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The Platonic Academy of Florence*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Paul Oskar Kristeller
Paul Oskar Kristeller*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

Since the beginnings of its greatness, Florence was a town of merchants and of craftsmen where the arts, literature, and religious devotion were highly cultivated and where the vernacular tongue, probably after the French and Provençal model, was used as a literary language much earlier than in the rest of Italy, not only in lyrical poetry but also in all other branches of literature. The example of Dante alone is sufficient to show that the interest in philosophy and theology was very much alive in early Florence. Yet the university which was founded during the fourteenth century never occupied a predominant place in the intellectual life of the city, and hence the learned disciplines characteristic of the medieval universities were less strongly represented in Florence than in the old university centers.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance News , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1961 , pp. 147 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1961

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Footnotes

*

This paper was read before the Middle Atlantic Renaissance Conference in Philadelphia on October 29, 1960. A somewhat different version of it appeared in German in the series Agora (no. 12, Darmstadt, 1959, pp. 35-47). For more detailed data on the subject, see: A. Della Torre, Storia dell'Accademia Platonica di Firenze (Florence, 1902); G. Saitta, La filosofia di Marsilio Ficino (Messina, 1923, and later editions); P. O. Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (New York, 1943), and Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome, 1956); Supplementum Ficinianum, ed. P.O. Kristeller (2 vols., Florence, J937); R. Marcel, Marsile Ficin (Paris, 1958); A. Chastel, Marsile Ficin et l'Art (Geneva, 1954); M. Schiavone, Problemi filosofici in Marsilio Ficino (Milan, 1957); Marsilius Ficinus, Opera Omnia (Basel, 1576, and Turin, 1959).

References

1 Baron, H., The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (2 vols., Princeton, 1955); Garin, E., Der italienische Humanismus (Bern, 1947)Google Scholar.

2 Rinuccini, A., Lettere ed Orazioni, ed. Giustiniani, V. R. (Florence, 1953)Google Scholar.

3 Saffrey, H. D., ‘Notes platoniciennes de Marsile Ficin dans un manuscrit de Proclus’, Bibliothique d'Humanisme et Renaissance, XXI (1959), 161–184 Google Scholar.

4 I hope to deal with this translation in a forthcoming article. On Pletho, see Masai, F., Pléthon et leplatonisme de Mistra (Paris, 1956)Google Scholar.