Denis J.-J. Robichaud - Portrait

Denis J. J. Robichaud

Phyllis W. G. Gordan/National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
10 settembre 2018–26 luglio 2019
Professione
Assistant Professor, Program of Liberal Studies, University of Notre Dame
Titolo del progetto
Marsilio Ficino Editions Project
Descrizione del progetto

In 1484, the Florentine humanist and philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) published the first complete translation of Plato, but his Greek to Latin translations of Iamblichus’s (a Syrian who lived ca. 245–325 CE) De secta Pythagorica and Theon of Smyrna’s (fl. first century CE) Mathematica remain unprinted. They were thought lost before P. O. Kristeller identified their manuscripts, have not been studied extensively, and many recent studies still ignore their existence. I have been editing these texts during the past three summers and will print them for the first time with the Ficinus Novus series of Nino Aragno Editore (Turin). My editions will include a book-length study of four topics: (1) Greek to Latin translations of philosophy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; (2) the development of Ficino’s translations; (3) their place in Ficino’s oeuvre and the history of philosophy; and (4) a study of the fortune of these works in the Renaissance, especially in scholarly, artistic, and religious communities in Florence and Rome. Ficino’s translations of these texts are the first reintroduction of the largest ancient corpus of Pythagoreanism in the Renaissance.