with two of Pico’s letters, in 1589 by John Windet.86 This pious portrait of Pico was

further

16

76 Trapp, The Early Tudor Humanists and Their Books, pp. 123-31. 77 See Marc Laureys, ‘The Reception of Giovanni Pico in the Low Countries’ in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Convegno internazionale di Studi nel Cinquecentesimo Anniversario della Morte (1494–1994), ed. Gian Carlo Garfagnini (2 vols, Florence, 1997), II, pp. 625–40.78 These are all collected in Thomas More, The Complete Works of St. Thomas More. Volume 1. English Poems, Life of Pico, The Last Things, eds. Anthony S. G. Edwards, Katherine Gardiner Rodgers, and Clarence H. Miller (New Haven, 1997).79 Trapp, The Early Tudor Humanists and Their Books, p. 127. 80 Edwards, ‘Life of Pico’, p. lvi. 81 Fredson Bowers, ‘Printing Evidence in Wynkyn de Worde’s Edition of ‘The Life of Johan Picus’ by St. Thomas More’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 43 (1949), pp. 398–9; and Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2008), pp. 68-9. 82Anthony S. G. Edwards, ‘Robert Parkyn’s Transcript of More’s ‘Prayer of Picus Mirandula unto God’ Moreana 27 (1990), pp. 133–8.83 Anthony S. G. Edwards, ‘More’s Life of Pico in the Early 17th Century’ Moreana 29 (1992), pp. 5–7.84 The Libraries of King Henry VIII, ed. James P. Carley (London, 2000), the entry is H2 Westminster 573, BL MS Royal 16. E XXV (s. xv/xvi) [No. 908], on p. 906. 85 Weiss, ‘Pico e L’Inghilterra’, p. 146. 86 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Twelve Rules and Weapons Concerning the Spirituall Battel, trans. W. H. (London, 1589).

Fig. 3: Frontispiece from the 1525 edition of More’s Lyfe, printed by Wynkyn de Worde.

17

boosted by Thomas Elyot’s translation of the ‘Twelve Rules’ as ‘The Rules of a Christian Lyfe’.87 This

was printed with a translation of St. Cyprian’s ‘A swete and deuoute sermon of mortalitie of man’ in

1534 and 1539, then issued with the works of Thomas Lupset in 1546 and 1560. In 1585 it was

issued, in Rouen, with Richard Whitford’s translation of the Imitation of Christ.88 In 1615, it was issued

with Anthony Hoskins’ translation of the Imitation of Christ and also a letter of St. Bernard by a secret

English press.89 Thus pious Pico, already present in Gianfrancesco’s Vita, was magnified in England.

This devotional presentation of Pico is fairly well-known. It was often a strategy deployed by supporters

of Pico, like Gianfrancesco and Paolo Cortesi, to rehabilitate him in the light of his papal

condemnation.90 However, a crucial piece of the puzzle has been missing. What has not been brought

to attention is the astonishing story of the afterlife of a pre-Reformation Renaissance humanist: Pico

was conscripted into Protestant history as a proto-Protestant hero.91 Protestant history grew out of the

need to prove that the newly minted Church of England was ‘no new-begun matter’.92 In England, the

chief writer of Protestant history was the martyrologist John Foxe, who in 1563 published the first

edition of the Acts and Monuments, popularly known as Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’. In it, Pico received a

single mention in an account of Luther’s life in 1516, deemed to be the ‘year of saluation’, because in

that year ‘began D. Martin Luther first to wryte’. Before Luther, ‘Picus Mirandula, and Laurentius

Valla,93 and last of all Erasmus Roterodamus, had somewhat broken the way before, and had shaken the

monks houses’. Luther ‘gaue the stroke, & pluckt down the foundation’.94 This reference was probably

the result of Foxe’s (and his collaborators’) hasty and imperfect digestion of the many sources, English

and continental, that had been used in the making of the Acts.95 The seeds of Pico’s Protestant

reputation were planted on the continent. The clue lay in Foxe’s statement that he would not speak at

too much length about Luther because the events had been sufficiently covered in ‘the history of

Iohannes Sleidane’.96 It has been noted that Foxe took the account of the Waldensian massacres from

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87 Stanford E. Lehmberg. Sir Thomas Elyot: Tudor Humanist (Austin, 1960), pp. 135-9. 88 Trapp, The Early Tudor Humanists and Their Books, p. 126. 89 Maximilian von Habsburg, Catholic and Protestant Translation of the Imitatio Christi, 1425-1650 (Farnham, 2011), pp. 90-2, 182-3. 90 John F. D’Amico, ‘Paolo Cortesi’s Rehabilitation of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’, Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 44:1 (1982), pp. 37-51. 91 See also my second M. Phil. essay, ‘The Place of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in Early Modern English Historiography’, pp. 11-5. 92 John Spurr, ‘“A special kindness for dead bishops”: The Church, History, Testimony in Seventeenth-Century Protestantism’ in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino, 2006), p. 309. See Alexandra Walsham, ‘History, Memory and the English Reformation’, Historical Journal 55:4 (2012), pp. 899-938 and in particular, pp. 902-5 for a succinct summary. 93 For the parallel afterlife of a pre-Reformation Renaissance humanist, Valla was viewed as a Proto-Protestant by Luther himself. See Jill Kraye, ‘Lorenzo Valla and Changing Perceptions of Renaissance Humanism’, Comparative Criticism, 23 (2001), pp. 37–55. 94 John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments (1st edn., London, 1563), p. 454. 95 Foxe was reliant on continental sources, such as the Magdeburg Centuries. See Patrick Collinson, ‘John Foxe as Historian’, The Acts and Monuments Online, [http://www.johnfoxe.org/index.php?realm=more&gototype=modern&type=essay&book=essay3], last accessed 5 May. 2013.].96 Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1st edn), p. 454.

the English translation of Johann Sleidan’s Commentaries.97 He could do so because the translation of

the Commentaries by John Daus had been published by Foxe’s own publisher, John Daye, in 1560. If

we turn to Sleidan’s Commentaries, Pico is mentioned in relation to Luther’s defence of the ninety-five

theses. Luther cited controversialists who had gone before him, like William of Ockham. To Ockham

Sleidan then adds ‘lykeyse Picus Mirandula, and Lawrens Ualla, whyche are now had in estimation’.98

Luther did indeed cite Pico in this regard.99 Foxe’s impression of Pico could have been taken from

another source he used: the translation of Oswald Myconius’s Life of Zwingli by Henry Bennet,

published as A Famous and Godly History (1561).100 There we come across the claim that Zwingli

‘approued [of] Iohn Picus of Mirandolas propositions’.101

Pico’s inclusion in the Acts triggered a series of polemical engagements, hitherto unnoticed, over Pico’s

orthodoxy that would stretch into the next century. Nearly every Catholic polemical work of the 1560s

contained an attack on the Acts.102 Chief among them was Nicholas Harpsfield’s Dialogi Sex (1566),

printed by Christopher Plantin in Antwerp. Harpsfield’s last dialogue scrutinised Foxe’s history, seeking

to excise ‘pseudo-martyrs’ from the Acts.103 Harpsfield picked up on Pico, countering that the latter was

completely orthodox. Therefore, Foxe had a duty to expunge Pico’s name from his list of pseudo-

martyrs.104 It is crucial to note here that Harpsfield’s rebuttal is taken from Gianfrancesco Pico’s Vita of

Pico (the same one translated by More). Harpsfield wrote a biography of More, entitled The Life and

19

97 Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2011), p. 117.98 Johann Sleidan, A Famous Cronicle of oure Time, called Sleidanes Commentaries, trans. John Daus, (London, 1560), xir. For Luther’s citation of Pico, Reuchlin and Valla, among others, as controversialists who had preceded him, see Erika Rummel, The Case against Johann Reuchlin: Social and Religious Controversy in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Toronto, 2002), p. 27. 99 Martin Luther, Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesammtausgabe (127 vols, Weimar, 1883), I, p. 574; IV, p. 183. 100 See Irena Backus, Life Writing in Reformation Europe: Lives of Reformers by Friends, Disciples and Foes (Aldershot, 2008), p. 47 and n. 3; Luther’s Lives: Two Contemporary Accounts of Martin Luther, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Vandiver, Ralph Keen and Thomas D. Frazel (Manchester, 2002), p. 1. Bennet’s book was also a translation of Wolfgang Capito’s Life of Johannes Ocelampadius (which had been republished with Myconius’ life of Zwingli as Epistolarum libri quatuor. Vtriusque vita et obtius in 1536) and Philip Melanchthon’s Life of Luther, De Vita et Actis Lutheri (1549). See also the invaluable critical commentary to the Acts and Monuments Online, which often points out Foxe’s numerous borrowings. 101 Henry Bennet, A Famous and Godly history contaynyng the Lyues and Actes of Three Renowmed Reformers of the Christian Church, Martine Luther, Iohn Ecolampadius, and Huldericke Zuinglius (London, 1561), p. 84. Zwingli was a reader of Pico. For a discussion of Zwingli’s annotations to Pico, see Irena Backus, ‘Randbemerkungen Zwinglis in den Werken von Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’, Zwingliana 18/4-5 (1990/1), pp. 291-309 and also Irena Backus, ‘Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Bucer and the Church Fathers’ in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Backus (2 vols, Leiden, 1997), II, p. 634. 102 Evenden and Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England, p. 137. 103 John N. King, ‘Guides to Reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’ in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino, 2006), pp. 140-1. 104 Nicholas Harpsfield, Dialogi sex contra summi pontificatus, monasticae vitae, sanctorum, sacrarum, imaginum oppugantores, et pseudomartyres (Antwerp, 1566), pp. 910-4.

Death of Thomas Moore, Knight (1566/7), at the request of More’s son-in-law, William Roper.105 In

response, Foxe expanded on Pico’s role in the 1570 edition. In a new preface, combatively titled ‘To the

True and Faithful Congregation of Christes vniuersall Church’, Foxe gave a lineage of the witnesses and

martyrs of the true church. For Foxe, the time from Wycliffe to the present time was a ‘period of

reformation and purging’. At the end of this paragraph Foxe then lists

Iohn Hus ... with whom I might also adioyne Laurentius Valla, and Ioannes picus the learned

Earle of Mirandula. 106

Pico is also listed in a new index of ‘The Names of the Authors Alleged in the Booke’.107 In the main

narrative, Foxe, moving from the Henry VII’s reign to the contemporaneous reign of Emperor

Maximilian to survey developments on the continent, noted that ‘the Churche and commonwealth of

Christ began now to be replenished with learned men’. Pico is first listed as part of a list of ‘famous and

worthy wyttes’ including Poliziano, Barbaro, Ficino and others.108 Foxe saw God’s provident hand in

the rise of letters:

to restore the Church ... it pleased God to open to man, the arte of Printyng ... whiche styrred

vp good wittes, aptely to conceaue the light of knowledge and of iudgement: by which light,

darkenes began to be espyed, and ignoraunce to be detected, truth from errour, religion from

superstition to bee discerned ... susteynyng the cause and defense ... of true religion, agaynst

superstition.

Foxe proceeds to list Pico (again), Valla, Petrarch, Erasmus and others as examples of these ‘wittes’. The

implication is that Pico (unlike say, Poliziano and crucially, Ficino) was not simply one of the learned

men of the period, but also a champion of true religion. These men ‘began the first pushe & assault to

be geuen against the ignorante & barbarous faction of the Popes pretensed Church’. By their writing

and work, ‘they had opened a wyndow of light vnto the world, and had made ... a way more ready for

other to come after’. For, ‘Immediatly, accordyng to Gods gratious appointement, folowed Martin

Luther’.109

Foxe also inserted a biography of Pico after an account of lollard prosecutions with the statement ‘I

should also in the same reign of king Henry vij. have induced the history of Ioannes picus Earle of

Mirandula’. Foxe noted Pico’s formidable learning ‘in all sciences, and in all tongues’. The proposed

20

105 Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Harpsfield, Nicholas (1519–1575)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12369, accessed 1 May 2013]; and Nicholas Harpsfield, The Life and Death of Sir Thomas Moore, Knight, ed. E. V. Hitchcock (London, 1932). 106 John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments (2nd edn. London, 1570), p. 5. 107 Ibid, p. 16. 108 Ibid, p. 886. 109 Foxe, The Acts and Monuments (2nd edn.), p. 1006.

Roman disputation is given an anti-Catholic slant: Pico, wishing to debate ‘conclusions ... touchyng the

matter of the Sacrament. &c.’, was seen as the victim of a papist plot of the ‘vnlearned clergy of Rome’

who ‘intangled this learned Earle in their snares of heresie, agaynst whom they neuer durst openly

dispute’.110

Lastly, Pico’s name was placed into the controversial calendar in the first edition of the Acts, its

rubrication in red and black an imitation of liturgical calendars, replacing traditional saints: he is listed

as a confessor for the 29th of December, alongside Erasmus and Martin Bucer (see fig. 4).111 This is

repeated in the calendars that accompany the 1576, 1583, 1596, 1610, 1641 and 1681 editions of the

Acts. The second edition of the Acts was given the official seal of approval, and in April 1571, the upper

house of the convocation of the Church of England ordered that it should be set up alongside the Bible

in all cathedral churches and in the homes of senior and cathedral clergy. A less formal instruction

required parish churches to provide copies.112 Foxe’s stories and images penetrated English popular

consciousness to an astonishing extent -- and it would be reasonable to conjecture that this image of

Pico did so as well. For example, Pico’s name found its way into William Beale’s almanac for the year

1631, which replaced some medieval saints with the names of Foxe’s martyrs and confessors (see fig.

5).113 This was a rehash of the controversial calendar in the Acts.

The dispute over Pico’s role in Protestant history lasted well into the seventeenth century. We find the

extraordinary (and false) claim by Arthur Dent in The Ruine of Rome (1603) that ‘the Pope & his clergy

had murthered ... Iohn Picus’ among a list of others including Jan Hus.114 The fact that Pico’s Vita was

reissued with the Imitation of Christ by various Catholic presses, as shown above, is possible evidence of

attempts to reclaim him for the Catholic camp. But there were also more explicit rebuttals. A Treatise of

Three Conversions (1603-4), by the Jesuit Robert Parsons, complained about Foxe and the ‘like Injury

they offer to Picus Earl of Mirandula, who never held any one Protestant Opinion in his life’.115

Sylvester Norris‘s The Guide of Faith (1621) defends Pico as a ‘manifest and knowne Catholike wholly

of our Religion’. 116 John Clare, in his The Converted Iew (1630), similarly asserted that ‘Picus of

21

110 Foxe, The Acts and Monuments (2nd edn.), p. 943. Foxe concludes, tantalisingly, ‘His story requireth a longer tractation: whiche if place do serue, we will not peraduenture forget’, but there are no significant expansions in later editions. 111 See Thomas S. Freeman, ‘The Power of Polemic: Catholic Responses to the Calendar in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61:3 (2010), pp. 475-95; Evenden and Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England, p. 126. It should be noted that while Freeman has examined Catholic responses to Foxe’s calendar, Pico’s strange place is not mentioned.112 David Loades, ‘The Early Reception’, The Acts and Monuments Online, [http://www.johnfoxe.org/index.php?realm=more&gototype=modern&type=essay&book=essay7], last accessed 4 May. 2013.113 William Beale, An almancake, for the yeere of our Lord God, 1631 (London, 1631). 114 Arthur Dent, The Ruine of Rome (London, 1603), pp. 145-6. 115 Robert Parsons, A Treatise of Three Conversions (Saint-Omer, 1603-4), p. 197. 116 Sylvester Norris, The Guide of Faith (Saint-Omer, 1621), chapter XII.

Fig. 4. Detail from the month of December, from the first edition of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments in 1563.

22

Fig. 5. The month of December, from William Beale’s An almancake, for the yeere of our Lord God, 1631.

