«Secundum Avenroem». Pico della Mirandola, Elia del Medigo e la “seconda rivelazione” di Averroè

Perhaps there has never been such intense interest in Arabic philosophy and science as there was in the Renaissance. Averroes’s works are a conspicuous example of this phenomenon, given how they were subjected to a second massive wave of translations from Hebrew into Latin between 1488 and 1562 after the first wave of Arabic-into-Latin translations in the 13th century. This volume demonstrates that Giovanni Pico della Mirandola – mythical icon of the Renaissance and father of the discovery of the Kabbalah – was also the indisputable pioneer and sponsor of the translation of a vast body of unknown philosophical works by Averroes (as well as other Islamic and Jewish philosophers). The meticulous analysis of the “Averroistic” manuscripts owned and annotated by Pico has led me to investigate the sources of Renaissance Averroism, within which the Jewish-Cretan philosopher and translator Elijah del Medigo (c. 1455-c. 1493) turns out to be one of the protagonists. The original works and the new translations made by Del Medigo, at the request of Pico, constitute in fact the birth certificate of that “second revelation” of Averroes, which would culminate in the publication of the monumental Giuntine edition (1550-52, 1562) of the Latin Aristotle and Averroes. There are three main novelties in this volume. The first is a new edition with commentary of several unpublished or badly edited texts composed by Del Medigo for Pico between 1485 and 1486, just before the publication of Pico’s 900 Theses. This edition is the result of a thorough analysis of the important manuscript Paris, BnF, lat. 6508, also from a paleographic point of view (Part I, chap. 1; Part II). The second is the commentary of the 41 Theses according to the opinion of Averroes, in order to demonstrate that almost all Pico’s theses secundum Avenroem (a) were based on materials provided by Del Medigo, or (b) were influenced by Del Medigo’s interpretation of Averroes (Part I, chap. 3). And finally, this volume offers a new general assessment of the work of that small number of sixteenth-century Jewish translators who continued the second wave of translations of Averroes’s works from Hebrew into Latin, with particular attention to the figures of Jacob Mantino and Abraham de Balmes (Part I, chap. 2). From the picture outlined here, it emerges with a certain clarity that Del Medigo’s contribution to Averroes’s “second revelation” was much more significant than is recognized today: several of his translations were in fact revised or merely embellished by other translators, who published these works as their own. The present research seeks to show the fundamental impulse that Del Medigo’s translations and original works, sponsored by Pico, provided to the Renaissance rediscovery of Averroes through the medieval Hebrew translations. As the motto goes: unicuique suum.