Palacký University in Olomouc has lately established a reputation as one of the most dynamic centers for the study of Renaissance philosophy in Europe, both through the publication of monographs and editions—usually in the Czech language—and the organization of international conferences like those devoted to Gemistus Pletho, Latin literature on alchemy, and now to Francesco Patrizi (1529–97) of Cherso. The proceedings of all of these conferences have been published and testify to the efforts of the editors in gathering a truly international group of specialists on each of these topics. This is particularly evident in the volume devoted to Patrizi, a thinker who is well known to scholars but whose multifaceted work has still not been explored in its entirety. Patrizi fully deserves the label of “philosopher of the Renaissance,” the tagline of the Olomouc conference and its proceedings. He wrote on love, beauty, poetry and poetics, history, politics, philology, geometry, and the art of war; he edited and translated ancient and modern texts; he bitterly attacked Aristotle and his followers, defending Presocratic philosophers and embracing Plato; he even held a short-lived chair of Platonic philosophy in Rome, a chair that represented a key moment in the history of Platonism in the midst of a renewed wave of hostility against the philosophy of the Academy.

These aspects of Patrizi’s life and works form the basis of the sixteen essays in the volume; the opening essay by Maria Muccillo has the additional merit of introducing readers to unpublished texts by Patrizi. Muccillo uses the problem of method as a fil rouge to investigate Patrizi’s Opera Omnia. Patrizi’s attention to the order of arguments is shown to be not only a powerful critical tool, as particularly displayed in the Discussiones Peripateticae, but even had repercussions on his philosophical ideas, as can be easily grasped from other works such as the Nova de Universis Philosophia. The following two essays, by Marie-Dominique Couzinet and Kateřina Šolcová, form a sort of diptych on Patrizi and history: Couzinet focuses on the meaning of the Dialoghi, highlighting the relationship between philosophy and history, and philosophy and the public sphere; Šolcová instead places the Dialoghi in comparison with Pontano. Luka Boršić introduces a somewhat related topic of Patrizi and the history of philosophy. This section concludes with an essay by Stefano Gulizia, who discusses Patrizi’s argumentative strategies in historiography by framing them in the wider context of sixteenth-century Venetian culture. Luc Deitz focuses on “marvelment” as a foundational element of Patrizi’s poetics, in contrast to the notion of mimesis from the then-triumphant Aristotelian poetics. The following essay, on Patrizi and women by Ivana Skuhala Karasman and Luka Boršić, works as a sort of entr’acte before a more theoretical block of essays that begins with an article by Paul Richard Blum on Patrizi’s psychology. Blum highlights the key role of the soul in Patrizi’s philosophy, also focusing on the difficulties the philosopher faced when discussing the topic. Erna Banić-Pajnić and Jacomien Prins offer further Neoplatonic perspectives, the first investigating Ficino’s and Patrizi’s views on love, the second Patrizi’s revision of the doctrine of the harmony of the heavens. Barbara Bartocci’s article discusses the personal and philosophical relationship between Patrizi and his contemporary Paolo Beni, while the essays by Matjaž Vesel and Jan Makovský focus on Patrizi and science and geometry. The three final essays, by Petr Pavlas, Tomáš Nejeschleba, and Jan Čížek, highlight particular moments of Patrizi’s reception in authors like Comenius, Alsted, and Jessenius.

Though a preface by the editors would have been welcome, this volume offers a number of solid contributions that will be of interest not only to scholars of Patrizi, but for anyone eager to know more about the intellectual history of the second half of the sixteenth century, a period of philosophical inquiry that is at times neglected or reduced to a handful of emblematic thinkers.