23

Mirandula’ was a ‘Roman Catholick, and dyed in that Religion’.117 Protestants did not give up their

claims to him, however. Pico is listed in a Catalogus Testium Veritatis of ‘Witnesses ... for proofe of the

PROTESTANT Religion’ in Simon Birckbeck’s The Protestants Evidence (1635).118 Henry Rogers’ The

Protestant Church Existent (1638) listed ‘Picus Mirandula’ as one of those who as ‘professed and

received the Faith, and Sacraments of the reformed Church’ before Luther.119 The controversy

continued past the mid-century. Alexander Petrie, a Presbyterian minister, in his A Compendious History

of the Catholick Church (1662) gave an account of Pico’s proposed Roman disputation, and alleged that

Pico prefigured the Protestant view of the Eucharist.120 A Catholic tract, Protestancy Condemned (1654)

by Edward Knott, an English Jesuit, attacked the Protestants’ ‘exceeding boldness in alleging Erasmus

and Picus Mirandula as Members of their Protestant Church’.121 Theophilus Gale’s claim that Pico was

among our ‘first Reformers ... [who] first attempted the Reformation of Philosophie ... in order to the

Reformation of Theologie and Ecclesiastic Affaires’ in The Court of the Gentiles (1669-72) was probably

influenced by this view of Pico.122

Let us step back and consider this Protestant view of Pico. Pico could be molded in such a fashion due

to several reasons, which have implications for the study of his reception. As shown above, his

reputation, before Foxe’s intervention, was already one of piety and devotion, due to More’s translation

of Gianfrancesco’s somewhat hagiographic Vita. His reputation for prodigy, genius and learning was no

doubt a bonus. Aspects of Pico’s life also lent themselves to Protestant readings. Luther and Zwingli

cited Pico’s proposed disputation and the subsequent clampdown as examples of the Church’s

corruption and its suppression of discussion. Several of Pico’s thirteen suspect propositions, like those

on the eucharist and the adoration of images, now found a favourable Protestant audience. Pico’s

association with Savonarola, a firm Protestant favourite, towards the end of his life, along with the anti-

astrological Disputationes, often deemed to be written for pious reasons, seemed to seal his attractiveness

to Protestants, who wished to claim Savonarola too.123 There is a last, strange reason. Gianfrancesco (or

Giovanni Francesco) Pico della Mirandola,124 the aforementioned author of Pico’s Vita and his nephew,

24

117 John Clare, The Converted Iew (S. I., 1630), p. 136. 118 Simon Birckbeck, The Protestants Evidence (London, 1635), b3r. This is an imitation of Matthias Flacius Illyricus’ Catalogus testium veritatis (1566).119 Henry Rogers, The Protestant Church Existent (London, 1639), pp. 119, 122. 120 Alexander Petrie, A Compendious History of the Catholick Church (Hague, 1657), p. 16. 121 Edward Knott, Protestancy Condemned (Douai, 1654), p. 288. 122 Theophilus Gale, The Court of the Gentiles (4 vols, London, 1669-72), IV, ‘Of Reformed Philosophie’, A2r. 123 Bruce Gordon, ‘“This Worthy Witness of Christ”: Protestant Uses of Savonarola in the Sixteenth Century’ in Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon (2 vols, Aldershot, 1996), I, pp. 93-107. 124 Charles B. Schmitt, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1469-1533) and His Critique of Aristotle (The Hague, 1968) is the fullest treatment of the younger Pico in English. See also Gian Mario Cao, ‘Inter Alias Philosophorum Gentium Sectas, Et Humani, Et Mites: Gianfrancesco Pico and the Sceptics’ in Renaissance Scepticisms, eds. Gianni Paganini and José R. Maia Neto (Dordecht, 2009), pp. 125-48 and Gian Mario Cao, Scepticism and Orthodoxy: Gianfrancesco Pico as a Reader of Sextus Empiricus (Pisa, 2007).

was often confused with the elder Pico in this period. Gabriel Harvey, for example, confused them.125

They sometimes are still mixed up in modern scholarship.126 This association was also present on the

continent, particularly in Germany.127 This confusion, or even the tendency to view them as a single

person, was not helped by the joint printing of their works in two volumes in the Basel editions of

1557, 1573 and 1601.128 This misidentification is important because the younger Pico was indeed a

church reformer, unlike the elder Pico, who was never explicitly so (though both were associated with

Savonarola). Gianfrancesco was the author of a famous oration to Pope Leo X lamenting the ills of the

church, De reformandis morbius oratio, first printed in 1520. It was later used as propaganda for the

cause of the Reformation.129 Of interest also is his De rerum praenotione libri novem (1506-7), a work

directed against false modes of prophecy, reminiscent of the elder Pico’s Disputationes.130 The confusion

added to the elder Pico’s supposed sanctity and attractiveness to Protestants.

Pico, figured as pious Protestant hero, was then read for his theological opinions, particularly in his

Apologia, which defended the propositions the Church had deemed heretical and suspect. The

Cambridge book inventories of the early modern period that list Pico indicate interest in Pico’s

theology. In Edward Moore’s inventory of 1539, Pico is listed under the heading of ‘Doctores’, along

with a work by St. John of Damascus and Peter Lombard’s Sentences.131 Walter Bygrave’s library, in an

inventory of 1554, was strong in the Church Fathers and in Canon law: Pico is listed just below the

works of Origen.132 John Madew, appointed Regius Professor of Divinity in 1545 and a Protestant, had

a library of largely Church Fathers and Protestant theology. Pico is here listed with Tertullian and St.

Augustine.133 The inventory of the Calvinist Robert Beaumont, made in 1567, lists a library with a

strongly Calvinist flavour. It is therefore striking to see that Pico is here listed after Erasmus, and just

before Peter Martyr and Heinrich Bullinger.134 There is evidence of this on the continent as well: in

Germany, Konrad Peuttinger placed Pico at the end of a list of Christian divines including Lactantius,

25

125 Gabriel Harvey, Three Proper and Wittie Familiar Letters (Oxford, 1924), p. 619. This was pointed out by Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, p. 47 n. 45. 126 See, for example, Rostvig, The Hidden Sense, p. 25. Even as careful a scholar as Irena Backus is caught out: see Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation, p. 214, n. 70, which misattributes Gianfrancesco Pico’s translation of Pseudo-Justin Martyr’s Cohortatio ad Graecos (also known as the Admonitorius gentium liber) to the elder Pico. See Schmitt, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, p. 200. The critical commentary to the otherwise excellent Acts and Monuments Online [http://www.johnfoxe.org], in a discussion of Pico’s mention in the Acts, claims that ‘This was one person, Giovanni Francisco [sic] Pico della Mirandola, the celebrated humanist’. A quick look at the calendar, and the given death year of 1497 (which, although incorrect for either, is closer to the elder Pico’s), suggests otherwise. 127 See Gian Mario Cao, ‘Pico della Mirandola Goes to Germany. With an Edition of Gianfrancesco Pico’s ‘De reformandis moribus oratio’’, Annali dell’istituto storio italo-germanico in Trento 30 (2004), pp. pp. 488-94. 128 Pichiana: Bibliografia delle edizioni e degli studi, eds. Leonardo Quaquarelli and Zita Zanardi (Florence, 2005), pp. 182-91, 301-4. 129 Schmitt, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, p. 194. 130 Ibid, p. 192. 131 E. S. Leedham-Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories (2 vols, Cambridge, 1986), I, no. 5, p. 14. 132 Ibid, no. 64, p. 145. 133 Ibid, no. 72, pp. 161-2.134 Ibid, no. 126, p. 291.

Tertullian, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa.135 In the copy of Pico’s Opera omnia in

Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, once owned by a former master of the college and a translator

of the King James Bible, William Branthwaite (1563-1619), the annotations, in Branthwaite’s hand,

indicate Brathwaite’s interest in Pico’s theological opinions -- and many readings take on a Protestant

hue.136 The ramifications of such a view of Pico, in particular the impact on his reception, have not

been fully explored. The first author considered in this dissertation, Richard Field, read Pico in just

such a way.

26

135 Cao, ‘Pico della Mirandola Goes to Germany’, p. 489. 136 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Ioannis Pici Mirandulae Omnia Opera (Reggio Emilia, 1506), Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, shelfmark F.17.4. Branthwaite’s engagement with Pico is discussed at length in my first M. Phil. essay, ‘Readers of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century England’.

III: Pico as Theologian: Richard Field’s Reading of Pico

The earliest uses of Pico in England were in fact theological, though this has been obscured. Colet

modified Pico’s sevenfold scheme of the universe in the Heptaplus for his Letters To Radulphus on the

Mosaic Account of Creation (c. 1497-1504), among other uses of Pico in Colet’s work.137 For Fisher,

Pico had a surprising anti-Lutheran use: Pico’s Cabbala could demonstrate that there could be other

testimonies to divine truth than the word of the Bible.138 Richard Field’s theological use of Pico was

different however: Pico was cited for his account of belief and nature of Christ.

Dr. Richard Field (1561-1616), was rector of Burghclere, chaplain to Elizabeth I and James I, then

Prebend of Windsor and Dean of Gloucester. He graduated BA from Magdalen Hall, Oxford on 18

November 1581 and rose through the ranks of the church thereafter. He was present at the Hampton

Court Conference on 14 January 1604 and in 1605 took part in the Divinity Act in Oxford. James I

approved of his sermons, apparently remarking ‘Is his name Field? This is a field for God to dwell in’.

Field was a contemporary and friend of the more well-known churchman and divine, Richard Hooker,

along with other luminaries such as John Spencer, Giles Thomson, Henry Savile and Sir Henry Nevill.

His substantial contribution to theology, On the Church, Five Bookes was first published (containing the

first four books) in 1606 in London, dedicated to Richard Bancroft, then Archbishop of Canterbury.

The fifth book appeared in 1610.139 As an early Jacobean, pre-Laudian theologian, Field occupies an

interesting place in the history of ecclesiology and theology: while he is insistent on importance of the

organisation of the visible church, he regards Rome with supreme suspicion, and always returns to the

criterion of doctrine as the mark of a true church. Field was principally concerned, as the title of his

book demonstrates, with ecclesiology and the ‘orderly connexion’ of the church.140 His writings,

though now forgotten, were much used by English Calvinists of the period.141 He was generally eirenic

in attempting to maintain the Anglican settlement. As his son Nathaniel states:

27

137 Trapp, ‘An English Late Medieval Cleric and Italian Thought’, pp. 247-9; Trapp, The Early Tudor Humanists and Their Books, pp. 132-5. See also Jonathan Arnold, The Great Humanists: An Introduction (London, 2011), p. 174.138 Porter, ‘Fisher and Erasmus’, p. 89. 139 Vernon Wilkins, ‘Richard Field, DD, 1561-1616, Of the Church, Five Books - on Ministerial Orders and Bishops’, Churchman 114:3 (2000) is the fullest biographical treatment of him. See also Wilkins’ ODNB entry on Field. More biographical information may be gleaned from the biography by Field’s son, Nathaniel Field, Some Short Memorials Concerning the Life of that Reverend Divine Doctor Richard Field (London, 1716-7). Anthony Milton’s book places some of Field’s work in context, as does Paul D. L. Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church (Edinburgh, 2002), pp. 51-8. Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 156-7 on the does so on the question of predestination. 140 Wilkins, ‘Richard Field’. 141 Milton, Catholic and Reformed, p. 533 and n. 8.

He was one which laboured to heale the Breaches of Christendome, and was readie to embrace

Truth wheresoever he found it ... His Desires, his Praiers, his Endeavours were for Peace, to

make up the Breaches of the Church, not to widen Differences but to compose them.142

But Field displayed great vehemence against Catholic opponents like Robert Bellarmine and Thomas

Stapleton, and his attitude towards the Roman church was very negative in general. The driving force

of his work was to refute Tridentine Roman attacks on the Church of England and to demonstrate that

Rome is in fact the false church, damned by its rejection of the Reformation and the hardening of this

rejection in the Council of Trent.143 Field stated that

it is easie to proue, that all things wherein they dissent from vs, are nothing else but nouelties,

vncertaineties; and that none of the famous, and greatest Churches, euer knew, or admitted, any

of their heresies.144

Unlike Laud later on, Field denied that the Roman church had an essential equality with the Protestant

churches. One example of Field’s attitude towards the Church of Rome is on the issue of baptism.

While Field conceded that in possessing effectual baptism the Catholics were in some sense part of the

visible church of God, he then immediately qualified that claim. Rome ministered true baptism

to the salvation of the souls of many thousand infants that die after they are baptized, before she

have poisoned them with their error.

In other words, the only hope for salvation in the Church of Rome, Field implied, was to die

immediately after baptism.145 For Field, it was true doctrine and faith, in accordance with that of the

saints and apostles, that determined the true universal and catholic church.146 This dissertation cannot

explore Field’s theology in detail, though Field has been neglected:147 it is his interactions with Pico,

cited as a theological authority, that concern us.

There are two contexts in which Pico was of particular use to Field. One is the Protestant genealogy

sketched out in the previous chapter. The other is in the context of Protestant-Catholic exchanges,

particularly in response to the Second Scholastic. Like many Foxe and many English divines, Field was

much exercised by the Catholic taunts of ‘Where was your church before Luther?’. There was a need to

28

142 Nathaniel Field, Some Short Memorials, pp. 22-3. 143 Paul D. L. Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, p. 53. 144 Richard Field, Of the Church, Five Books (Oxford, 1628), 3v. 145 Milton, Catholic and Reformed, pp. 135, 231. 146 Wilkins, ‘Richard Field’. 147 As noted in Milton, Catholic and Reformed, p. 6, the religious literature of the period 1600-40 ‘remains almost wholly unstudied’, with historiographical debate focused on a ‘tiny sample’.

maintain that the true, invisible church had existed in the medieval period, as promised by Christ. A

solution that would allow for the salvation of members of the pre-Reformation Roman Church, which

would simultaneously justify denying it to its present members, was needed. Field’s solution was to

contend that the medieval Latin church was an arena of dispute between a corrupt papalist faction and

the rest of the church. Because these Romish, false doctrines were never ‘constantly delivered nor

generally received’ in the Church, it was possible for souls to be saved. The Reformation, was however,

the dividing line. Trent formalised the doctrines of the Romish faction into formal error, and hence

those now in it were damned. Field’s solution was a masterfully subtle one, which soon gained wide

acceptance and exercised influence on Laudians and others after Field’s death.148 Field’s interest in the

descent of the true church would have brought Foxe’s Acts (which was, in any case, close to inescapable)

to his attention. Field therefore thought that Pico was among the

innumerable more of the best, wisest, and holiest men the Church had [who] saw those abuses

errours, vncertainties, and barbarismes, wherewith the glory of the Church was greatly

blemished, and almost quite defaced, and wished and expected a reformation.149

Pico was mentioned as one of the ‘innumberable ... worthy guides of Gods church’.150 It is clear from

an unpublished work of Field’s, entitled ‘An Answer to Mr Brerelyes obiection concerning the Masse,

publiquelie vsed in all Churches at LVTHERS appearing’ and inserted into the 1628 edition of Of the

Church by Field’s son Nathaniel, that Field was engaged in this post-Foxe battle over Pico’s place in

Protestant history. John Brereley, a Catholic recusant whose real name was James Anderton,151 had in

1608 published an attack on Protestantism entitled The Protestants Apologie for the Roman Church. In it,

Anderton noted that ‘S. Bernard, Erasmus, Mirandula, and sundry other known Catholique Writers’

had been ‘iniustly’ claimed by ‘our adversaries ... to bee of their Church’. Anderton went on to note

that ‘M. D. Feild [sic] (a prime adversary)’ was guilty of enforcing

vndue and intollerable bould clayme to many Catholickes (a supposed particuler faction of them

only excepted) dispersed through the Christian world, at and next before Luthers first appearing:

during which very tyme so many other of his owne breethren are to the contrary inforced to

confesse, that their Church was then invisible and could not be then shewed.152

Field was a combatant in the Protestant-Catholic exchanges over Pico’s proto-Protestant credentials.

29

148 Milton, Catholic and Reformed, pp. 277-84. 149 Field, Of the Church, p. 90. 150 Ibid, p. 91. 151 A. F. Allison, ‘Who was John Brereley? The Identity of a Seventeenth-Century Controversialist’, Recusant History 16 (1983), pp. 17-30. 152 John Brereley [James Anderton], The Protestants Apologie for the Roman Church (1608), pp. 329-30.

