Abstract

This is a one-volume edition of the original two-volume work published in 1990 with a second edition in 1991. The work falls into two main parts. Volume 1 is devoted to a series of studies describing the revival and dissemination of Plato in the Italian Renaissance. There are four main parts to the first volume. The first part treats the revival of Platonic studies in early fifteenth-century Florence. Here the figure of Leonardo Bruni looms large. Part 2 deals with the revival of Platonic studies in Milan. The translations of the Republic by Uberto Decembrio and later by his son Pier Candido Decembrio receive most of the attention. Part 3 deals with mid fifteenth-century developments of Platonic studies in Rome. Here Hankins provides chapters on George of Trebizond, Pletho, Cardinal Bessarion, and a fascinating account of the dispute between Trebizond and Bessarion. Finally, volume 1 ends with an extensive discussion of the Platonism of Marsilio Ficino. Volume 2 consists of various appendices dealing with specific topics, texts by a variety of Renaissance authors dealing with the interpretation of Plato’s writings, and an exhaustive “Census of Manuscripts” designed “to document the diffusion and influence of Renaissance translations of Plato”. Of course, a review of this size can hardly begin to do justice to the breadth and richness of Hankins’s research. Instead, I shall try to point out the general trajectory of his account of the development of Platonism in the fifteenth century. Of course, Hankins’s project is not a philosophical one, as he admits. Indeed, his goal is to place the transmission of Plato within a well-constructed historical context. However, I shall suggest at the end of this review some ways in which Hankins’s study should provoke philosophers to a more careful consideration of the arguments of Renaissance Platonists.