This is an interesting book for specialists in the field of Renaissance Platonism and literature: by means of very extensive and sophisticated close readings Steffen Schneider examines the literary and philosophical intertwinings and uses of participation. And indeed, metexis is no doubt a key concept in the Platonic tradition. Mediating between the noetic world of forms and the material world, it functions in Neoplatonic philosophy as a means to explain the attainment of knowledge. In Schneider’s words, participation has the scope to evoke in the audiences “the presence of the transcendent in the immanent” in order to create enthusiastic participation and thereby engender conversion; such texts are, therefore, to be regarded as performative and the book under review investigates the topic on its cosmological level (22–24).

Kosmos, Seele, Text analyzes literary strategies and philosophical concepts of participation in the works of three individuals, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), the most eminent Hellenist of the fifth century; Pierre Ronsard (1524–85), probably the most important French poet of his day; and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), theorist of the infinite universe. Even though Schneider only briefly addresses the reasons for his choice of authors, it is arguably an interesting one, for he points to various forms of enthusiastic participation, which become formative structures of the texts. For instance, as a result of a persuasive close reading of the enigmatic Spaccio della bestia trionfante, Schneider concludes that Bruno aimed at the psychic transformation of the individual by the rational use of the human affects (383–90).

Schneider also duly emphasizes that in the case of Ficino this interdependence of philosophy and literature has hardly ever been examined. Yet one may add that Plato was not only a very important philosopher, but also an enormously gifted writer and that, therefore, the specific modes in which a message was being conveyed are of traditional importance in the Platonic tradition, as Martha Nussbaum has shown. Schneider argues that participation is a mode of literary production that has to be regarded as an alternative to Aristotle’s concept of mimesis. This is a very interesting idea that no doubt should have been further elaborated on, at least by historicizing the concepts of metexis and mimesis in order to clarify their relationship. This reviewer for instance is not quite convinced of which ways enthusiasm is supposed to be “a-mimetic” (74). At this point one has to remark that Kosmos, Seele, Text has the tendency to present its arguments rather independently of much relevant scholarly literature: for instance, the very brief exposition of the role of magic in Ficino would have benefited from at least consulting Brian Copenhaver’s seminal texts on the topic. Generally one feels somehow uneasy that — apart from the general introductions to the scholarship that precedes each section of the book — Schneider during his extensive close readings of often very famous passages in Ficino or Bruno does not acknowledge the sometimes vast extant scholarly literature that exists on these very passages (the notable exceptions being some of the pages on Bruno).

The three authors under consideration are also presented as rather isolated from each other, so that the book has the tendency to fall neatly into three different treatises, and this in spite of discussion of the relationships among Ficino, Ronsard, and Bruno. On the other hand, the book under review sometimes tends to lose sight of its topic: this is the case, for instance, in the Bruno section where for about fifty pages we do not read much about participation. The long quotations in Italian and French are given only in the original language, which makes it more difficult for the nonspecialist to follow the sometimes very interesting arguments. Again a more extended summary as well as an index at the end of the book would have been immensely helpful. Still, one may also perceive these characteristics of Kosmos, Seele, Text to be the minor compared with the close readings of and serious engagement with a set of highly sophisticated (and one may add, beautiful) texts.