An Introduction to the Symbolic Literature of the Renaissance

This book is an introduction to the literature of symbolism which flourished during and immediately after the Renaissance in Europe. Contemporary theorists were able to distinguish about eighty different types of this symbolic literature and in some of these genres thousands of different titles were published especially during the first two centuries or so after the invention of printing. The purpose of this book is to review these numerous expressions and examine why it was that these books were so popular with Renaissance readers, what was their common theme and what was the significance of the differences between the genres?

The answers to these questions show that this literature was the culmination of many threads of classical, medieval and Renaissance thought: the Realism of the neoPlatonists, the mysticism of the kabbalists and the alchemists, the secrecy of magic and hermetism, the literary disciplines of the classical art of rhetoric, the allegorical stories from the Greek myths and classical writers and the moralizing aphorisms from collections of fables and proverbs and from the writings of the Christian fathers.

The importance of the symbol in western thought was first fully articulated by Plato with his theory of Forms and Plato's ideas were in turn adopted by Christian theologians as a key element in their search for clues to the nature of God. Over the centuries, the symbol took on a central role in the whole span of contemporary spiritual and moral belief and this role was illustrated in the Renaissance books of symbolism by every imaginable motif from the myths, classical literature, the scriptures, nature and everyday life. As such, they are an extraordinary resource for investigating the culture, ideas and intellectual life of the time and of the previous two thousand years of western history. The mysticism and symbolism embodied in this literature provide a metaphysical vocabulary of unequalled depth and variety and also a focus on contemporary theories of aesthetics and semantics.