Le periple intellectuel de Jean Pie de la Mirandole, suivi du Discours de la dignite de l'homme et du traite L'etre et l'un.

Louis Valcke and Roland Galibois. Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l'Universite Laval, 1994. xxiii + 353 pp. n.p. ISBN: 2-7637-7397-4.

This interesting volume presents two studies dealing with the thought of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. In the first, Louis Valcke advances a developmental account of Pico's intellectual context, without omitting detailed analysis of the Oratio de dignitate hominis and of the De ente et uno. In the second, Roland Galibois offers annotated French translations of these two works. The volume as a whole is the first of two planned works. The proposed second volume will deal with the "ramifications laterales" which are only touched upon in passing here, such as the influence on Pico of Paduan "Averroism" (xxii-xxiii), as well as the place of magic in Pico's thought (101), inter alia.

In the first study, Valcke offers three contextualizing chapters (3-73), a consideration of the Oratio (75-121), a description of Pico's "conversion" after papal reprimand in the late 1480s (123-40), and an account of Pico's last years, along with an analysis of the De ente et uno (141- 66).

The examination of the Oratio is the centerpiece. Here Valcke argues that the Oratio was somewhat of an exception in Pico's corpus, having had only limited popularity until comparatively recent times. Intended as a prefatory speech to Pico's ill-fated, hypothetical disputatio at Rome, it differs in character and, especially, rhetorical style, from his other, more scholastic works. Valcke also suggests that the Oratio is neither a philosophically grounded paean to human liberty, nor a serious statement (like Ficino's, say) of human ontological centrality, but rather that the language Pico uses in describing human dignity (and even human ontological mobility) is metaphoric, descriptive, and non-systematic. Humans are free, that is, to discover the multi-faceted and powerful forces in the universe, but not to change them (97).

In addition, although Pico was sympathetic to some aspects of Plotinus's thought in the Oratio, he began here to differ from the Neoplatonist par excellence, since Plotinus, in rejecting gnostic dualism, did not consider the sensible world to be essentially bad, whereas Pico increasingly did with the passage of the years. For Pico the world is positus in maligno, and as Valcke points out, this phraseology is repeated in the later De ente et uno (103-05). This represents the author's central thesis: that Pico in later years would reject a Ficinian/Plotinian view of the world, to such a point that in his (essentially peripatetic) concordisme he would, in the De ente et uno, represent Plato as basically agreeing with Aristotle that One and Being were convertible (154-55).

If there were one small cavil concerning this first study, it would be that the somewhat dated scholarly apparatus leads occasionally to a lack of precision. Thus reference is made to res platonicae without recourse to the work of Hankins, to Pletho without Woodhouse or Masai, to George of Trebizond without Monfasani, to Ficino without Allen, to the beginnings of the Florentine Platonic revival without Field, and to ontological hierarchies without Mahoney, to name only a few instances. These omissions do not vitiate the work entirely, but to mention one case where things might have been given a bit more akribeia, the canonical version of the founding of the Platonic academy is accepted without question here (10-11), even though Hankins has recently shown that that version is far from certain.

In the second study the fluid translations of Galibois are accompanied by notes based on those of Eugenio Garin (181). There are also a number of interesting appendices. One such (227-28) brings into relief certain similarities of language between Pico's Oratio and Pliny the Elder's Historia Naturalis, XXX. Galibois's own introductions to the two works are well worth reading, since they focus more on issues of translation and language.

CHRISTOPHER S. CELENZA Michigan State University