RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research program

Critical and electronic edition of Marsilio Ficino's complete works

University Co-ordinator

Università degli Studi di CASSINO - FILOLOGIA E STORIA - CASSINO(FR)

Research Unit Leader

Sebastiano GENTILE

Description

The work of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) represents a turning point in the history of Italian and European thought, in the transition from mediaeval to modern philosophy. His integral translation and his commentaries of Plato's and Plotinus' writings, as well as his numerous other versions of neoplatonic writings (Proclus, Iamblichus, Synesius, ps. Dionysius Areopagita) and of Corpus Hermeticum's treatises, revealed to Latin culture many texts of Greek philosophical thought that had been known only fragmentarily and episodically during the Middle Ages. At the same time the study of Ficino's works and in general of Ficino's culture reveals his many debts toward mediaeval philosophical culture. These debts have also been borne out again and again by studies devoted to the sources of his thought as well as to the books belonging to his library that have then been so far identified (among others: Boethius, Avicenna, saint Thomas and the versions of Proclus made by William of Moerbeke ).
The impressive corpus of translations, commentaries and original works, that Ficino wrote during his lifetime, restored to the Latin West the fundamental texts of Greek thought and made possible the great philosophical blossoming which took place in Europe from the XVIth century onwards. Thanks to Ficino's activity the West has recovered that Platonic tradition which is at the very beginning of its speculation and which in the mediaeval period remained almost completely unknown, apart from some very significant, although isolated, instances (as in the case of the study of the Timaeus in the XIIth century).
The versions of Iamblichus's De mysteriis Egyptiorum and of Corpus Hermeticum I-XIV deserve special attention because they brought back to the Latin West the Egyptian myths of "prisca theologia" and "pia philosophia", which in the early modern period was often regarded as the common root of classical and Christian culture. These myths were the ground from which many influential theories arose, either philological or more philosophical and theological in purpose. These theories deeply affected not only the culture of his time. Ficino's translation of the Corpus Hermeticum gave new life to medieval Hermetism, which was founded on the Asclepius, a treatise that Ficino long studied and transcribed in MS Riccardianus 709.
Only a small percentage of the seemingly boundless number of Ficino's works has been published in modern and critical editions. Among the works still unpublished are the De voluptate, the De Christiana religione, the Praedicationes, the Commentarium in Epistolas D. Pauli, the De sole et lumine, the Commentaria in Dyonisium Areopagitam, other commentaries on Plato of extraordinary importance (particularly the In Parmenidem and the In Timaeum), the enormous commentary and Latin version of Plotinus (running to 1500 pages) and the translations of neoplatonic authors, some of them with commentaries. Even today Ficino's original works are only available in the two-volume edition printed in Basel in 1576, from which these works are generally cited. But the Basel edition is full of mistakes and marred by the many arbitrary corrections made by XVIth century editors. Although this edition is complete - the few opuscula which remained unpublished are now available in P.O. Kristellers's Supplementum Ficinianum (1937) - its inaccuracy demonstrates the necessity of a reliable edition of Ficino's original works. There is no doubt, for example, that the edition of Ficino's Epistolae (in 12 books), which has been initiated by the co-ordinator of this project, is of extreme relevance for the study of Platonism's fortune in Italy and in Europe during the second half of the XVth century. Ficino's translations are currently available only in the incunabular editions printed during the author's lifetime or in XVIth or in XVIIth century.
To address these lacunae, which make the study of Ficino very difficult, we intend to publish his original Latin and vernacular works, and his translations from Greek. Our work will be completed in different stages, starting with the correction of the modern published texts. The first stage will be to obtain the scanned texts (already completed for the most part) of those works published in the XXth century. These digitalized texts will be carefully reviewed in order to improve their punctuation and to correct their printing errors by checking them against extant manuscripts. Regarding Ficino's unpublished works, we have already completed a "recensio" of the manuscripts and printed editions, and we have started collecting cd-roms, microfilms and photographs of useful exemplaria. In the transcription of texts we have used "editiones principes", usually published with the author's oversight and therefore notably more correct than the early modern editions. Through the collation of manuscripts we will establish critical texts, divided into paragraphs and with modern punctuation; these texts will be published and employed in different ways.
The first step towards a complete edition will be a CD-ROM containing all of Ficino's works, including commentaries and translations. This CD-ROM will make possible various kinds of hypertextual research, a methodology particularly useful for working with such a wide corpus of both published and unpublished texts. In addition to its obvious philosophical relevance, the possibility of studying these texts will encourage research on linguistic and grammatical matters in fields such as late mediaeval and humanistic Latin which still lack reliable analytical tools. The texts assembled for this CD-ROM will make possible the creation of data-bases of various sorts and typologies.
This CD-ROM will form part of a series entitled "Classici del pensiero europeo. Textual data banks on CD-ROM" (Nino Aragno Editore) in which the Opera omnia of Giordano Bruno and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola have been already published.
The second stage will be realized in tandem with the cd-rom, consisting of published traditional editions, based on all MS witnesses, with a philological introduction, critical apparatuses of variant readings and sources, and indexes.