But a new context was the response to the theology of the Second Scholastic. Field’s book was directed

at these theologians and in particular Robert Bellarmine, who is cited nearly four hundred times. As

Cardinal Inquisitor, Bellarmine was responsible for setting down doctrine definitively for the

Tridentine, counter-Reformation church, most notably in his Disputationes de Controversiis Christiane

Fidei (1581-93), known as the Controversiae, which provoked numerous Protestant rebuttals.153

Thirteen theses from Pico’s proposed disputation of nine hundred had already been condemned by a

papal commission in 1486.154 But Counter-Reformation theologians like Bellarmine inflicted fresh

condemnations on Pico’s theses, such as the heretical proposition that Christ’s soul did not descend to

hell with respect to its real presence.155 Gabriel Vázquez in his De cultu adorationis libri tres (1594)

condemned Pico, among others like Robert Holcot and Guillaume Durand, for his opinion on the

adoration of the cross.156 Such condemnations were where other English theologians derived Pico’s

contrary opinions. Edward Stillingfleet stated, citing Vázquez, that ‘before the Council of Trent, several

Persons who lived in Communion of that Church, but by no means approved the Worship of Images,

such as Durandus, Holcot, Picus Mirandula, and others’.157 The same strand on the worship of images

was picked up on by Simon Birckbeck158 and then Samuel Rutherford in his Divine Right of Church-

Government (1646).159 Similarly, Jeremy Taylor in his Symbolon Theologikon (1674) cited Pico’s views

on the eucharist.160 Field’s source was Francisco Suárez’s Commentariorum ac Disputationum, first

published in Mainz in 1590.161 Suárez was explicitly cited by Field.162 In Suárez’s discussion of images,

those condemned for doubting the value of worshipping images are Guillaume Durand, Jean Gerson

and Pico.163 In chapter 23 of the third book, ‘Of the Superstition and Idolatry committed formerly in

the worshipping of Images’, for instance, Field stated that

30

153 Patricia Springborg, ‘Thomas Hobbes and Cardinal Bellarmine: Leviathan and ‘The Ghost of the Roman Empire’, History of Political Thought 16:4 (1995), pp. 503-31. 154 See the Appendix for the full list of these condemned propositions, in translation.155 Peter Goodman, The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine Between Inquisition and Index (Leiden, 2000), p. 169-70.156 Gabriel Vázquez, De cultu adorationis libri tres (Alcalá, 1594), in particular pp. 103-4, 125-33, 147, 174-7. See Appendix, proposition 3. 157 Edward Stillingfleet, The Doctrines and Practices of the Church of Rome (London, 1686), p. 17.158 Birckbeck, The Protestants Evidence, p. 125. 159 See Samuel Rutherford, The Divine Right of Church Government (London, 1646), pp. 132, 158, 163, 166, 174, 176, 186. 160 Jeremy Taylor, Symbolon Theologikon (London, 1674),IX p. 222; XI, p. 230.161 ‘Bibliography’, The Philosophy of Francisco Suárez, ed. Benjamin Hill and Henrik Lagerlund (Oxford, 2012), p. 230.162 Field, Of the Church, III.23, p. 121. 163 Francisco Suárez, Commentariorum ac Disputationum in tertiam partem divi Thomae (Lyon, 4 vols, 1593), I, LIV.3, p. 668. ‘Fuit autem haec opinion Durandi in 3.d.9.q.2. num.10. & 14. quam sequitur ibi Maior q. vnica, & Gerson alphab. 12. litera N. & Picus Mirandul. in apolog. q. 3. inclinat etiam Castro verbo Imago, haeresi 1. circa finem.’

many in the Romane Church did see the abuse & superstition, that was in the vse of Images,

appeareth by Picus Mirand. his Apology of his conclusion proposed in Rome, that neither the

Crosse, nor any other image is to be worshipped with diuine worship.164

Durand and Gerson are then also listed by Field as examples of those who disapproved of the adoration

of images. Many of Pico’s condemned opinions, expressed before Luther, acquired a different hue in

the light of the Protestant Reformation, particularly those on the adoration of the cross and images, the

eucharist and the freedom of belief.165 The new condemnations of the theologians of the Second

Scholastic brought Pico’s beliefs to the attention of Protestants, and might have brought Field to Pico

in the first place.

But unlike other theologians cited above, Field’s engagement with Pico ran deeper than the citation of

opinions contrary to the Roman church’s official doctrine. Field was much taken with Pico’s often

sublime expressions, and used him as a source of ornament to enrich his own discussion. In the opening

discussion on ‘the calling of grace’, Field quoted with approval Pico’s statement in the Heptaplus that

the ‘true and perfect happiness’ is to ‘see the face of God: which is to behold is the height of all that

good which any creature can desire’.166 Pico was cited to support Field’s point that man will ‘neuer ...

rest satisfied, till he come to an infinite good’, which is God. Our true liberty is found in closeness to

God. In fact, as Pico stated, ‘God is more neere to euery of vs than we are to our selves: then are wee

nearer to ourselves to any other thing’.167 Similarly, Field’s point that those who ‘doe not discerne the

Majesty of God in all bookes that are diuine’ have ‘some defect’ in themselves, and this is not due to

any fault of Scripture was supported by Pico’s claim that ‘there lyeth hidde in the Scripture a secret

vertue, strangely altering and changing them’.168 Field was attracted, on one level, to Pico’s phrases.

Pico was also used for biblical commentary. (As noted above, Field used Sixtus Senensis.) Field waded

briefly into the controversy -- and he was directed to this by Bellarmine’s De verbo dei (1576), the first

part of the Controversiae --169 about whether St. Jerome, in his Prologus Galeatus, the prologue to the

31

164 Field, Of the Church, p. 338. The reference is to to the third of Pico’s condemned theses. See Appendix. See Milton, Catholic and Reformed, pp. 189-96.165 See Appendix, nos. 3, 6 and 8. 166 Field, Of the Church, p. 4. The reference is to Heptaplus, VII, Proem. ‘Vera autem et consummata foelicitas ad Dei faciem contuendam quae est omne bonum’. This is taken from Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Opera omnia (Basel, 1557), p. 47. For the English translation, see Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, ‘Heptaplus’, trans. Douglas Carmichael in On the Dignity of Man, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis, Paul J. W. Miller and Douglas Carmichael (Indianapolis, 1965), p. 151. 167 Field, Of the Church, p. 280. Field’s reference is to De ente et uno. But this is not in the main text itself, but rather, in Pico’s exchange of letters over various points with Antonio Cittadini of Faenza, appended by Gianfrancesco Pico, the editor of the Opera omnia, to the main text. See Garin, History of Italian Philosophy, I, p. 315 and also Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and His Sources’ in Studies in Renaissance Thoughts and Letters III (Rome, 1993), pp. 245, 254 n. 144. 168 Field, Of the Church, p. 858. 169 Ibid, IV.25, p. 385. The reference is ‘Bellar. I. 2. c. 4. de verbo dei.’ See Hamilton, The Apocryphal Apocalypse, pp. 90-1.

Book of Kings in the Latin Vulgate, was right in asserting that Esdras the scribe had ‘found out newe

Hebrewe letters, and left the old to the Samaritans’.170 It is important for Field to state that the scripture

‘which Moses and the Prophets deliuered, Esdras sought and religiously commended vnto the people’ in

an unchanged form. Field doubted Jerome’s (and Bellarmine’s) assertion and cited Pico’s testimony that

he, ‘hauing conferred with sundry Iewes, about this matter ... all constantly denyed this alteration of

letters’.171 Field thought that this was a minor point ‘of no great moment’ and we ought to ‘let euery

man judge as he thinketh best’. Nonetheless Field held that

the whole Scripture of the Olde Testament, was written in Hebrew, so the same neuer perished

wholly, in any of the captiuities of the Iewes, but was religiously preserued, euen the same which

Moses and the Prophets deliuered to the people of God.172

As a Reformed divine, it was important for Field to maintain the authority of the text of Scripture.

Pico’s testimony was used to support the primacy of Scripture against Catholic theologians like

Bellarmine who had wished to show that the text of Scripture, due to the existence of elements of

human invention, could not provide absolute rules of doctrine but instead required the tradition of the

Church for interpretation.173

But it is Pico’s theology in the Apologia that received the most attention. The first instance of this is a

long discussion on faith and certainty, an issue which exercised many Anglican divines like Hooker,

Laud, William Chillingworth and later theologians.174 But it should be noted that Field died before

many of these controversies took shape: the context is not the same as that of the 1630s. In chapters 7

and 8 of the fourth book of Of the Church, Field was specifically taking on Thomas Stapleton’s

32

170 Jerome’s original assertion reads: ‘Certumque est Ezram scribam legisque doctorem post captam Hierosolymam et instaurationem templi sub Zorobabel alias litteras repperisse, quibus nunc utimur, cum ad illud usque tempus idem Samaritanorum et Hebraeorum caracteres fuerint.’ This is taken from Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. Robert Weber (Stuttgart, 1983), p. 364. 171 Field, Of the Church, p. 385. The reference is to Pico’s letter to an unknown friend (‘ignoto amico’), dated 10 November 1486. The passage reads: ‘Et ut ad ea veniam quae de Chaldaeorum Hebraeorumque literis desideras, percunctatus sum ego saepe et Mithridatem et multos Hebraeos de his quae apud Hieronymum in Galeato prologo leguntur, ubi ille scribit eosdem olim fuisse Samaritanorum et Hebraeorum characteres, Esdram autem post instaturationem templi sub Zorobabel alias adinvenisse literas, quae nunc sunt in usu, nescios se huius mutationis omnes praedicant.’ This is taken from Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Opera omnia (Basel, 1557), p. 385. See Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter With Jewish Mysticism, pp. 170-1. Lim, ‘Readers of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’, discusses a case in which an English reader of the same period, William Branthwaite, took issue with Pico’s statement and seemed inclined to support Jerome. 172 Field, Of the Church, IV.25, p. 385. 173 This discussion should be viewed in parallel with the debate over the Masoretic vowel points and the general inerrancy of the text of Scripture, which Bellarmine had also raised in De verbo dei. See Richard A. Muller, ‘The Debate over the Vowel Points and the Crisis in Orthodox Hermeneutics‘ in After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford, 2003), pp. 146-55. 174 On this see Martin I. J. Griffin, Jr., Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England (Leiden, 1992); Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1983), pp. 74-119; Henry G. Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought, 1630-1690 (The Hague, 1963), pp. 15-48.

discussion of the nature of faith and belief, specifically in the latter’s Triplicatio inchoata (1596).175 Field

was keen to refute the idea that it was merely ‘the authority of the Church’ that ‘moveth a man to

beleeu[e] the things that partaine to faith’.176 Field’s overall contention was that some element of reason

had to come into play in belief: it was not possible to

beleeue the things that are diuine, by the meere and absolute command of our will, not finding

any sufficient motiues & reasons of perswasion.177

Field cited, and wished to refute, the scholastic distinction between certitudo evidentiae (certainty of

evidence) and certitudo adhaerentiae (certainty of adherence). In this distinction, certainty of evidence

was attached to what the human intellect, unaided by grace, could achieve from considering the

external evidences of the Christian revelation, along with the truths of natural religion. This did not

produce divine faith, which required certainty of adherence, which was a movement of the will, aided

by the grace of God. Field’s fellow divine Hooker and later on William Laud, believed that superadding

grace was needed in addition to reason for faith to be attained. They both included in their account of

faith an element of the Church’s authority, though it is not clear that Field had Hooker in mind.178

Hooker’s adoption of this scholastic distinction did raise contemporary objections.179 Certainly, the

general question of faith’s relation to the will and intellect was one with a long tradition: Calvin had

dealt with it,180 as had Thomas Aquinas.181 Some, said Field, suppose the certainty of adherence to

be the certainty that is found in fayth, and there vpon they hold, that a man may beleeue a

thing meerely because hee will, without any motiues or reason of perswasion at all.

Field cited Pico as having held the contrary opinion:

the contrary whereof when Picus Mirandula proposed, among other his conclusions to bee

disputed in Rome, hee was charged with heresie for it. But hee sufficiently cleared himselfe from

33

175 Field, Of the Church, IV.7, p. 352. The reference is ‘Triplicatio. fol. 188’. 176 Ibid. 177 Ibid, p. 353. 178 Griffin, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England, p. 98. See, for example, Richard Hooker, A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certaintie and Perpetuitie of the Elect (Oxford, 1612). 179 Debora K. Shuger, ‘Faith and Assurance’ in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. William J. Torrance Kirby (Leiden, 2008), pp. 221-50.180 Milton, Catholic and Reformed, p. 415. See R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford, 1979) and the response to Kendall in Richard A. Muller, ‘Fides and Cognitio in Relation to the Problem of Intellect and Will in the Theology of John Calvin’ in The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition (Oxford, 2000), pp. 159-74. It is probably unhelpful to speak of an ‘intellectualist’ as opposed to ‘voluntarist’ account of faith; as Muller notes, Calvin’s account of faith cannot be simply reduced to ‘intellectualist’.181 See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, IIaIIae IV.2, 8.

all such imputation, and improued their fantasie that so thinke, by unanswerable reasons, which

I have thought good to lay downe in this place.182

Field then produced a long, translation from Pico’s Apologia, a summary of Pico’s entire defence of his

seventh condemned proposition (see Appendix).183 Pico’s contention was that there was need for ‘some

inducement ... to settle our perswasion’ in belief. It is not possible for the ‘sole acte of a mans will’ to

‘make a thing ... appeare and seeme true or false, but either the euidence of the thing or the testimony

of some one’. While the action of the will many ‘consider of a thing, and thinke vpon it, or to turne

away such consideration from it’, the act of ‘assent or dissent’ itself cannot simply derive from the will.

Christian belief is never due to the ‘sole command of the will’; in fact, there exist ‘sundry reasons ... as

appeareth by the course of all Diuines, who lay downe eight principall reasons moving men to beleeue

the Gospell’. These eight are

the light of propheticall prediction, the harmony and agreement of the Scriptures, the diligence

of them that receiued them, carefully seeking to discerne betweene truth and errour, the

authority & grauitie of the writers, the reasonablenesse of the things written, & the

vnreasonablenes of all contrary errours, the stability of the Church, and the miracles that haue

beene done for the confirmation of the faith it professeth.

Lastly, Pico argued that, if faith is simply the exercise of will, willing to believe and willing not to

believe something cannot be distinguished as

the acte of neither of these is more reasonable then the other, being like vnto the will of a

Tyrant, that is not guided at all by reason, but makes his owne liking, the rule of his actions

In doing so, we might be perilously equating Christian belief in the gospel and the corresponding

disbelief of infidels, as both sides ‘haue no more reason to leade them’.184 This is a remarkable instance

of Pico’s opinion on the freedom of belief (de libertate credendi) and the importance of reason in faith

being cited for serious theological consideration. In fact, it seems that Field, perhaps uniquely among

the English theologians of the period, appreciated Pico’s achievement in clarifying the nature of belief

and faith, an accomplishment that is only just beginning to be recognised in modern scholarship.185

(One other citation of this account of belief is made by the Scottish Presbyterian theologian, Alexander

Henderson, in his exchange with Charles I over episcopacy at the end of the First English Civil War.186

34

182 Field, Of the Church, IV.7, p. 354183 Ibid. The corresponding pages in the 1557 Opera omnia are pp. 224-9. 184 Field, Of the Church, IV.7, p. 354. 185 Notably Edelheit, Ficino, Pico and Savonarola: The Evolution of Humanist Theology, pp. 278-368. 186 Charles I and Alexander Henderson, The Papers which Passed at New-Castle Betwixt His Sacred Majestie and Mr Alexander Henderson Concerning the Change of Church-Government (London, 1649), p. 6.

