Workshop

14 June 2022

Photo: BnF/UHH

We would like to invite you to a workshop on "Beyond Doubt: Prophetic Language and Esoteric Knowledge in Renaissance Kabbalah." It will take place on 14 and 15 June 2022.

Date
June 14–15, 2022

Convenors
Flavia Buzzetta (Universität Hamburg) and Fabrizio Lelli (Università del Salento, Lecce/Universität Hamburg)

Abstract
At the end of the fifteenth century, a horrified preacher from Santa Maria Novella claimed that Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino had been trying to achieve mystical union with God, perform miracles, and prophesise using magic and Kabbalah. His fears were directed towards unknown and sulphurous forms of knowledge that were part of an ancient divine wisdom and manifestations of a unique and universal truth. Did they constitute stages along a path leading to a knowledge that was certain and free from doubt for the humanists of the time? Of what does this “knowledge beyond doubt” mainly consist?

This workshop aims to answer these questions by examining this knowledge in Jewish and Christian thought in the early modern period. This is set against the backdrop of the importance accorded by various Renaissance thinkers to “esoteric” Kabbalistic and prophetic wisdom, which, by activating the highest human cognitive faculties, can penetrate the divine mysteries and grasp the most hidden aspects of the Truth and its unquestionable and incontrovertible manifestations. Particular attention will be paid to prophecy and Kabbalah as “esoteric knowledges” capable of interpreting the most hidden, mysterious, and occult dimension of nature and the Godhead.

Participants