Around the university quarter of 15th-century Paris, the advice they gave to students was “Never grow old in the arts”. Languages, history or philosophy might be fun to study, but you’d be better off ditching them and doing something you can get a job in.
If he ever heard the saying, the Italian scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola roundly ignored it, spending his life rooting out the secrets of old books and turning ancient wisdom into modern arguments as part of the great intellectual upheaval we call the Renaissance. A polymath and a polyglot, reading Greek and Latin alongside Hebrew and Arabic, Pico was irresistibly enchanted by the idea that speech and sounds held near-infinite power, if only they could be harnessed by one who possessed the knowledge to do so.
Edward Wilson-Lee’s The Grammar of Angels offers a propulsive new account of Renaissance controversies about language, knowledge and the occult. Tracing Pico’s career up to his explosive publication of 900 theses for debate in 1486, which saw his works banned, denounced from the pulpit and publicly burnt, Wilson-Lee shows the high stakes and intellectual daring of Renaissance scholarship.
Wilson-Lee is a superb writer who excels at bringing to life figures or stories often neglected in English-language popular history. The Grammar of Angels does struggle to balance the details of Pico’s life and work with the broader narrative of the period, and there are times when the reader wants the prose to slow from a gallop to a trot so we can take in a bit more of the scenery. Perhaps this is a risk of any book that tries to capture the power of language to seize and transport us, as if by magic.
The SDLP, Politics and Peace: The Mark Durkan Interviews by Graham Spencer – a sharp mind in full flow
The Grammar of Angels: Propulsive new account of Renaissance controversies about language, knowledge and the occult
In Judgement of Others by Eleanor Anstruther: An astonishingly chilly comedy of manners
Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth) by Markus Zusak: When the family pets are ‘complete b*stards’ but also ‘beautiful darlings’
Pico did not grow old in the arts: he did not grow old at all. He died in Florence in 1494, aged only 31, with a French army at the gates and the city in the grip of the radical preacher Girolamo Savonarola. Many of his writings were lost or destroyed, though what remains shows a daring thinker inspired not only by ancient Greece and Rome but by Persia, Egypt and Ethiopia. The Grammar of Angels gives us the measure of this thrilling and frustrating Renaissance man.