Field is a likely intermediary source.187 Whether Pico had any role in arguments for religious tolerance

and liberty is as yet unexplored.) Pico is by far the main authority quoted in this discussion, and he is

placed alongside Durand and Pierre d’Ailly (‘Cardinall Cameracensis’) as a confuter of this ‘senselesse

conceipt’.188 Overall, Field’s conviction was that while

the authority of Gods Church, prepareth vs vnto the faith, and serueth as an introduction, to

bring vs to the discerning and perfect apprehension of diuine things.

it cannot be ‘the ground of our faith, and reason of beleeuing’, which must be Scripture and

doctrine.189 This is by far the most significant citation of Pico’s theology in Field’s work. Another

instance occurs in the discussion of whether the ‘punishments of sinne repented of, ceasing, and

forsaken, should bee euerlasting, or ioyned with despaire’. Field, referencing Pico’s second condemned

proposition, thought that this is ‘no way necessary’ and not required by the ‘iustice of God’.190 But Pico

was here just one buttressing authority among others.

The last significant reference occurs not in the main text of Of the Church, but in an appendix in

response to attacks on Field’s first four books by the convert to Catholicism (later reconverted by

Thomas Morton), Theophilus Higgons, in his The First Motive to suspect the Integrity of his Religion,

with an Appendix against Dr. Field, Dr. Humfrey, &c. (1609), written under the pseudonym Thomas

Forster.191 Higgons had alleged that Field ‘fayled exceedingly in two poyntes’ in the discussion of the

body of Christ and his nature. 192 This is a tangled web: Field had attempted in this section to refute

Bellarmine’s charge that the German Protestants were repeating the heresy of the Eutychianism, which

is the idea that

after the incarnation there was but one only nature in Christ, for that the nature of God was

turned into man, that there was a confusion of these natures.193

Higgons alleged that Field’s errors in his refutation were: first, that

there is no place, where the body of Christ is not vnited personally vnto that God, who is euery where;

and that it doth subsist euery where.

35

187 See David George Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 1590-1638 (Oxford, 2000), p. 80188 Field, Of the Church, IV.7, p. 354. 189 Ibid, p. 358. 190 Ibid, p. 447.191 Antony Charles Ryan, ‘Higgons, Theophilus (1578–1659)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13241, accessed 24 April 2013]. See also Michael Questier, ‘Crypto-Catholicism, Anti-Calvinism and Conversion at the Jacobean Court: The Enigma of Benjamin Carier’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 47:1 (1996), pp. 45-64. 192 Field, Of the Church, III.35, pp. 151-2. 193 Ibid, p. 151.

Higgons contended that the human nature of Christ ‘subsisteth therein finitely, and in one determinate

place; the vnion it self being a created thing’. To claim that ‘the body of Christ hath vnion with his

person in all places, because it is vnited vnto that, which filleth all places’ would be to claim that

Christ’s created human nature subsists everywhere, which would be ‘an heresy’. And second, that

the humane nature of Christ may rightly be SAYD to be euery where, in asmuch as it is vnited

personally vnto that, which is euery where.

This is the corollary to the discussion above, and Higgons argued that

by virtue of the personall vnion in Christ, the proprieties of the diuine nature are attributed

vnto the Person in concrete viz, GOD, and MAN: not vnto the humane nature in abstracte, viz.

vnto the manhood. 194

Field’s response was that there is, as Thomas Aquinas famously held, ‘a beeing of essence, and a beeing

of existence, or subsistence’. Thus while with regards to essence, the human nature of Christ was finite

and limited, ‘as is the essence of all other men’, its existence ‘hath none of it owne, but that of the

Sonne of God communicated to it, which is infinite and Diuine’. He quoted Pico’s opinion, from the

Apologia, that ‘God, in the incarnation of the eternall word, produced the essence of the humanity [of

Christ], without that finite and created actuall existence, which left to itselfe, it would haue had’.195

Field cited Pico’s discussion of the eucharist, which held that the person of the son of God

hauing in it the fulnesse of all beeing, drew the nature of man to the vnity of that infinite beeing

it had in it selfe, and communicated the same vnto it: so that the humanity of Christ neuer had

any other beeing of actuall existence or subsistence, but that of the Sonne of God

communicated to it.

Therefore, following Pico,

the substantiall, actuall beeing of the body of CHRIST, is the increated beeing of the Sonne of

GOD: seeing in CHRIST there is but one beeing of actuall existence.

This opinion, Field asserted, which ‘Picus Mirandula hath deliuered’ is also ‘the resolution of Thomas

Aquinas, Caietan, and all the best learned in the Romane Schoole’.196

36

194 Theophilus Higgons, I.2.5-6, pp. 37-8. The corresponding section of Of the Church is III.35, pp. 151-2. 195 Field, Of the Church, p. 820. The corresponding section of the 1557 Opera omnia is p. 230. 196 Field, Of the Church, p. 820.

Field had an extensive engagement with Pico’s theological opinions in the Apologia. It is a testimony to

Pico’s importance for Field that he cites Pico to come down in favour of an account of faith guided by

reason and intellect, not the action of the will. Pico was also used as a theological authority of Christ’s

human and divine natures, on par with Aquinas and Cajetan. It is clear that this early seventeenth-

century divine found much in Pico that was relevant to the theological debates of his day, especially in

the context of Catholic-Protestant polemics. No doubt, as noted above, the peculiar attempt by English

Protestants to claim Pico for their church added to Pico’s appeal. It is hoped that this explication of

Field’s substantial engagement with Pico has allowed another Pico -- Pico the proto-Protestant

theologian -- to emerge from the shadows.

37

IV: Ambivalence, Rejection and Satire: John Donne’s Encounter with Pico

Donne’s encounter with Pico was one framed, from the off, by odd coincidences. As Donne himself

cryptically noted, in a discussion of Pico in the Essayes in Divinity, he was related to Sir Thomas More,

(Donne’s mother was More’s great-niece).197 Furthermore, he stated that he had read More’s Life of

Pico:

Picus Earl of Mirandula (happier in no one thing in this life, then in the Author which writ to

us).198

Furthermore, Donne’s talents apparently attracted flattering comparisons to Pico: it was said ‘That this

age had brought forth another Picus Mirandula’.199 Yet the precise nature of Donne’s engagement with

Pico has never been clarified. We are instead told, vaguely, that Donne’s poetry made use of the

‘popularisation of Neoplatonism in the sixteenth century, inspired by thinkers such as Pico della

Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino, as well as Petrarch’.200 This chapter attempts to provide a treatment of

Donne’s engagement with Pico that takes into account Donne’s scholarly practices and contexts, an

approach that others have already begun to take to Donne’s work.201 This can only be a limited

contribution to this field that hopefully illuminates this intriguing intellectual encounter. Donne read

Pico principally for two reasons outlined in chapter two: Christian Cabbalism and biblical commentary,

though he came to reject Pico’s approach.

The first citations of Pico in Donne’s work occur in Donne’s Biathanatos, his defence of suicide. It was

composed in 1607-8, but only published posthumously in 1647 due to its controversial subject

matter.202 Pico was not a major influence here: some quotations are used, in Donne’s own words, ‘only

for ornament and illustration’.203 Nonetheless, Pico was present in a list of ‘Authors cited in this

Book’.204 Pico was cited for the ‘best description of felicity I have found’, which is ‘reditum

uniuscuiusque rei ad suum principium’ (the return of each and every thing to its beginning).205 In the

context of the main argument of Biathanatos: that of the desirability of suicide, this definition had some

38

197 David Colclough, ‘Donne, John (1572–1631)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2011 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7819, accessed 24 April 2013].198 John Donne, Essayes in Divinity, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal and Kingston, 2001), p. 16. 199 Izaak Walton, Life of John Donne, p. 6. See n. above. 200 Andrew Hadfield, ‘Literary Contexts: Predecessors and Contemporaries’ in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achshah Guibbory (Cambridge, 2006), p. 62. See Patrick Grant, ‘Donne, Pico, and Holy Sonnet XII’, La Revue de l' Association des Humanites 24 (1973), pp. 39–42 for an attempt to link Donne’s poetry to Pico. 201 See Piers Brown, ‘“Hac ex consilio meo via progredieris”: Courtly Reading and Secretarial Meditation in Donne’s The Courtier’s Library’, Renaissance Quarterly 61:3 (2008), pp. 833-66 and Katrin Ettenhuber, Donne’s Augustine: Renaissance Cultures of Interpretation (Oxford, 2011). 202 John Donne, Biathanatos, eds. Michael Rudick and M. Pabst Battin (New York, 1982), p. ix. 203 Ibid, p. 9. 204 Ibid, p. 8. 205 Ibid, p. 63. The reference is to the Heptaplus, VII, Proem. The corresponding page in the 1557 Opera omnia is p. 45: ‘Felicitatem ego sic definio, reditum uniuscuiusque rei ad suum principium’. For the English translation, see Pico della Mirandola, ‘Heptaplus’, trans. Douglas Carmichael, p. 148.

function, but it was not a significant one. Another citation to Pico, as a supporting quotation, appeared

in Donne’s assertion that

in some cases, we may without sin wish death, and that not only for enjoying the sight of

God ... but even to be so delivered from the encumbrances of this life.

Pico was cited, and the reference is again to the Heptaplus, which is quoted as saying that ‘Nolle

meliorem est corruptio primae habitudinis’ (To refuse what is better is a corruption of the prime

condition).206 Yet nothing in the Heptaplus corresponds to this line. Donne was fond enough of this

spurious Pico quotation to use it again in a later sermon.207 Pico’s supposed saying could have been the

product of distortions along the way: as Katrin Ettenhuber has shown, Donne’s engagement with Saint

Augustine rarely followed the direct path of simply reading Augustine first hand.208 The last citation of

Pico was in a discussion of the Law, which is ‘not absolutely good’ but simply ‘forbids [what] is evil’.

Pico’s comparison of the Law ‘to the firmament’ is then cited approvingly, because when God made the

firmament, ‘He did not say that it was good ... and yet it was not evil’.209 While it is easy to dismiss

these citations as mere ‘ornament’, such references to Pico can be more productively interpreted in the

context of practices of courtly reading and secretarial mediation, as proposed by Piers Brown. Donne,

sometime after 1601 and before 1610, wrote an unusual satirical piece entitled the Catalogus librorum

aulicorum incomparabilium et non vendibilum, commonly known as The Courtier’s Library. First

published posthumously in 1650, the Catalogus originally circulated in manuscript among a select

audience.210 It is a mock library catalogue intended to satirise learned culture and authors. Donne took

on the role of a secretary or tutor advising a courtier on study for the purpose of ornament and

performance in court. Donne recommended imaginary works which would allow the courtier to

suddenly spring forth, on almost all topics, if not more learned than others, at least as learned in

a different way.211

39

206 Donne, Biathanatos, p. 117. 207 John Donne, Sermons of John Donne, eds. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley, 10 vols, 1953), X, sermon 19, pp. 29, 383. 208 Ettenhuber, Donne’s Augustine, p. 5.209 Donne, Biathanatos, p. 160. The reference is to Heptaplus VII.6. ‘Firmamentum (ut supra ostendimus) legem figurat, et erat firmamentum uti informe, ita neque perfectum simpliciter donec Sole, Luna, ac stellis fuit instructum: quemadmodum neque lex, non quidem mala, ut dicunt Manichaei, sed neque bona erat simpliciter, id est perfecta, donec Christus venit, qui legem implevit. Si malum fuisset firmamentum, solem non recepisset, si fuisset bonum Sole non eguisset. Sed firamamentum eatenus bonum, quatenus solis caeterorumque Syderum erat capax, sicut eatenus bona erat lux, quatenus paedagogus nobis erat in Christo, et multa permisit Moses ob duritiam populi, quae Euangelium postea non permisit.’ From the 1557 Opera omnia, p. 58. See Pico della Mirandola, ‘Heptaplus’, trans. Douglas Carmichael, p. 168 for the corresponding translation.210 Brown, ‘Courtly Reading and Secretarial Meditation in Donne’s The Courtier’s Library’, p. 833. The discussion that follows is much indebted to this article. Similar points are made in Ettenhuber, Donne’s Augustine, pp. 46-7. 211 John Donne, The Courtier’s Library, trans. Piers Brown in “Hac ex consilio meo via progredieris”: Courtly Reading and Secretarial Meditation in Donne’s The Courtier’s Library’, Renaissance Quarterly 61:3 (2008), p. 859.

By parading non-knowledge, the courtier could distinguish himself. The Catalogus had a serious point

to make. By presenting itself as a annotated bibliography of works, it was not immediately

distinguishable from the excerpts and summaries made by learned secretaries for their masters. Scholarly

attention has been drawn to the importance of such practices of early modern scholarship in the context

of courtly politics, counsel and performance.212 The Catalogus drew attention to the truly learned reader

behind the scenes, the scholar secretary, who existed in a problematic relationship with his master. In a

world where the status of knowledge was in question due to repeated summary, digestion, compression,

epitomising and transmission,213 this satire was particularly acute. Knowledge used for ornament,

display and performance risked vulgarising and trivialising knowledge and obscuring the hard work

involved in reading, note-taking, annotating and understanding. The Catalogus betrayed Donne’s

anxiety and insecurity: he did not wish for his hard work, a very physical and material process, to be

obscured. We are told by Donne’s biographer Izaak Walton that Donne was an assiduous reader of

books: Donne’s copy of Bellarmine’s works were ‘marked with many weighty observations under his

own hand’.214 This is a possible reason for the long list of authorities, which, as noted above, includes

Pico, provided at the start of Biathanatos. Another clue is given by the painstaking scrupulousness

Donne displayed in preparing the printed marginal notes for Biathanatos.215 Donne can be seen as

wishing to display his diligent scholarship, based on his ‘own old notes’.216 (Ironically, in light of

Donne’s desire to prove his scrupulousness, his confession that ‘I did not refresh them with going to the

original’ might be the reason why he attributed and then reused a spurious quotation attributed to

Pico.)217 Donne’s references to Pico in Biathanatos, which seem to add little to his overall argument,

might betray an anxiety to display his hard-won, bona fide learning.

One significant observation to be made of Donne’s citations to Pico in Biathanatos is that they are all

from the Heptaplus, and indeed, entirely from book 7. This provides an important clue to the nature

and extent of Donne’s engagement with Pico: Pico was important as a biblical commentator on the

book of Genesis.

40

212 Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present 129 (1990), pp. 20-78 and Lisa Jardine and William Sherman, ‘Pragmatic Readers: Knowledge Transactions and Scholarly Services in Late Elizabethan England’ in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 102-24. 213 Blair, Too Much to Know. See also Daniel Rosenberg, ‘Early Modern Information Overload: Introduction’, Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003), pp. 1-9. 214 Walton, Life of John Donne, p. 56. 215 William E. Slights, Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books (Ann Arbor, 2001), pp. 80-3. 216 Donne, Biathanatos, p. 9. 217 Ibid.

It was therefore in the Essayes in Divinity, a work of biblical commentary,218 written in 1614 and

posthumously published in 1651,219 that Donne most extensively engaged with Pico. Before delving

into the precise references to Pico, it is worth considering why Donne read Pico at all, aside from the

reasons mentioned above. The Essayes in Divinity was an exposition of the first verse of each of the book

of Genesis and Exodus.220 It was in line with works such as Andrew Willet’s Hexapla in Genesin (1605)

and Hexapla in Exodum (1608).221 Donne was therefore engaging with a tradition of biblical exegesis

on the book of Genesis (and Exodus).222 Donne read Pico’s Heptaplus because it is a work of biblical

commentary on Genesis. In fact, the Heptaplus ends with an exposition of the first phrase of Genesis,

‘In the Beginning’ (bereshith). As noted above, Sixtus Senensis’s Biblotheca made mention of Heptaplus

in this regard -- and Donne cited Sixtus (whom he calls ‘Sextus Senensis’) as well.223 There is another,

related reason for Donne’s interest in Pico in the Essayes. Donne was engaged, in a fashion, with

Christian Cabbalism and Hebraism.224 Although his knowledge of Hebrew was limited,225 Donne was

fond of using explanations of Hebrew words in explicating Scripture. (Donne is not alone in this. John

Selden, before acquiring Hebrew, used Reuchlin and Pico for knowledge of Hebrew as well.)226 In fact,

because Donne’s Hebrew was slight, he was reliant on other commentators who had more knowledge

of Hebrew, as intermediary sources, like Reuchlin and Pico.227 Donne thus cited Reuchlin,228 Zorzi,229

Arcangelo230 and Pico. It is Donne’s engagement with this tradition that encompasses his reading of

Pico.

