Reading list
The working bibliography
This is the working bibliography for Phase A, published as an ongoing reading guide. It grows as the reading proceeds.
Primary sources
- Fabio Paolini, Hebdomades, sive septem de septenario libris (Venice, 1589). The editio princeps, with a focus on Book IV (de humano corpore) and Book VI (de natura rerum). Available on Internet Archive. No modern critical edition exists.
- Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life / De vita libri tres, edited and translated by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989). The Neoplatonic backbone of the tradition that Paolini inherits and transforms.
- Girolamo Mercuriale, De arte gymnastica, critical edition by Concetta Pennuto, English translation by Vivian Nutton (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2008). The Italian medical manual of the body as subject at the time Paolini is writing.
- Girolamo Fracastoro, De sympathia et antipathia rerum; De contagione. Modern edition by Concetta Pennuto (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2008). The Venetian source closest to Paolini on the sympathies between things.
- Jean Fernel, Universa medicina (Paris, 1567), with selected passages on physiology and occult qualities. Modern edition of the Physiologia by John M. Forrester and John Henry (American Philosophical Society, 2003).
Anchor secondary works
- D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958), chapters 1 and 2 on Ficino and 6 on Paolini. Still the canonical reading of Paolini in English.
- Brian Copenhaver, Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015). The most comprehensive recent study of the natural-philosophical tradition in which Paolini writes.
- Hiro Hirai, Medical Humanism and Natural Philosophy: Renaissance Debates on Matter, Life and the Soul (Leiden: Brill, 2011). The most methodologically relevant recent study for the meeting of medicine, natural philosophy, and Platonism in the late Renaissance.
- Grantley McDonald, “Music, Magic, and Humanism in Late Sixteenth-Century Venice: Fabio Paolini and the Heritage of Ficino, Vicentino, and Zarlino”, Journal of the Alamire Foundation 4 (2012), 222-248. The only modern study devoted specifically to a part of the Hebdomades.
- Rudolph Allers, “Microcosmus: From Anaximandros to Paracelsus”, Traditio 2 (1944), 319-407. The classical reference for the microcosm-macrocosm tradition within which Paolini writes.
Context and neighbouring works
- Christopher S. Celenza, The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Background on Italian humanism and its Neoplatonic inflections.
- Concetta Pennuto, Simpatia, fantasia e contagio. Il pensiero medico e il pensiero filosofico di Girolamo Fracastoro (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 2008). A methodological model for reading medicine and philosophy together in the Italian sixteenth century.
- Paul F. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540-1605 (Princeton University Press, 1977). The confessional context of the Venetian press at the moment Paolini writes.
- George P. Conger, Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms in the History of Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 1922). The longer historical context for the microcosm-macrocosm motif.