Volume 51, Number 3 · February 26, 2004
In No Man's Land
By Anthony Grafton
Judaism and Enlightenment
by Adam Sutcliffe
Cambridge University Press, 314 pp., $60.00
The Languages of Paradise: Aryans and Semites, a Match made in Heaven
by Maurice Olender, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer
Other Press, 213 pp., $22.00 (paper)
The fifteenth-century Italian philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola loved nothing more than buying books—the costlier and the more outlandish the better. He built up a splendid library in the palace at Mirandola, decorated with a fresco by Cosimo Tura that depicted the Persian sage Zoroaster and the Egyptian Hermes, as well as the Greek and Roman philosophers. And he firmly believed that his collecting was a philosophical enterprise. Since every major thinker offered readers a unique and valid slice of a vast, universal set of truths, each book represented one colorful tile in a magnificent, divinely ordained mosaic.
Review, 4712 words
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