Donne’s attitude towards Pico and what he calls ‘Cabalistick learning’ was one of rejection, or at least

ambivalence. Donne simply stated that ‘Cabalistick learning seems to most Occupatissima vanitas’ and

as a result, in his discussion, he would ‘forbear the observations ... of Picus in His Heptaplus and in the

Problemata of Francis George [Zorzi]’.231 But despite this ambivalence, Donne then went on to provide

a defence of Pico, Zorzi and the use of the Cabbala:

41

218 For more on Donne’s biblical exegesis, see Dennis B. Quinn, ‘John Donne’s Principles of Biblical Exegesis’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 61 (1962), pp. 313-29 and also Ettenhuber’s account of the Essayes, Donne’s Augustine, pp. 105-35. 219 Anthony Raspa, ‘Introduction’ in John Donne, Essayes in Divinity, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal and Kingston, 2001), p. xvi. 220 Ibid, p. xiii. 221 Ibid, p. xxiii. 222 See Williams, The Common Expositor.223 Donne, Essayes in Divinity, p. 22. 224 Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne, pp. 129-30, 204. 225 Don Cameron Allen, ‘Dean Donne Sets His Text’, ELH 10:3 (1943), p. 219. 226 G. J. Toomer, John Selden: A Life in Scholarship (2 vols, Oxford, 2009), I, pp. 86, 100.227 Chanita Goodblatt, ‘From “Tav” to the Cross: John Donne’s Protestant Exegesis and Polemics’ in John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives, ed. Mary Ashagouni Papazian (Detroit, 2003), pp. 224-231. See also Goodblatt’s book, The Christian Hebraism of John Donne (Pittsburgh, 2010). 228 Donne, Essayes in Divinity, pp. 11, 28, 98. 229 Ibid, pp. 12-14, 38, 52, 60, 86, 102. 230 Ibid, pp. 13-5. 231 Ibid, pp. 12-3.

For as Catechisers give us the milk of Religion, and positive Divines solid nutriment ... though

there be proper use of controverted Divinity for Medicine, yet there be some Cankers, (as

Judaisme) which cannot be cur’d without the Cabal.232

It should be remembered that Pico had made similar claims about the use of the Cabbala to refute and

convert Jews:

there is no point of controversy between us and the Jews on which the latter could not be

refuted and convinced by means of the cabalistic books, so that no corner will remain in which

they may take refuge.233

Nonetheless, despite this, Donne ultimately rejected Pico’s method in the Heptaplus. Pico’s attempt to

read into bereshith (In the Beginning) in the final section of the Heptaplus was seen as the product of

‘man of an incontinent wit, and subject to the concupiscence of inaccessible knowledges and

transcendencies’. Donne’s report of Pico’s project was negative, and he described Pico as ‘vexing’ and

having ‘wrung out’ from this single word a supposed truth of Christianity. Donne’s rejection of Pico

was one of hermeneutical principle:

since our merciful God hath afforded us the whole and intire book, why should wee tear it into

rags, or rent the seamless garment?234

We should be wary, Donne went on to say, of placing the book of Moses ‘in a wine-presse, and squeeze

out Philosophy and particular christianitie’.235 Rather, the book of Genesis ought to be valued as a work

of history:

we are utterly disprovided of any history of the Worlds Creation, except we defend and

maintain this Book of Moses to be Historical, and therefore literally to be interpreted.

42

232 Ibid, p. 13. 233 Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, p. 273. See Saverio Campanini, ‘Talmud, Philosophy, and Kabbalah: A Passage from Pico della Mirandola’s Apologia’ in “The Words of a Wise Man’s Mouth are Gracious” (Qoh 10,12): Festschrift for Guenter Stemberger on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. Mauro Perani (Berlin, 2005), pp. 432-7; Kocku von Stuckrad, ‘Christian Kabbalah and Anti-Jewish Polemics: Pico in Context’ in Polemical Encounters: Esoteric Discourse and its Others, eds. Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden, 2007), pp. 3-24. 234 Donne, Essayes in Divinity, p. 16. 235 Ibid, p. 17.

There was, in Genesis, ‘both History and Precept’.236 Like many in his time, Donne was aware of the

problems raised by researches into Biblical and non-Biblical chronology and its potentially destabilising

effects, as this passage testifies:237

In the Epistle to Alexander the Great to his Mother ... there is mention of 8000. years. The

Caldeans have delivered observations of 470000 years. And the Egyptians of 100000. The

Chineses vex us at this day, with irreconcilable accounts. And to be sure, that none shall prevent

them, some have call’d themselves Aborigenes. The poor remedy of Lunary and other planetary

years, the silly and contemptible escape that some Authors speak of running years, some of years

expired and perfected; or that the account of dayes and monthes are neglected, cannot ease us,

nor afford us line enough to fathom this bottom. The last refuge uses to be, that prophane

history cannot clear, but Scripture can.238

The Essayes in Divinity have been seen as an attempt to find a middle way between overly literalistic

interpretations and mystical interpretations. For example, Donne took issue with Sixtus Senensis and

Emmanuel Sa’s literalistic interpretations but also St. Gregory’s mystical interpretations.239 We can now

add that Donne also rejected Pico’s interpretive approach in the Heptaplus. In doing so, Donne

signified that he valued Genesis as a historical document, which provided points of stability in the

Christian faith amidst conflicting evidence, new technologies and irreconcilable chronologies.

There remains one question, however. What did Donne really mean when he spoke of ‘Cabalistick

learning’? Whereas the study of the Cabbala is now (and indeed by practitioners like Pico, Reuchlin and

others) seen as the interpretation of certain esoteric Jewish mystical writings, this was in fact not

Donne’s conception of it. Donne saw the Cabbalists as

Anatomists of words, [who] have a Theologicall Alchimy to draw soveraigne tinctures and

spirits from plain and grosse literall matter, observe in every variey some great mystick

signification, but so it is almost in every Hebrew name and word.240

Donne thought of the Cabbala not as the interpretation of mystical Jewish texts, but simply a type of

biblical hermeneutics, whereby meaning was drawn out of texts through rearrangement. This view of

the Cabbala was not without some truth: certain Cabbalistic techniques could be seen in this light.

Gematria involved making sums of the Hebrew letters, which each had a numerical value. The ars

43

236 Ibid, p. 21. 237 There is now a wealth of literature on the importance of historical chronology in the early modern period. See, in particular, Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (2 vols, Oxford, 1994) and especially volume 2 on Historical Chronology. Levitin, ‘From Sacred History to the History of Religion’ provides a handy overview. 238 Donne, Essayes in Divinity, p. 22. 239 Quinn, ‘John Donne’s Principles of Biblical Exegesis’, p. 316. 240 Donne, Essayes in Divinity, pp. 54-5.

combinandi (or hokhmat ha-zeruf), which attempted to make sense of a text by rearranging it creatively,

was used by Pico in his explication of bereshith in the Heptaplus.241 Yet this means that Donne had an

particular (mis)understanding of the Cabbala. He does not seem to have appreciated it as a tradition of

study of certain mystical Jewish texts. Rather, it was simply an interpretative method which sought to

creatively generate meanings out of texts through certain methods, which Donne rejected.

We see this if we return to the Catalogus. While the Catalogus has hitherto been mined for biographical

information242 and, in Brown’s article, for insight into Donne’s scholarly practice and insecurities,243 it

can also shed important light on what Donne thought about certain authors, and the way in which he

read them. Pico was mentioned at the very start of this list of imaginary works, and he is preceded by

Zorzi and Reuchlin:244

The Judeo-Christian Pythagorus, in which 99 and 66 are shown to be the same number if the

page is turned upside down, by the more than angelic Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola.245

This suggests that Pico, Zorzi and Reuchlin were being read as a set of Cabbalists with a particular

method of biblical interpretation. This seems to be proven by the parodies of the three of them made at

the start of the Catalogus. Cabbalism and biblical interpretation, to Donne, were conflated.

It remains for us to summarise the extent of Donne’s interaction with Pico and to draw out some

implications. While Donne did read Pico, it was a reading limited exclusively to the Heptaplus and no

other work of Pico’s. (It is not known what edition of Pico, Opera omnia or otherwise, Donne used as

Pico does not appear on any inventory or notice we have of Donne’s book collection.)246 Aside from

personal connections to Pico, Donne’s interest in biblical exegesis and interpretation, the Cabbala and

44

241 Black, Pico’s Heptaplus, pp. 142-4. See also Chaim Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism and Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, 1988) and Brian Copenhaver, ‘Number, Shape and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala:  The Upright Tsade, the Closed Mem and the Gaping Jaws of Azazel’ in Renaissance Natural Philosophy and the Disciplines, eds. Anthony Grafton and N. Siraisi (Cambridge, Mass.; 2000), pp. 25-76. 242 Evelyn M. Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne (Oxford, 1948), pp. 150-3. 243 Brown, ‘Courtly Reading and Secretarial Meditation in Donne’s The Courtier’s Library’, p. 835 and n. 6. 244 Donne seems to have anticipated Jorge Luis Borges’s satirical reference to Pico, accomplished by the invocation of another imaginary work: ‘Pico della Mirandola’s Book of All Things and Also Many Others’, itself a reference to Francisco Quevedo’s Libro de todas las cosas y otras muchas más (1627), which is in turn a mocking satire of Quevedo’s rival Luis de Góngora. See Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights’ in Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York, 2000), p. 102. 245 Donne, ‘The Courtier’s Library’, p. 861. 246 See Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne (Oxford, 1973), pp. 258-279. See also M. P. Dubinskya, ‘A Book from John Donne’s Library’, Kollektsii--knigi--avtografȳ 1 (1989), pp. 95-102; Mary Hobbs, ‘Bibliographical Notes and Queries’, Book Collector 29 (1980), pp. 590-2; Geoffrey Keynes, ‘More Books from the Library of John Donne’, Book Collector 26 (1997), pp. 29-35; Geoffrey Keynes, ‘Bibliographical Notes and Queries’, Book Collector 27 (1978), pp. 570-2; David Pearson, ‘An Unrecorded Book from the Library of John Donne’, Book Collector 35 (1986), p. 246; Henry R. Woodhuysen, ‘Two More Books from the Library of John Donne’, Book Collector 32 (1983), p. 349; and Hugh Adlington, ‘More Books from the Library of John Donne’, Book Collector 61 (2012), pp. 55-64.

Christian Hebraism can be credited. Pico was being read as one of a set of authors that included Zorzi,

Reuchlin and others. More broadly, he was being read as one of many commentators on Genesis.

Ultimately, Donne rejected what he saw as a Cabbalistic method of interpreting Scripture, preferring to

value the Book of Genesis for its significance as sacred history. It should be noted that this rejection of

Cabbalism was not confined to Donne: the marginal annotations of William Branthwaite also

demonstrate this, and one note by Brathwaite, written beside one of Pico’s discussions of the Cabbala in

the Opera omnia, is a dismissive ‘O supersitio Iudaica’.247 There is therefore, in this encounter with Pico

which did not result in significant influence, a story of reading, selective misreading, misunderstanding,

ambivalence, rejection and satire. Donne soon moved on to more traditional authorities like Aquinas

and Augustine.248 Pico was important because Donne defined his method of Biblical exegesis against

Pico’s. Nonetheless, Pico was still used for ornamental quotations, a practice which is meaningful in the

context of Donne’s scholarly practice.

45

247 Pico della Mirandola, Ioannis Pici Mirandulae Omnia Opera (Reggio Emilia, 1506), Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, shelfmark F.17.4, Y4r. ‘O superstition of the Jews’.248 Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne, p. 204; Quinn, ‘John Donne’s Principles of Biblical Exegesis’, pp. 317-9. For Donne’s interaction with Augustine, Ettenhuber, Donne’s Augustine is now essential.

V: Walter Ralegh’s Use of Pico in the History of the World (1614)

Although Sir Walter Ralegh is more popularly seen as a royal courtier, pirate, explorer and spy, his

History of the World (1614) testifies to his wide reading, painstaking scholarship and his participation in

the intellectual trends of the period, such as historical and biblical chronology, cartography and

geography.249 Indeed, Ralegh’s concerns overlap significantly though not entirely with Donne’s

discussed above, and in a strange coincidence, both sailed together to the Azores in 1597.250 An

examination of his library, which had at least five hundred volumes in six languages, provides evidence

of Ralegh’s wide reading.251 During Ralegh’s imprisonment in the Tower of London from 1603 to

1616, when the History was composed, he had access to this library, that of Henry Percy’s and the Earl

of Northumberland’s.252 He also borrowed titles from the library of Sir Robert Cotton.253 An inventory

of Ralegh’s library, in Ralegh’s own hand, shows that he owned the 1601 Basel edition of Pico’s Opera

omnia, which is listed under ‘Picus Mirandula’. The list is divided into thematic sections, and thus it is

crucial to know that Pico is here listed with: Gregory of Valencia, William of Auvergne (or William of

Paris), Agostino Steuco, Sixtus Senensis, Gasparo Contarini, Nicholas of Cusa, Benedict Pererius’s

Commentariorum et Disputationum in Genesim, along with Willet’s, Calvin’s, Jean Mercier’s and

Augustin Marlorat’s commentaries on Genesis, Marlorat’s Thesaurus sacrae Scripturae propheticae et

apostolicae (1574; also known as the Loci Communes in this period),254 Girolamo Zanchi, J. G. Stuckius,

Thomas Bilson’s Survey of Christ's Sufferings for Man's Redemption and of His Descent to Hades Or Hell

for Our Deliverance (1604), Peter Martyr Vermigli, Lactantius and Clement of Alexandria.255 This list

provides important clues for how Ralegh read Pico: he is classed together here with commentators on

Genesis, theologians (often Protestant) and importantly, Steuco, who famously promoted a version of

ancient wisdom or philosophia perennis (prisca theologia), which Pico -- and Ralegh -- also subscribed

to.256 Unsurprisingly then, Ralegh used Pico for a defence of the prisca theologia, as a source of biblical

commentary and also history.

