“Et questo bene et perfettamente parlare quanto all’homo sia possibile...”: filosofia naturale del linguaggio di Giovanni Battista Raimondi

As director of the Typographia Medicea, based in Rome (1584-1614), Giovanni Battista Raimondi (c. 1536-1614) developed his linguistic knowledge and projects in a period of expanding geographical and linguistic horizons, specifically in the Papal States, but also more broadly in Europe. In a series of manuscript notes, Raimondi evaluates and elucidates different languages’ qualities of excellence, especially those of Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian. Employing a pragmatic position in these notes, he thus inserts himself into the impassioned debates of his day about the first language, prior to the trauma of Babel. At the same time, one of these documents frames Raimondi’s praise of Persian within a philosophical reflection on the difference between human and animal language. It appears that the document’s contents may be traced to the Neoplatonic reflections taking place among leading figures in contemporary philosophy (such as Bernardino Telesio, Francesco Patrizi, Tommaso Campanella, Antonio Persio), with whom Raimondi had direct and indirect links, and whose critical and revisionsit views of Aristotelian authority were developing, according to naturalistic terms, a more nuanced connection between man and other animals.