Like all great works of philosophy and literature from the past, the Oration on the Dignity of Man has a publication history that reflects the importance accorded to it by its readers over the course of time. When its themes are of greatest relevance, it appears more frequently in print. A glance at this record for the text from the 1400s to the present reveals two distinct periods of production, separated by three hundred years of “silence.” Between the appearance of the editio princeps in 1496 and Heinrich Petri’s 1572–73 reprint of Pico’s Opera, the Oration appeared ten times in the company of Pico’s other works and once alone. Between 1905 and the publication of the volume you now hold in your hands, it appeared roughly another fifty times, both in the original Latin and in translation into modern languages, including (from the greatest to the fewest in number) Italian, English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, French, Swedish, Danish, Hebrew, Romanian, Catalan, Finnish, Serbo-Croatian, Dutch, Japanese, and Chinese. Naturally, one may expect a work such as this to be rather widespread among the generations immediately following that of its author, but the reasons that lay behind this feverish “rediscovery” in the second half of the twentieth century are not as clear. Perhaps its newfound relevance since the second half of the twentieth century is a response to the violence of war, the philosophical exigencies of human rights and decolonialization, or a combination of these and other motives as well. Whatever the causes, it is undeniably true that there is something in the Oration that is pertinent, even necessary, to the thought of our times.

The various phases of the Oration’s original composition have been reconstructed by scholars who, though occasionally in disagreement, have succeeded in providing the historical and biographical contexts that influenced Pico’s decisions regarding which elements to include and which to modify or discard altogether.¹ Our purpose in these few pages, however, is to review what took place once the text first appeared in print. Unlike some of his other works, the entire Oration was never published during Pico’s lifetime.² Although parts of it were included in the Apologia, it was not until 1496, two years after his uncle’s early death, that Gianfrancesco Pico included it in the posthumous Opera printed in Bologna by Benedetto (di Ettore) Faelli.³ In that edition, Gianfrancesco wrote:

This oratio elegantissima (“most elegant oration”) still had not taken on the title by which we have come to know it.⁵ Pico, as far as we know, never gave it a precise name; it has been suggested that he originally intended to call it the Oratio ad laudes philosophiae (“Oration in Praise of Philosophy”),⁶ but the evidence for this is slight.

Not long after the Bolognese edition of 1496, though we cannot know precisely when,⁷ there appeared another publication of Pico’s Opera, which is no more than a reproduction of the editio princeps. Though it, too, bears the colophon of Faelli, scholars have identified it as a product of Jacobino Suigo and Nicolas Benedict, who had it printed in Lyon.⁸ The third instance of the Oration’s publication, this time in Venice, dates from 1498 and, with the exception of the order in which some of the works are presented, is essentially the same as the first two. Indeed, although some of the extant copies carry the Bernardino Vitali colophon, others are attributed directly to Faelli. The actual editor, it would seem, was not Vitali (who apparently employed the same character set nowhere else) but Antonio Moretus.⁹ The fourth publication of Pico’s Opera was put together by Jakob Wimpheling and Hieronymus Emser (two men who, curiously, had conflicting views on Lutheranism) and completed in 1504 by Johann Prüss’s press in Strasburg. It was in this version that the Oration (still called Oratio quædam elegantissima in its index) appeared for the first time with the subtitle de hominis dignitate (“on the Dignity of Man”).¹⁰ It is worth noting that such a title actually refers most precisely only to the first section of the work (§§1–50), while the remainder would in fact seem to be best described as an encomium of philosophy. Two years later, Pico’s Opera was printed yet again, and in this version, printed in Reggio Emilia by Ludovico Mazzali¹¹ five months after the press’s completion of Guarino Veronese’s Regulae grammaticales, the Oration resumed what had been until then its traditional title. In 1517, the Oration was included in the first compilation of the Opera to be printed outside of Italy: the Parisian version of Jean Petit.¹² The Oratio quædam elegantissima followed on the heels of the De ente et uno, just as it had done in all previous versions of Pico’s collected works. In 1519, the Opera was published again by the Venetian press of Guglielmo da Fontaneto,¹³ which in the same year also put out copies of La uita el transito et gli miraracoli [sic] del beatissimo Sancto Hieronymo doctore excellentissimo, the pseudo-Augustinian Soliloquia animae ad Deum, and Priscian’s Grammar with the glosses of Johannis de Aigre. These titles, and the fact that the pseudo-Cyprian Carmen de ligno crucis was presumably bound accidentally within Pico’s works, lead one to assume (correctly) that this was no great step forward in Pico studies.