Ralegh began his history with the creation. The first book of the The History of the World is therefore a

commentary on the account of creation in the Book of Genesis, as Pico’s Heptaplus was. Thus, as the

46

249 Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (Chicago and London, 2012), p. 6. 250 Jonathan F. S. Post, ‘Donne’s Life: A Sketch’ in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, p. 8. 251 Walter Oakeshott, ‘Sir Walter Ralegh’s Library’, The Library 23:4 (1968), pp. 285-327. 252 Joseph M. Levine, ‘Sir Walter Ralegh and the Ancient Wisdom’ in Court, Country and Culture: Essays on Early Modern British History in Honor of Perez Zagorin, eds. Bonnelyn Young Kunze and Dwight D. Brautigam (Rochester, 1992), p. 92. 253 Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World, p. 32 and John Racin, Sir Walter Ralegh as Historian: An Analysis of the History of the World (Salzburg, 1974), p. 5. 254 Leedham-Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories, II, p. 526. 255 Oakeshott, ‘Sir Walter Ralegh’s Library’, pp. 311-2. 256 Charles B. Schmitt, ‘Perennial Philosophy: From Agostino Steuco to Leibniz’, Journal of the History of Ideas 27:4 (1966), pp. 505-32; Walker, The Ancient Theology, particularly, in relation to Ralegh, pp. 30-2; Levine, ‘Sir Walter Ralegh and the Ancient Wisdom’, pp. 89-108; Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World, pp. 91-8.

library list suggests, Ralegh sought out commentaries on Genesis for this purpose. Ralegh was hugely

reliant on these commentaries, and his own commentary is often simply a translation of these

commentaries. Like Donne, Ralegh’s lack of Hebrew and Greek meant that he leant heavily on these

commentaries.257 Sixtus Senensis was also a source. Despite this, it is clear that Ralegh’s use of Pico in

this respect was limited: the Heptaplus is only cited in one instance. In a discussion of the spirit of God

moving over the waters, Ralegh placed particular emphasis on ‘moved’. It was essential for Ralegh, as

opposed simply being a ‘breath or winde’, to stress that the spirit of God ‘may indeede be truely called,

Principium motus, and with Mirandula vis causae efficentis, The force of the efficient cause’.258 This spirit

could not be ‘separate from the infinite active power of God, which then formed and distinguished, and

which now sustaineth and giveth continuance of the Vniuersall’. Although the citation to Pico was

brief, it is revealing. Ralegh had a providential view of history, and his own History was meant to

illuminate the workings of providence, placing him in a tradition of sacred historians. It also enhanced

his claims, as gifted reader of God’s workings in the world, to provide counsel to James I, with whom

he was distinctly out of favour.259

There was also another standalone use of Pico. In a discussion of ‘mans estate in his first Creation, and

of Gods rest’, Ralegh stated that in the beginning Man had a ‘free and vnconstrayned will, and on

whom he bestowed the liberall choice of all things’. Thus

Such was the liberalitie of God, and mans felicitie: whereas beasts, and all other creatures

reasonlesse brought with them into the world (saith Lucilius) and that euen when they first fell

from the bodies of their Dammes, the nature, which they could not change; and the supernall

Spirits or Angels were from the beginning, or soone after, of that condition, in which they re|

maine in perpetuall eternitie. But (as aforesaid) God gaue vnto man all kinde of seedes and

grafts of life (to wit) the vegetatiue life of Plants, the sensuall of Beasts, the rationall of Man,

and the intellectuall of Angels, wherof which soeuer he tooke pleasure to plant and cultiue, the

same should futurely grow in him, and bring forth fruit, agreeable to his owne choice and

plantation. This freedome of the firstman Adam, and our first Father, was aenigmatically

described by Asclepius Atheniensis (saith Mirandula) in the person and fable of Proteus, who was

said, as often as he pleased, to change his shape. To the same end were all those celebrated

Metamorphoses among the Pythagorians, and ancient Poets, wherein it was fayned, that men

were transformed into diuers shapes of beasts, thereby to shew the change of mens conditions,

from Reason to Brutalitie, from Vertue to Vice, from Meeknesse to Crueltie, and from Iustice

to Oppression.260

47

257 Racin, Sir Walter Ralegh as Historian, pp. 18-26; Williams, The Common Expositor, pp. 4-7.258 Walter Ralegh, The History of the World (London, 1617), I.1.1.6 (Part.Book.Chapter.Section), p. 7. The reference is to Heptaplus I.2, though it is a slight misquotation. See Pico della Mirandola, Opera omnia, p. 13, ‘vim causae agentis’. 259 Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World, especially p. 69, pp. 237-9260 Ralegh, History of the World, I.1.2.6, p. 32.

This is a very close paraphase of Pico’s famous Oratio,261 though Ralegh, perhaps deliberately, did not

explicitly cite the source, instead only attributing to Pico the reference to ‘Ascelpius Atheniensis’. Yet it is

important to qualify Ralegh’s use of Pico here. It did not function, as for some modern interpreters of

Pico, as a trumpeting of human freedom. Rather, it served as an explanation for the Fall: thus, ‘man

hauing a free will and liberall choyce, purchased by disobedience his owne death and mortalitie’.262 Its

use was therefore theological. It would be erroneous, therefore, to see Ralegh as a champion of human

freedom.

But Pico was used more importantly as a source of history. One crucial question for Ralegh, as with

many other commentators of the time, was how Moses, credited as the author of Genesis, came to

know about the events of Creation in the first place, much less be in the position to chronicle them.

(Donne raises this same problem in his Essayes in Divinity.)263 In Ralegh’s formulation:

How the certaine knowledge of the Creation came to Moses, seeing there was no Storie thereof

written, and if any such had beene, yet it is conceiued, that all memorie of Antiquite perished in

the Vniuersall Floud.264

Ralegh’s solution drew from Pico’s account of the Cabbala, but Ralegh adapted it to instead explain

how Moses came to know of Creation.

And it was thought by Esdras Origen, and Hilaerius, (as Mirandula conceiueth) that Moses did

not onely vpon the Mount receiue the Law from God, but withall, secretiorem & veram legis

enarrationem; a more secret and true explanation of the Law; which (saith he, out of the same

Authours,) hee deliuered by mouth to Iosuah, and Iosuah to the Elders: For to teach these

mysteries, which hee called secretiora, to the rude multitude, were no other quàm dare sanctum

canibus, & inter Porcos spargere Margaritas, then to giue holy things to Dogges, and to cast Pearles

before Swine.265

Bearing in mind that for Donne ‘Cabbala’ was a method of Biblical interpretation, it is here important

to note that Ralegh called this ‘more secret and true explanation of the Law’ in its first appearance the

‘Cabala of the Iewes’. Ralegh then defined the Cabbala in Pico’s terms: ‘Cabala in Hebrew is receptio in

Latine’.266 This was how Moses came to know about the events of Creation, claimed Ralegh, even if we

do not accept that

48

261 See Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, pp. 118-25.262 Ralegh, History of the World, I.1.2.7, p. 33. 263 Donne, Essayes in Divinity, pp. 13-4. 264 Ralegh, History of the World, I.I.5.6, p. 78. 265 Ibid. This is from the Apologia. See Pico della Mirandola, Opera ominia (Basel, 1557), p. 122. 266 Ralegh, History of the World, I.I.5.6, p. 79.

the storie of the Creation or beginning of all things was written by inspiration, the holy Ghost

guiding the hand of Moses.

It has to be noted that Ralegh’s explanation was not entirely coherent and he had a tendency to hedge

his bets and multiply explanations, as he then floated the possibility that the Book of Enoch,

traditionally ascribed to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, deriving ultimately from Adam himself

was passed down to Noah and eventually to Moses. Ralegh confused the matter further by stating

how they [the knowledge contained in the Book of Enoch] were deliuered to posteritie I know

not, whether by the Iewes Cabala, or by what other means.267

In the end, Ralegh concluded that there was no doubt the Moses could have known of Creation ‘be it

by letters, or by Cabala and Tradition’.268 Ralegh’s solution is puzzling, because he wished to use the

term ‘Cabala’ to denote both the direct revelation, the ‘more secret and true explanation of the Law’,

given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai and also a tradition passed down from Adam through Seth

through Noah and eventually to Moses. Ralegh’s aim was to prove, without doubt, by whatever means,

that Moses was undoubtedly the author of the account of creation in Genesis and that this knowledge

was the ‘vndoubted word of God’.269 We have here yet another understanding of the Cabbala: as

Jewish oral tradition.

Ralegh’s most significant use of Pico, however, was in justifying the prisca theologia, the idea that certain

pagan authors, along with their works and the pagan myths had an inkling of the divine revelation. Pace

Dmitri Levitin’s claim that the phrase prisca theologia is ‘almost entirely useless for the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries’, in the context of Ralegh’s beliefs it is perhaps still serviceable, though this is not a

comment on its later applicability.270 Thus Ralegh believed that

Hermes, who liued at once with, or soone after, Moses, Zoroaster, Musaeus, Orpheus, Linus,

Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Melissus, Pherecydes, Thales, Cleanthes, Pythagoras, Plato,

and many others ... found in the necessitie of inuincible reason, One eternal and infinite

Being.271

Ralegh claimed that ‘the wisest of the Heathen, whose authoritie is not to be despised, haue

acknowledged the world to have beene created by God’.272 Thus the writings of these pagans are of use,

49

267 Ralegh, History of the World, I.I.5.7, p. 80. 268 Ibid. 269 Ibid. 270 Levitin, ‘From Sacred History to the History of Religion’, p. 1137. 271 Ralegh, The History of the World, Preface, D3v. 272 Ibid, I.I.2.2, p. 2.

for ‘in old corruptions we may finde some signs of more ancient truth’, and like ‘a skilful and learned

Chymist’ one can draw ‘helpfull medicines out of poyson’.273 Ralegh placed great store by authors such

as Orpheus, Hermes and Zoroaster, who never ‘believed in ... fooleries’, unlike those pagans who

deified themselves, like Cham, Alexander and Nero.274 Ralegh used Pico to defend these prisci theologi.

As we have seen above, Pico is read alongside Steuco and Lactantius in this regard. Thus, in a discussion

of these wise ancient heathens, Ralegh championed Orpheus’ piety, who in Ralegh’s opinion

euery-where expressed the infinite and sole power of one God, though he vsed the name of

IUPITER, thereby to auoid the enuie and danger of the time.275

Thus in Ralegh’s opinion, Orpheus masked his secret inkling of the Christian truth through pagan

myth. Ralegh then used one of Pico’s theses to show that Orpheus’ hymns were not opposed to

Christian truth:

Nomina Deorum (saith MIRANDVLA) quos ORPHEVS canit, non decipientium daemonum, à

quibus malum & non bonum prouenit; sed naturalium virtutum diuinarumque sunt nomina; The

names of those Gods whom ORPHEVS doth sing, are not of deceiuing Deuils, from whom euill

comes, and not goodnesse; but they are the names of naturall and diuine vertues.276

It was in defence of Zoroaster, however, that Ralegh used Pico to the fullest extent. Zoroaster, and the

Oracles attributed to him, were promoted by Ficino and Pico as a source of wisdom. He had, however,

come under attack as a magician and necromancer, by scholars such Annius of Viterbo,277 as the

originator of devilish arts. He was conflated with Cham, the inventor of magic.278 Ralegh was therefore

keen to clarify who Zoroaster was. Citing Pico’s testimony in a letter about a book of Zoroaster (which

was entirely spurious) which Pico claimed to be written in the Chaldean (i.e. Aramaic) tongue, Ralegh

disassociated Zoroaster from Cham:

But by those bookes of one Zoroaster, found by Picus Mirandula, it appeareth plainely, that the

Author of them was a Chaldaean by Nation... it appeareth by his Bookes, which (saith Picus)

were written in the Chaldean tongue ... Now that the Magi and they were not differing, it may

be iudged by the name of those bookes of Zoroaster, which in an Epistle of Mirandula to

50

273 Ibid, I.I.6.1, p. 85. 274 Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World, p. 96. 275 Ralegh, The History of the World, I.1.6.7, p. 94. 276 Ibid. This is Pico’s Conclusiones 10>3, though Ralegh does not quote it in full. See Farmer, Pico’s 900 Theses, pp. 504-5. 277 Lauren Kassell, ‘“All was This Land Full Fill’d of Faerie,” or Magic and the Past in Early Modern England’, Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006), p. 113. 278 Ralegh, History of the World, I.2.2.1, p. 199.

Ficinus, he saith, to be intituled, Patris EZRE ZOROASTRIS, & MELCHIOR magorum

oracula.279

Ralegh then moved, in the next section, to a discussion of magic. Here, he was engaging in a debate

with James I’s Daemonologie (1597), which had condemned a wide range of magical arts as ancient

pagan pollutions.280 Ralegh, though himself accused of practising corrupted magic and holding

heterodox views,281 wished to defend the practice of some forms of magic as legitimate. He first

repeated Pico’s warning that magic was a much misunderstood art, which few understand and many

reprehend, comparing its detractors to ‘Dogs [that] barke at those they know not’.282 Ralegh agreed with

the King that necromancy was indeed deplorable. But legitimate magic, Ralegh claimed, was simply

‘the wisedome of Nature’, which is the ‘investigation of those vertues and hidden properties, which

God hath given to his Creatures, and how fitly to apply things that worke to things that suffer’.283 To

support his argument, Ralegh then quoted Pico extensively:

Mirandula in his Apologie goeth further: For by vnderstanding (saith he) the vttermost activitie of

naturall agents we are assisted to know the Diuinite of Christ: for otherwise (to vse his owne

wordes) ... The terms or limits of naturall power and vertue not vnderstood, we must needes doubt

whether those verie workes which Christ did many not bee done by natural l means: after which

goeth on in this sort ... Therefore I said not heretically, not superstitiously, but most truly and

Catholikely, that by such Magicke wee are furthered in knowing the Divinite of Christ.284

Ralegh thus rehearsed Pico’s defence, in the Apologia, of his condemned thesis, ‘There is no science that

assures us more of the divinity of Christ than magic and the Cabala’. In Ralegh’s view, therefore, magic

had an apologetic use, against ‘the Iewes and others the enemies of Christian religion [who] doe

impudently and impiously obiect’ to the divinity of Christ and his miracles, by showing that

the workes which Christ did, and which ... no man could doe ... were performed by that hand

which held Nature therin but as a Pencill, and by a power infinitely supreme and diuine.

51

279 Ibid, p. 200. See Karl H. Dannenfeldt, ‘The Pseudo-Zoroastrian Oracles in the Renaissance’, Studies in the Renaissance 4 (1957), pp. 7-30, with a translation of this letter, addressed to Ficino, on p. 15.280 Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World, p. 292. For more on the Daemonologie, see Stuart Clark, ‘King James’s Daemonologie: Witchcraft and Kingship’ in The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sydney Anglo (London, 1977), pp. 156-81. 281 Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World, pp. 291-2.282 Ralegh, History of the World, I.2.2.2, p. 201. The reference is to the Apologia. See Pico della Mirandola, Opera omnia (Basel, 1557), p. 167. 283 Ralegh, History of the World, I.2.2.2, p. 204. 284 Ibid, pp. 204-5.

Thus, those ‘that were faithelesse, were eyther conuerted or put to silence’.285 By using Pico’s

arguments, Ralegh cleverly rebutted James I’s condemnation by promoting the apologetic purposes of

magic, using Pico’s argument in the Apologia.

Ralegh’s engagement with Pico’s work was diverse: he mined Pico for many purposes. But Ralegh seems

to have read Pico in certain ways. This account of Ralegh’s engagement of Pico has sought to emphasise

how different Ralegh’s reading of Pico was from modern interpreters. Ralegh did not use the famous

Oration for championing the dignity of man; rather, for him, it accounted for Adam’s fall. He simply

saw the Cabbala as a Jewish oral tradition. One possible account is that Ralegh, like Donne, first went

to Pico for the biblical commentary of the Heptaplus, but as he read the rest of the Opera omnia,

discovered many other useful discussions, such as the history of the book of Genesis, of Zoroaster and

of magic. Pico was also read as a defender of the prisci theologi, and used for this purpose. The prisca

theologia was an important concept for Ralegh, and Pico was read by Ralegh as part of a tradition of

those who testify to its truth and importance.

52

285 Ibid, p. 205.

VI: Henry Reynolds’ Mythomystes (1632) and Pico

Very little is known about Henry Reynolds, translator of Torquato Tasso (Aminta Englisht, 1628), and

a poet in his own right. He was a courtier at some point and in 1608 he was secretary to the Lord

Chamberlain, the Lord of Suffolk, till the end of 1611 at least.286 He has been confused with the author

of a telegraphical tract, Macro-lexis (1629), but this has been shown to be the project of another

author.287 He is most well-known as the addressee of one of Michael Drayton’s poems, ‘To Henry

Reynolds, Of Poets and Poesie’ (1627), where Reynolds is cited as a critic of good judgement in poetry.

In it, Drayton alludes to their friendship and their long conversations on poetry. Another friend may

have been the traveller Thomas Coryate. His most significant work, Mythomystes (1632), the subject of

this chapter, was dedicated to Henry, Lord Maltravers, the eldest son of Thomas Howard, the earl of

Arundel.288 This might have linked Reynolds to a circle that included Inigo Jones, Henry Peacham and

John Selden. Reynolds has, astonishingly, been hailed by Northrop Frye as ‘the greatest critic before

Johnson’.289 Attention has also been drawn to Reynolds as a mythographer.290 Reynolds might seem a

an odd choice for discussion: while Donne, Field and Ralegh had the interests of biblical commentary

and theology somewhat in common, Reynolds does not share those interests. However, his interests

did overlap with Ralegh. Both of them seem concerned to defend a version of the prisca theologia and

both took up Pico’s definition of magic as natural wisdom. Furthermore, in the context of Pico’s

reception, his work is the most heavily reliant on Pico of the four authors discussed: he used Pico’s

views of concealment and of magic to inform his poetics and to set out a new direction for English

poetry.

