It is always a welcome event when new texts of great importance are made available to the scientific community. This is the case with Gasparo Contarini’s De Immortalitate Animae (1517), recently edited by Paul Richard Blum with the help of the Center for Renaissance Texts at Palacký University in Olomouc (Czech Republic), headed by Tomáš Nejeschleba. Gasparo Contarini (1483–1542) was a Venetian nobleman who spent the first part of his career in Venice as magistrate and the second in the Catholic Church as cardinal. He is a key figure in the first half of the sixteenth century for many reasons. His political thought emerges from two works: the treatise De Magistratibus et Republica Venetorum, where he celebrated the constitution of Venice as the most virtuous political system of his age, and the three texts of De Potestate Pontificis, concerning the reform of the papal institution. He was also an experienced philosopher and his works De Elementis and Compendium Primae Philosophiae display a great command of and interest in the Aristotelian tradition. Finally, he offered some inspiring theological guidelines with his treatise De Officio Episcopi, as well as with his theological letters (on free will, predestination, and justification), where he debated he Reformed theology.

De Immortalitate Animae was Contarini’s first treatise, and it quickly became controversial. The previous year, his university professor, Pietro Pomponazzi, had asked him an opinion about his Tractatus de Immortalitate Animae (1516), in which he aimed to prove that the Aristotelian doctrine does not provide any ground for the defense of the immortality of the soul. Contarini answered in 1517 with a private text, arguing that it is actually possible to extrapolate arguments for the immortality of the soul from Aristotle’s texts: namely, the activity of will and intellect needs to be separate from matter, and consequently it represents the proof of an immaterial, eternal process of the human soul. Pomponazzi appreciated the clarity of his pupil’s answer and seriously took Contarini’s remarks into consideration, even though they were at odds with his fundamental assumptions: in 1518 Pomponazzi published an Apologia, adding Contarini’s De Immortalitate Animae as an appendix text, under the name of Treatise of the Contradictor. The respect and the attention of the master for his pupil’s remarks emerges from the fact that the response to Contarini takes up more than half of the Apologia, and Pomponazzi never turns to Contarini with his usual vehemence—as he does in the case of his responses to Ambrogio Fiandino and Agostino Nifo.

With this volume, Paul Richard Blum and his team provide us with a philologically accurate edition, a clear English translation, and a good commentary on the main philosophical sources of the text. Blum is one of the most accomplished researchers on Contarini and, more generally, on the Italian Renaissance tradition: as a matter of fact, he is the first (together with Enrico Peruzzi) to consider Contarini’s De Immortalitate Animae according to its own principles, and not as a mere contradictor of a greater master. This volume is recommendable for three reasons. First, the edition takes into consideration all the ancient witnesses of the text, from the manuscript codex to the printed editions (Bologna 1518, Venice 1525, and Paris 1571): a comparative list of variants is provided on every page of the volume. Second, Blum includes an introduction in which he portrays the circumstances of composition and the main features of the text. Finally, the commentary provides rich insights on the authorities employed by Contarini; the most interesting case is that of Avicenna, whose influence is well underscored by the editors (starting from the example of the flying man, 100–01).

This edition lets us hope for future developments in the research on the academic Aristotelianism of the sixteenth century, a branch of study that is still largely unexplored, even though it contains important avenues for groundbreaking inquiry.

Luca Burzelli, KU Leuven