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Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Conclusiones Nongentae Disputandae (1486).
The Conclusiones were first published by Eucharius Silber in Rome on 7 December, 1486. The 24-year-old Pico planned to publicly "defend" his theses in Rome, in January 1487, before a commission of cardinals and theologians appointed by Pope Innocent VIII. However, thirteen of the 900 theses were judged heretical by Catholic theologians and the public defense was called off by the Pope and never took place. The VHL will provide a forum for the understanding of this legendary episode of the Renaissance, symbolically representing one of the most profound transformations in Western thinking, at a time when another fundamental transition, from manuscript to print culture, was taking place. More specifically, the VHL aims at forging the tools for a collaborative, hypertextual edition of the Conclusiones Nongentae or 900 Theses. This text reflects Pico’s syncretistic method of taking the best elements from other philosophies and combining them in his own thought. By linking and connecting in short, synthetic lexia or aphorisms, profoundly diverse traditions and ideas with his own elaborations, Pico’s Theses exemplify a truly hypertextual system of thought, ante litteram.
The 900 Theses present specific and unique challenges for digital representation and visualization: namely, how to best represent Pico’s “correlative system of thought,” along with and beyond its multilinear textual concretization. Our goal is to perfect (through the VHL Editing House) a collaboratively annotated text that will both illustrate and “mirror” Pico's dialectical method, in its structural elements: e.g., dynamic links to (and between) sources and secondary materials (texts, images), including ancient characters and fonts, diagrams, indexes and maps, etc. This will allow a richly interactive fruition of the text and its alternative or multiple interpretations, in the VHL Seminar Room. As a first stage we are developing an interface or "environment" that can expedite the collaborative process of annotation, parallel commentaries and translation among the team members -- a system that could easily perpetuate itself, also to encompass external contributions from various scholarly communities online (philosophers, historians, art historians).
Team members and collaborators:
- Francesco Borghesi, Assistant Professor of Italian, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
- Pier Cesare Bori, Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Bologna
- Paul Caton, Research Analyst, Scholarly Technology Group, Brown University
- Saverio Marchignoli, Researcher in Moral Philosophy, University of Bologna
- Giorgio Melloni, Assistant Professor of Italian, SUNY, New Paltz
- Michael Papio, Assistant Professor of French and Italian, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
- Ernesto Priani, Profesor titular, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
- Massimo Riva, Professor of Italian Studies and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University