Reynolds’ Mythomystes was self-consciously a work of poetics and criticism, in line with more famous

works such as Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (c. 1580), George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy

(1589), Thomas Campion’s Observations in the Art of English Poesy (1602), Samuel Daniel’s Defence of

Ryme (1603) and William Alexander’s Anacrisis. Or a Censure of some Poets Ancient and Modern. (c.

53

286 For attempts at finding out more biographical information, see Mary Hobbs, ‘Drayton’s ‘Most Dearest-Loved Friend Henery Reynolds Esq.’, The Review of English Studies 24:96 (1973), pp. 414-28; J. N. Douglas Bush, Two Poems by Henry Reynolds, Modern Language Notes 41:8 (1926), pp. 510–513; and George Thorn-Drury, ‘Reynolds, Henry (fl. 1628–1632)’, rev. Graham Parry, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23415, accessed 25 April 2013]. 287 William Poole, ‘Nuncius Inanimatus. Seventeenth-Century Telegraphy: The Schemes of Francis Godwin and Henry Reynolds’, The Seventeenth Century 21:1 (2006), p. 68.288 The most substantial study of Reynolds is now Anna-Maria Hartmann, ‘Reading the Ancient Fable: Early Modern English Mythographers 1590-1650’ (Unpublished PhD. Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2012), esp. chapter 3 ‘While the Winds Breathe, Adore Echo: Henry Reynolds and the Neo-Platonic Interpretation of Myth’, pp. 95-136. See also A. M. Cinquemani ‘Henry Reynolds' "Mythomystes" and the Continuity of Ancient Modes of Allegoresis in Seventeenth-Century England’, PMLA, 85:8 (1970), pp.  1041–1049; Arthur F. Kinney, ‘Note’ in Henry Reynolds, Mythomystes, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Menston, 1972), pp. i-ix; and Robert D. Denham, ‘Frye and Henry Reynolds’ in Essays on Northrop Frye -- The Educated Imagination (Emory, 2011), pp. 202-14 for an account of Frye’s intriguing reading of Reynolds. 289 Denham, ‘Frye and Henry Reynolds’, p. 202. 290 Hartmann, ‘Reading the Ancient Fable’.

1635). English literature in this period was in its fledgling state, with its rules very much in flux, and

there was a need for poets to grapple with classical and continental models. The break from Rome

during the Reformation emphasised England’s island position and the need to provide a defence of

vernacular, national poetry. Along with the strident claims of reconceptualised Renaissance occupations

like artists and indeed, magi, poets were attempting to claim unique status for themselves, often as

orator-poets, tracing descent from rhetorical, Ciceronian ideals. Reynolds shared many of these

concerns in Mythomystes.291 In fact, in the poem Drayton dedicates to Reynolds, ‘To Henry Reynolds,

Of Poets and Poesie’, Drayton cast both of them in the role of critics, relying on Reynolds’ memory for

discussions:

Spoke our own verses ‘twixt ourselves, if not

Other men’s lines which we by chance had got,

Or some stage pieces famous long before,

of which your happy memory had store!

Drayton’s poem then goes on to speak of (and deliver verdicts on) Chaucer, Gower, Spenser, Sidney,

Marlowe, Nashe, Shakespeare, Daniel, Jonson, Chapman, among others.292 Mythomystes took up this

critical impulse.

Fleshing out Reynolds’ poetic project will help set the scene for his encounter with Pico. Reynolds was

explicit that he was keen to redress the ‘violence offered to the excellent art of Poesye’ by those who ‘call

themselues Poets’.293 He castigated ‘common rimers in these our moderne times, and moderne

tongues’.294 Reminiscent of Drayton’s poem, Reynolds then offered verdicts on various poets, to

‘exempt some few’.295 He praised some poets in other tongues, then moved to English, delivering

verdicts on Chaucer, Sidney Daniel, Drayton himself and also Spenser: the last he wishes were ‘a little

freer of his fiction, and not so close riuetted to his Morall’.296 Daniel was too historical: Reynolds

wished his Civil Wars (1609) were somwhat more than a true Chronicle history in rime’.297 Reynolds

also belittled the obsession with ‘stile, phrase, and manner of expression’,298 perhaps ridiculing earlier

debates over the technicalities of versification.299 Modern poets were too satisfied ‘to be stiled by others

54

291 Gavin Alexander, ‘Introduction’ in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London, 2004), pp. xvii-lxxix; Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst, 1986). 292 Michael Drayton, ‘To Henry Reynolds, Of Poets and Poesy’ in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander, pp. 291-7.293 Henry Reynolds, Mythomystes (London, 1632) pp. 4-5. 294 Ibid, p. 5. 295 Ibid. 296 Ibid, p. 8. 297 Ibid, p. 9. 298 Ibid, p. 10. 299 Gavin Alexander, ‘Introduction’, pp. xlvii-lii. See also Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge, 1974), in particular chapters 11-15, pp. 165-227.

a good Latinist or Grecian’.300 Reynolds sharpened a critical impulse towards existing poetry with an eye

to reforming the poetry of his age.

Instead, Reynolds thought that poetry instead ought to possess a ‘higher sence’, something ‘diviner in

them infoulded & hid from the vulgar’.301 Poetry should force us to contemplate intellectual objects,

‘the excellency of the Beauty of Supernall and Intellectual thinges’.302 Pico was central to this discussion

of intellectual beauty: this was Reynolds’ first substantial use of Pico, and the work he turned to was the

Commento. For Reynolds, ‘Carnall or Vulgar’ beauty was inferior to the intellectual. Reynolds cited and

translated Pico’s discussion in the Commento:

Such, whose vnderstanding (being by Philosophicall studie refined and illuminated) knowes this

sensible Beauty to bee but the image of another more pure and excellent, leauing the loue of this,

desire to see the other; and perseuering in this eleuation of the minde, arriue at last to that celestiall

loue; which although it liues in the vnderstanding of the soule of euery man, yet they only .. make vse

of it, and they are but few, who separating themselues wholy from the care of the body, seeme thence

oftentimes extaticke, and as it were quite rauisht and exalted aboue the earth and all earthly

amusements.303

In this context, Pico’s explication of the Homer’s blindness and the fable of Tiresias, in his

Commento,304 was cited: the loss of one’s ‘corporall eyes’ meant an admirable turn to intellectual and

divine things away from the gross and the corporal.305 Pico was then celebrated by Reynolds as the

‘excellent Io: Picus (or rather Phaenix as wisemen haue named him)’306 and played a special role in

Reynolds’ theory of poetry. Thus Reynolds was entirely aware of Pico’s sterling reputation, and bought

into this view of Pico as a genius. More importantly, Pico’s account of intellectual and sensible beauty

was crucial to Reynolds’ conception of what poetry ought to do.

Reynolds then invoked the practice of the ancients, who are seen as having been both poets and

philosophers. Poets and philosophers were, for Reynolds, ideally ‘both professors of but one, and the

same learning’. In this regard, Pico was cited for testimonies that the ancients were much better than

55

300 Reynolds, Mythomystes, p. 12. 301 Ibid, p. 13. 302 Ibid, p. 17. 303 Ibid, p. 18. The reference is to Commento III.4. See Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Commentary on a Canzone of Benivieni, trans. Sears Jayne (New York, 1984), p. 129. 304 For more on the Commento see Michael J. B. Allen, ‘Pico as Platonic Exegete in the Commento and Heptaplus’ in Pico della Mirandola: New Essays, pp. 81–113 and Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. 305 Reynolds, Mythomystes, p. 18-9. The reference is to the Commento III.4. See Pico della Mirandola, Commentary, pp. 127-8. For an explication of this, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, p. 58. 306 Reynolds, Mythomystes, p. 21.

the moderns, as their poets were also philosophers.307 Citing Pico’s Apologia, Reynolds showed that

Zoroaster and Orpheus were poets and philosophers. Reynolds was rehearsing a version of the prisca

theologia. Pico had said

(speaking of the Poesies of Zoroaster and Orpheus) Orpheus apud Graecos fermè intiger;

Zoroaster apud eos mancus, apud Caldaeos absolutior legitur. Ambo (sayes he) priscae Sapientiae

patres & authores. Both of them fathers and authors of the auncient Wisdome.308

One crucial disparity between the ancients and the moderns lay in the ‘price and estimation they held

their knowledges in’. Unlike the moderns, the ancients ‘tooke to conceale them from the vnworthy

vulgar’.309 Pico was here essential for Reynolds’ contention that the ancients often hid secret knowledge

in their writings and that the moderns ought to follow them in this regard. Reynolds said, quoting

(though not citing) Pico’s Apologia in the Latin and then translating it, that Orpheus

within the foults and inuoluements of fables, hid the misteries of his doctrine; and dissembled

them vnder a poeticke maske so as who reades those hymnes of his, will not beleeue any thing

to bee included vnder them, but meere tales and trifles.310

Even Reynolds’ supposed knowledge of Plato, Aristotle and Iamblichus in relation to the art of

concealing truths was lifted directly from Pico’s Apologia.311 To take an example, Reynolds stated that

The diuine Plato writing to a friend of his de supremis substantiis - Per aenigmata (sayes he)

dicendum est: ne si epistola forte ad aliorum peruenerit manus, quae tibi scribimus, ab aliis

intelligantur - we must write in enigma's and riddles; lest if it come to other hands; what wee

write to thee, be vnderstood by others.

This was taken almost entirely from Pico’s Apologia (portions of which are also repeated in the Oratio,

but Reynolds seems to have read the Apologia, not the Oratio):312

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307 Ibid. See Richard Foster Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-Century England (New York, 1961).308 Reynolds, Mythomystes, p. 21. The quotation here is from Pico’s Apologia. See Pico della Mirandola, Opera omnia (Basel, 1557), p. 124. Reynolds does not translate this fully. ‘Orpheus exists among the Greeks in an almost complete form, Zoroaster in a more crippled form, but among the Chaldeans he is read more completely. Both are fathers and authors of ancient wisdom’.309 Reynolds, Mythomystes, p. 26. 310 Ibid, p. 30. 311 Hartmann, ‘Reading the Ancient Fable’, pp. 118-9. 312 Ibid, p. 119.

Plato Dionysio quaedam de supremis scribens substantiis, per aenigmata, inquit, dicendum est,

ne si epistula forte ad aliorum pervenerit manus, quae tibi scribemus ab aliis intelligantur.313

This concealment of wisdom, practised by the ancients, was passed down ‘among themselues by word

of mouth; and by successiue reception from them downe to after ages’. This is tied to what Reynolds

deemed to be Cabbala, ‘or the Science of reception: Cabala among the Hebrews signifying no other

than the Latine receptio’. For Reynolds, the Cabbala (and here we have yet another understanding of it)

was ‘That Art of mysticall writing by Numbers, wherein they couched vnder a fabulous attire’.

Reynolds’ discussion of the Cabbala was influenced heavily by Pico, as the quotations, both cited and

uncited, attest.314 Citing Pico, Reynolds justified the Cabbala by nothing that God

did nothing by chance, but through his wisdome disposed all things as in weight and measure,

so likewise in number.315

But it is not only the ancients who artfully conceal knowledge in the writings, but Moses himself did

so. Reynolds thus cited Pico’s Heptaplus:

the full and entire knowledge of all wisdome both diuine & humane, is included in the five

bookes of the Mosaicke law - dissimulata autem, & occultata (as the excellent Io: Picus in his

learned exposition vpon him sayes) in literis ipsis, quibus dictiones legis contextae sunt - But

hidden and disguized euen in the letters themselues that forme the precepts of the Law.316

Pico was then quoted again, from the Apologia, for the account (also used by Ralegh, above) that Moses

received, in Reynolds’ translation, ‘the more hidden also, and true explanation of the Law’ from God

on Mount Sinai. To Moses’ credit, he did not ‘commit to letters nor diulge’ this knowledge but limited

it to a few.317 Poetry among the moderns, in Reynolds’ vision, should conceal knowledge as the pagan

ancients and Moses did. Pico was an absolutely vital source for this discussion.

What ought to be concealed in poetry, therefore? Reynolds thought that attempts to conceal moral

doctrine in poetry -- as Spenser did -- were misguided, as such things should simply be in ‘plaine

prose’.318 Moral philosophy ‘needes no fiction to clothe or conceal it in. And therfore vtterly vnfit to

57

313 Pico della Mirandola, Opera omnia (Basel, 1557), p. 122. 314 Reynolds, Mythomystes, pp. 34-5. 315 Reynolds, Mythomystes, p. 34. This is a translation of the line from the Apologia which Reynolds first quotes: ‘nihil casu, sed omnia per suam sapientiam vt in pondere et mensura, ita in numero disposuit’. See Pico della Mirandola, Opera omnia (Basel, 1557), p. 174. 316 Reynolds, Mythomystes, p. 40. 317 Ibid, p. 41. 318 Ibid, p. 45.

bee the Subiect of Poems’.319 Rather, poetry must conceal the ‘hidden wayes & workings of our great

Gods handmaid, Nature’.320 Reynolds was therefore suggesting that modern poets ought to veil natural

philosophy in their poetry. In this, he drew on Pico’s discussion of natural magic in the Apologia as

‘exacta & absoluta cognitio omnium rerum naturalium - the exact and absolute knowledge of all naturall

things’.321 Reynolds read Pico to mean that Homer, Orpheus (in the Orphic hymns), David (in the

Psalms) and Zoroaster (presumably in the pseudo-Zoroastrian oracles) all concealed this ‘natural

wisdome’ in their works. Orpheus and Zoroaster were therefore, as Reynolds had contended, poets and

natural philosophers.322 For Orpheus, Reynolds cited one of Pico’s theses that

There is nothing of greater efficacy than the hymnes of Orpheus in naturall Magick, if the fitting

musick, intention of the minde and other circumstances, which are known to the wise, bee

considered and applied.323

Translating yet another thesis of Pico’s, the Orphic hymns were claimed to be

of no lesse power in naturall magick, or to the vnderstanding thereof, then the Psalmes of David

are in the Caball, or to vnderstand the Cabalistick Science by.324

Pico’s interpretation of the pseudo-Zoroastrian oracles was taken to show that one of the oracles was

about

the series or concatenation of the vniuersall Natures, from a no degree ... of matter, to him that

is aboue or beyond al degree graduately extended.325

Pico’s Conclusiones were used to demonstrate that Zoroaster, along with Orpheus, was ‘one of the

greatest ... of Naturall Magicians, or masters of the absolute knowledge of all Nature’.326 To compare

Reynolds’ and Ralegh’s uses of Pico: both use Pico’s definition of magic and defend a thesis of ancient

58

319 Ibid, p. 48. 320 Ibid, p. 50. 321 Ibid, p. 52. See Pico della Mirandola, Opera omnia (Basel, 1557), p. 170. 322 Reynolds, Mythomystes, pp. 52-4. 323 Ibid, p. 53. ‘Nihil efficacius hymnis Orphei in naturali magia, si debita musica, animi intentio, et caeterae circumstantiae quae norunt sapientes, fuerint adhibitae’. This is Conclusiones 10>2, see Farmer, Pico’s 900 Theses, pp. 504-5. 324 Reynolds, Mythomystes, p. 53. ‘Sicut hymni Dauid operi Cabalae mirabiliter deseruiunt, ita hymni Orphei operi uerae, licitae, et naturalis magiae’. This is Conclusiones 10>4, see Farmer, Pico’s 900 Theses, pp. 506-7. 325 Reynolds, Mythomystes, p. 54. ‘Quod dicunt interpretes chaldei super primum dictum Zoroastris, de scala a Tartaro ad primum ignem, nihil aliud significat quam seriem naturarum uniuersi a non gradu materiae ad eum qui est super omnem gradum graduate protensum’. This is Conclusiones 8>1, see Farmer, Pico’s 900 Theses, pp. 486-7. 326 Reynolds, Mythomystes, p. 54.

wisdom, citing Pico. But the former used it for a discussion of poetry and the latter for a defence of

Zoroaster in particular and the practice of magic. As odd as it seems, Reynolds was therefore seriously

contending that modern poets ought to, supposedly like the ancients, conceal truths of natural

philosophy in poetry: this was the new direction he envisioned for the poetry of his age, and it is little

wonder that Mythomystes never found a large audience or following. Reynolds’ engagement with Pico

was therefore one of influence and creative reading: Reynolds took Pico’s ideas of concealment and

natural magic seriously, but creatively reinterpreted them to lay out a new poetics. In particular, he laid

stress on the idea that poetry ought to conceal truths of natural philosophy.