The year 1530, however, marks an interesting moment for the Oration, inasmuch as it was printed for the first time independent of Pico’s Opera omnia, a decision taken much earlier for other works, such as the Apologia and the Epistles. The place was Basel, Switzerland, and the printer Heinrich Petri¹⁴ (direct ancestor of the owners of the modern Schwabe publishing house – the oldest still in existence). On the frontispiece of this edition, the Oration, which appears with Pico’s glosses on Psalm 15 and two other works, bears the impressive title Oratio de homine Ioannis Pici Mirandulae, ubi sublimiora et sacrae et humanae philosophiae mysteria explicantur (“Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on Man, in Which are Explained the Most Sublime Mysteries of Both Sacred and Human Philosophies”). Petri was also responsible for the following edition of the Oration, contained in Pico’s Opera of 1557,¹⁵ for which the publisher this time returned to the 1504 Strasburg edition for its title: Oratio de hominis dignitate. This appended phrase is one that has stuck with the work to the present day. Unfortunately, however, Petri took the text from Gianfrancesco’s 1496 editio princeps, which contained several typographical errors. Despite the fact that many of them were corrected in the errata corrige of Pico’s nephew, Petri’s editors seem not to have noticed. Given the great influence of the Petri editions over the centuries, this is an oversight that produced substantial defects in subsequent editions.¹⁶ Of particular interest to anyone concerned with publishing history is the intriguing tidbit that this is the first edition of the Opera to contain Johann Reuchlin’s De arte cabalistica (ad intelligenda loca quaedam Pici, magno usui futura lectori [“for the comprehension of those passages of Pico’s that will be of great use to the reader”]). One may well wonder what role Johannes Herold, the volumes’ erudite humanist editor, played in this choice. In addition to being responsible for the fourth edition of Petrarch’s collected works for Petri in 1554, Herold was a Swiss-German polyglot and editor with a taste for syncretism in his own right. His studies ranged from the Greco-Roman to the medieval, to Italian humanism, to Zoroaster and the Middle East.¹⁷ Essential to a full understanding of the dynamics here in play is the fact that the Basel humanists (such as Reuchlin, Lefèvre, and Beatus Rhenanus, to name but a few) were deeply concerned with Pico and the concept of human dignity. It is by no means a coincidence that Erasmus’s language often echoed that of these Basel scholars in their programme of Christian humanism.¹⁸ In Italy, during that same year of 1557, the Milanese editor Girolamo Scoto produced his own edition of Pico’s Opera in Venice.¹⁹ A musician and bookmaker generally concerned with the texts of Alexander of Aphrodisias (Aristotelian philosopher, fl. 198–211 ad) and Alessandro Achillini (1463–1512, professor of philosophy at the University of Bologna), Scoto seems to have enjoyed some success with this publication, insofar as the number of his tomes that remain extant is roughly the same as that of Petri. This is a fact that may, however, say more about the eagerness of the reading public of 1557 than about the quality of Scoto’s edition. On the frontispiece, the Oration is entitled Oratio quædam elegantissima de Hominis celsitudine & dignitate (“A Certain Most Elegant Oration on the Excellence and Dignity of Man”), which may suggest some partial influence exercised by (the success of?) the Petri edition. Scoto’s edition, despite its claim to present a complete corpus of Pico’s work, omits the Commento and the Esposizione. We owe the final two pre-modern editions of the Oration to the Petri publishing house as well. The first of these, published in Basel in 1572–73 by Heinrich Petri, describes the work in both its index and its document header with the title De hominis dignitate (“On the Dignity of Man”).²⁰ Worthy of note is the fact that the editors elected to put Pico’s works into the first volume and an incomplete collection of his nephew’s into the second.²¹ Like its 1557 predecessor, this edition also contains Reuchlin’s De arte cabalistica. The next and last early edition is that of 1601, published in Basel by Sebastian Henricopetri, the son of Petri who, upon being knighted in 1556 by Charles V, had assumed this new cognomen for his descendants.²²

While the Oration was never the most popular among the works selected for publication between the end of the 1400s and the 1900s (this honour belongs to Pico’s Epistles), its absence from the bibliographic record between 1601 and 1905 is a symptom of the waning interest in Pico’s writings as a whole rather than in this specific text. The 1700s produced nearly nothing of particular value in editions of Pico’s writings, and the century that followed, in which the publishers’ interest turned principally to Pico’s neglected works (such as his vernacular and Latin verses and some previously unpublished letters), overlooked the Oration altogether. The nineteenth century, however, would indeed prove invaluable for the initial appearance of what we would now call serious scholarship (e.g., Massetani, Di Giovanni, and even Oreglia), which in turn would set the stage for the veritable boom in editions in the twentieth. The first modern translation was published in 1905 in a volume of Pico’s selected works edited by Arthur Liebert, a member, like Cassirer, of the Neo-Kantian Marburger School.²³ Semprini’s Reference Semprini1936 study, entitled La filosofia di Pico della Mirandola, contained in its appendix the first Italian translation of the Oration, unaccompanied by the original text.²⁴ Herbert Werner Rüssel produced another translation of the work into German in 1940, prefaced it with a brief essay on humanistic theology, and included some of Thomas More’s translation of Gianfrancesco’s biography (also in German).²⁵ In that same year, Charles Glenn Wallis published his own translation, under the title The Very Elegant Speech on the Dignity of Man,²⁶ the first to appear in English and one in which the historical uncertainty of the title is visible. Indeed, in this initial edition, reproduced from typewritten copy, we read: “The first translation into this language of Oratio elegantissima de dignitate hominis.” Wallis, poet and translator of Latin, Greek, and French, had already prepared English versions of works by Baudelaire, Plato, Porphyry, Kepler, Copernicus, and Grosseteste before turning his hand to Pico. In 1941, Bruno Cicognani’s translation appeared,²⁷ followed a year later by that of Eugenio Garin,²⁸ whose text was used by Elizabeth Livermore Forbes in her translation of selected passages from the Oration in The Journal of the History of Ideas 3 (1942): 347–54. Forbes went on to publish a complete translation of the work in 1948 for the very widely circulated volume of Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall entitled The Renaissance Philosophy of Man.²⁹ Thus, in this short war-torn span of about twelve years (1936–48), the Oration – after having lain nearly untouched for three centuries – was translated three times into Italian, twice into English, and once into German. The third English translation, that of Robert Caponigri, appeared in 1956.³⁰ The Wallis-Forbes-Caponigri triad of English editions has been reprinted since then in various forms by various publishers without any substantial changes.³¹

The last fifty years have witnessed great advances in the publication of Pico’s short speech, most notably represented in the Italian editions of Tognon (1987) and Bausi (Pico 2003). Unfortunately, however, none of this progress has been reflected in any English translation until now. The present edition not only brings much of the scholarship of the last half-century into the Anglophone debate over this important work but also contributes substantially in its own right to the study and interpretation of the text.