Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola and his Islamic Sources

Abstract

This thesis examines the way in which Giovanni Pico della Mirandola read and was influenced by Islamic sources, philosophical and religious texts from the medieval Islamic tradition, many of them part of the Arabic-Latin translation movement. Pico’s strong allegiance to the Averroistic conception of the Intellect has been remarked upon by numerous Pico scholars such as Eugenio Garin, Bruno Nardi, and Louis Valcke among others. However, there has not been sustained examination of Pico and Islamic philosophy in its entirety, including other major figures known in the medieval and early modern West, such as Avicenna and Ibn Ṭufayl.

As a species of Renaissance encyclopedism, Pico’s project of 1486 and 1487 has long been notable for its commitment to gather an extraordinarily large collection of ideas and texts that were available, and to produce from these texts and their arguments a concord or synthesis. Islamic sources were a crucial part of the concordistic and encyclopedist motivations of Pico at this period of his life. Later in the 1490s, while focusing on a critique of the determinism of divinatory astrology, Pico’s attitude to Islamic thinkers such as Avicenna and Averroes changed, but at this point it was Ibn Ṭufayl who influenced Pico’s thinking on autodidacticism and human freedom.

Situated within the context of study of large-scale intellectual transmission from the Islamic world to the West in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, this thesis aims to deepen the understanding of the role of Islamic texts in Europe in the early modern period. Investigating the story of Pico’s reading, absorption, and eventual adoption of these Islamic sources occurring at the heart of the Italian Renaissance helps to provide a new image of the development of the Renaissance and the humanistic movements within it.