This chapter is therefore in disagreement with Anna Maria-Hartmann’s recent interpretation of

Reynolds’ engagement with Pico, which remains the main and only interpretation -- therefore the rest

of this paragraph lays out the main points of disagreement derived from this chapter’s reading of

Reynolds. Firstly, it is doubtful whether reading Reynolds as a mythographer, as Hartmann does, is the

most productive approach. As Hartmann herself notes, the so-called English mythographers were not

trying to ‘use the genre the same way as their Italian counterparts did’. Rather ‘the English

mythographies were embedded in very specific, local contexts’.327 This seems to beg the question: why

even see them (Hartmann also discusses Abraham Fraunce, Francis Bacon and Alexander Ross) as

primarily mythographers then, or even label their works ‘mythographies’?

Hartmann then contends that ‘Reynolds’s tone changes’ in the later half of Mythomystes to a rejection of

the seeming wisdom of the ancients in favour of the supremacy of Christian revelation.328 Because of

this, Hartmann says that Reynolds ‘rejects some of the the most central tenets of Neo-Platonic poetics’.

But this ‘Neo-Platonic poetics’ has not been adequately defined. Hartmann seems to associate it with

Ficino and Pico in a compound now familiar to us, but as noted above, terms like ‘Neoplatonism’ are

problematic in relation to Pico’s reception. It remains to be proven, not assumed, that Reynolds saw

himself as engaging with this ‘Neo-Platonic poetics’. Furthermore, Pico’s views on poetry were never

fully explicated, as he never wrote his proposed Poetic Theology. Whether Pico thought the ancients

could possess truths of revealed theology is doubtful; natural theology is another matter, and this was

freely admitted by orthodox theologians. Hartmann’s opposition of ‘natural knowledge’ and ‘Christian

truth’ is therefore not helpful in this regard.329 Hartmann would have Reynolds turn against Pico at the

end, because Reynolds realises that the ancients ‘were not inspired by God’.330 But this would be to

assume that Pico privileged the wisdom of the (pagan) ancients over Christian revelation. Hartmann

also draws on S. A. Farmer’s distinction between Pico’s early works and later works, or ‘Pico’ and ‘Anti-

Pico’. For one, this distinction, which suggests a radical shift in Pico’s works, has not been accepted by

59

327 Hartmann, ‘Reading the Ancient Fable’, p. 177. 328 Ibid, pp. 109-12. 329 Ibid, pp. 113-4. 330 Ibid, p. 114.

most Pico scholars.331 But this account of Farmer’s point is misleading as it suggests that the supposed

shift in Pico’s later works (which Farmer proposes), like the Disputationes, meant that Pico thought that

‘there is no wisdom in the ancients at all, only superstition’.332 This is a misunderstanding of Farmer’s

point, and also Pico’s. The only ancients that Pico charged with superstition and idolatry in the

Disputationes were the Egyptians and the Chaldeans. The Greeks, like Orpheus and Plato, were not

targeted.333 The crucial point is that Pico never privileged the wisdom of the ancients over Christian

knowledge throughout his life. Hartmann’s interpretation of Pico is coloured by the view of Pico the

pagan propagated by Pater, as outlined above, and Edgar Wind, whom Hartmann cites.334 Hartmann is

keen to underscore Reynolds’ originality and downplay Pico’s influence: he is not simply ‘the ‘English

voice of Neo-Platonism’.335 Reynolds ‘perhaps knew only a few pages of the Italian’s works’.336 This

chapter has tried to show the opposite: that Pico was absolutely central to Reynolds’ new poetics. As

suggested above, there is no need to locate such a turn against Pico in Mythomystes in order to prove

Reynolds’s originality. The very conception of a poetry that conceals natural philosophy is original and

unusual, a strangely fitting poetics for the seventeenth century. In fact, Hartmann does not do enough

to highlight this achievement as Mythomystes is treated as a work of mythography rather than poetics.

Reynolds’ interaction with Pico was therefore important in two ways. From Pico he took the idea that

the ancients, unlike the moderns, venerated knowledge by concealing it from the vulgar in various ways.

Building on Pico’s discussion of natural magic, Reynolds linked the knowledge of natural philosophy to

poetry and the concealment of such knowledge in the poetry of the ancients, notably Orpheus and

Zoroaster. It should be noted that this is a creative reading of Pico, who did not see poetry in such a

light. For him, poetry concealed truths of theology and metaphysics. Indeed, Pico had intended to write

a work entitled Poetic Theology.337 Nonetheless, Pico is absolutely crucial to Reynolds’ vision, which

collapses without Pico as intellectual backbone. Indeed, Reynolds’ citations of Pico were the most wide-

ranging of the four authors studied here, referencing the Commento, the Apologia, the Heptaplus and the

Conclusiones.

60

331 See Grafton, ‘Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Trials and Triumphs of an Omnivore’, pp. 93–134.332 Hartmann, ‘Reading the Ancient Fable’, p. 115. 333 Ibid, p. 143. 334 Ibid, p. 6. 335 Ibid, p. 114. Hartmann here is reacting against the view of J. E. Spingarn, ‘Introduction’ in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Joel E. Spingarn (Oxford, 1908). p. xxi. 336 Hartmann, ‘Reading the Ancient Fable’, p. 120. 337 Pico della Mirandola, Commentary, p. 149.

VII: Conclusion

The central questions that have driven this dissertation are simply: why did English thinkers read Pico

and how? Key to this discussion has been the idea of ‘tradition’ and how these English authors

imagined the past and Pico. In T. S. Eliot’s landmark essay ‘Tradition and the Individual

Talent’ (1921), Eliot tells us that ‘the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of

the past, but of its presence’. Thus, the poet’s ‘significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his

relation to the dead poets and artists’.338 Much the same could be said of early modern intellectuals and

indeed, early modern England generally, which has been seen as developing greater historical

consciousness and a ‘historical culture’.339 Rather than presuming to presuppose how they imagined

Pico and his work as part of certain traditions and debates, this dissertation has held that in order to

truly excavate Pico’s ‘influence’ and ‘reception’ in early modern England, we must recreate these

traditions and debates as they saw them. It has thus been necessary to deal with questions of Pico’s

reputation and his place in history as imagined by early modern thinkers: as a biblical commentator, as

a Cabbalist, as a young genius and as pious Protestant hero. This discussion has been supplemented

with the consideration of the scholarly practices of early modern intellectuals. If an uncontroversial

definition of ‘intellectual history’ might be ‘the history of intellectual activity’, then intellectual history

cannot exist aside from the history of scholarship, reading and the book, at least in most literate

cultures. We do not encounter, and neither did early modern thinkers, the work and thought of past

thinkers without the mediation of scholarly practice. These practices, which can be physical or mental,

inevitably influence how they read and used these thinkers. For example, a Protestant theologian

encountering Pico for the first time through citations by Catholic adversaries was more likely to be led

towards Pico’s condemned theses and his defence of them in the Apologia, rather than say, his De ente et

uno. Consideration of these practices is necessary for the writing of intellectual history and certainly, the

history of the reception and afterlife of any thinker.

These contexts then informed the discussions of each author’s use of Pico. To briefly summarise, Field

engaged significantly with Pico’s theology. Donne engaged with Pico’s perceived method of biblical

exegesis and rejected it. Ralegh used Pico for purposes of biblical commentary, history, the defence of

Zoroaster and a discussion of magic. Pico was essential to Reynolds’ vision of a new poetics for his age,

due to Pico’s discussion of the concealment of wisdom and his definition of magic. This dissertation

cannot claim to be a comprehensive survey of Pico’s reception in early modern England. It will need to

be combined with Pico’s role in the debate over astrology and with a still unsynthesised picture of Pico’s

reception in the sixteenth century. Thus the conclusions offered here must be tentative. There is no

evidence that Pico was seen as a Hermetist. There is little evidence that Pico was being read as a

61

338 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in The Sacred Wood (London, 1921), pp. 44. 339 Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-1730 (Oxford, 2003); Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World.

Neoplatonic commentator, though this should not be precluded,340 especially for the later half of the

seventeenth century, as Pico’s Commento was translated as A Platonick Discourse by Thomas Stanley and

placed after his account of Plato in his History of Philosophy (1655).341 He was certainly being censured

as a Neoplatonist by Samuel Parker his A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie

(1666),342 as noted above. More work would need to be done on the reception of Platonism and anti-

Platonism in England in relation to Pico. More generally, the reception of criticisms of Pico, which

began as early as his nephew Gianfrancesco’s rejection of his project,343 would also enrich our picture of

Pico’s reception. But it also seems right to largely decouple Pico from Ficino, which might explain why

Ficino has had a more demonstrable (though not large) influence on the Cambridge Platonists,344 as

well as writers such as George Chapman.345 The unusual use made of Pico by Reynolds is testimony to

the diverse number of readings Pico could be subject to and is a reminder that Pico’s reception in this

period is very complex and not easily reducible. More generally, while these traditions reconstructed

existed, Pico was nonetheless adapted by each thinker for their own purposes.

The most significant rediscovery is Pico’s reputation as a proto-Protestant, which informed Field’s

engagement with him as a theologian. This theological reading of Pico is also attested to in Cambridge

book inventories and the marginal annotations made by William Branthwaite in his copy of Pico’s

Opera omnia in the library of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.346 This proto-Protestant Pico

has been shown to be widely received but also widely contested.347 The construction of this Pico was

made possible by his generally pious reputation, shaped in England by More’s translation of his Vita;

the writing of Protestant history, exemplified in Foxe’s insertion of him into the Acts and Monuments;

62

340 Colet, for example, cites Pico ‘the Platonist’. See Trapp, The Early Tudor Humanists and Their Books, p. 135.341 Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy (4 vols, London, 1655-62), II, pp. 94-118. 342 Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure, pp. 95-6, 104-6. 343 See Charles B. Schmitt, ‘Gianfrancesco Pico’s Attitude Toward his Uncle’ in L’opera e il pensiero di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola nella storia dell’umanesimo (2 vols, Florence, 1965), II, pp. 305-13. 344 See, for example, David Leech, ‘Ficinian Influence on Henry More’s Arguments for the Soul’s Immortality’ in Laus Platonici Philosophi: Marsilio Ficino and his Influence, ed. Stephen Clucas, Peter J. Forshaw, Valery Rees (Leiden, 2011), pp. 301-16; Alexander Jacob, ‘Henry More’s Psychodia Platonica and its Relationship to Marsilio Ficino’s Theologica Platonica’, Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985), pp. 503-22; Sarah Hutton, ‘Henry More, Ficino and Plotinus: The Continuity of Renaissance Platonism’ in Forme del neoplatonismo: Dall’eredita ficiniana ai platonici di Cambridge, ed. Luisa Simonutti (Florence, 2007), pp. 281-96; Craig A. Staudenbaur, ‘Galileo, Ficino and Henry More’s Psychathanasia’, Journal of the History of Ideas 29 (1968), pp. 565-78; Edward P. Mahoney, ‘Marsilio Ficino and Ralph Cudworth on the Hierarchy of Being’ in Forme del neoplatonismo: Dall’eredita ficiniana ai platonici di Cambridge, ed. Luisa Simonutti (Florence, 2007), pp. 321-33; Jean-Louis Breteau, ‘Ralph Cudworth’s Reading of Ficino’ in Forme del neoplatonismo: Dall’eredita ficiniana ai platonici di Cambridge, ed. Luisa Simonutti (Florence, 2007), pp. 45-72. 345 See, for example, Stephen Clucas, ‘‘To Ravish and Refine an Earthly Soule’: Ficino and the Poetry of George Chapman’ in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, ed. Michael J. B. Allen and Valery Rees (Leiden, 2002), pp. 419-42. 346 For more, see my first M. Phil. essay, ‘Readers of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century England’. 347 For more, see my second M. Phil. essay, ‘The Place of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in Early Modern English Historiography’.

the possible confusion between him and his nephew, Gianfranceso Pico; and lastly, as the study of Field

has shown, the fresh condemnations on Pico’s theses in the Conclusiones, inflicted by the Catholic

theologians of the Second Scholastic. Therefore, a particular English slant, due to the crucial role played

by More and Foxe, to Pico’s reception and afterlife has been uncovered; how this compares to his

continental afterlife requires more investigation. He was viewed as a biblical commentator, due to his

Heptaplus, and was cited in this regard. Pico was also known as a Cabbalist. But this should be

qualified. The authors studied did not engage with Pico’s Cabbalistic thought per se; rather, they used

his account of the Cabbala for their own purposes. Furthermore, as shown, the thinkers studied each

had their own, idiosyncratic, slightly different idea of what the term ‘Cabbala’ denoted and implied.

Donne saw it as a biblical hermeneutic, Ralegh as Jewish oral tradition, and Reynolds as ‘That Art of

mysticall writing by Numbers’.348 A study of the use of this term, and what early modern intellectuals

thought it meant, is perhaps in order.349 These reconstructed traditions, based on the actual use early

modern English thinkers made of Pico, will hopefully serve as starting points for a larger work on the

reception and afterlife of Pico and one hopes, other Renaissance intellectuals.

63

348 Reynolds, Mythomystes, p. 34.349 Regrettably, Schmidt-Biggeman’s account of the Cabbala for the seventeenth century is not yet available.

Appendix: List of Pico’s Condemned Propositions

1. Christ did not truly and in respect to his real presence descend into hell as Thomas [Aquinas]

and the common way [communis via] propose, but only in effect.

2. For a mortal sin of a finite time an infinite temporal penalty is not due, but only a finite

penalty.

3. Neither the cross of Christ, nor any image, should be adored with the adoration of veneration

[latria], even in the way that Thomas [Aquinas] proposes.

4. I do not agree with the common opinion of theologians saying that God can assume any nature,

but I concede this of the rational nature.

5. There is no science that assures us more of the divinity of Christ than magic and the Cabala.

6. If the common way is maintained concerning the possibility of assumption in respect of any

creature, I say that without the conversion of the bread into the body of Christ, or the

annihilation of the breadness, the body of Christ can exist on the altar in accordance with the

truth of the sacrament of the Eucharist.

7. It is more rational to believe that Origen is saved, than to believe he is damned.

8. Just as no one holds an opinion that something is so precisely because he wills to hold that

opinion, so no one believes that something is true precisely because he wills to believe that is

true.

9. Whoever says that an accident cannot exist unless it exists in something can uphold the

sacrament of the Eucharist, even maintaining that the substance of the bread does not remain as

the common way holds.

10. Those words: This is my body, etc., which are spoken in the consecration, are held in a material

and not indicative sense.

11. The miracles of Christ are the most certain argument of his divinity, not because of the things

he did, but because of the way he did them.

12. It is more improperly said that God is intellect or that which has intellect, than that rational

soul is an angel.

13. The soul understands nothing in act and distinctly except itself.350

64

350 This translation is extracted from Farmer, Pico’s 900 Theses, pp. 212-553.

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Unpublished Work

Richard Bauckham, ‘The Career and Thought of Dr. William Fulke (1537–1589)’ (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1973).

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N. J. S. Hardy, ‘The Ars Critica in Early Modern England’ (Unpublished D.Phil. Dissertation, University of Oxford, 2012).

Anna-Maria Hartmann, ‘Reading the Ancient Fable: Early Modern English Mythographers 1590-1650’ (Unpublished PhD. Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2012).

Dmitri Levitin, ‘Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1650-1700’ (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2011).

Daryl Lim, ‘The Place of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in Early Modern English Historiography’ (Unpublished M. Phil. Essay, University of Cambridge, 2013).

Daryl Lim, ‘Readers of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century England’ (Unpublished M. Phil. Essay, University of Cambridge, 2012).

Sheila J. Rabin, ‘Two Renaissance Views of Astrology: Pico and Kepler’ (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, City University of New York, 1987).

H. Darrel Rutkin, ‘Astrology, Natural Philosophy and the History of Science, 1250-1700: Studies Toward an Interpretation of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes Adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem’ (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Indiana, 2002).

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