Marsilio Ficino: Three Books on Life

Marsilio Ficino's Three Books on Life, in the critical edition and translation by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark published by the Renaissance Society of America in 1989, presents Ficino's own De vita libri tres, the fifteenth century Florentine philosopher's treatise combining medical advice, astrology and what Ficino called natural magic, alongside scholarly commentary situating the text within Renaissance astrological practice. Its strength is that it pairs a primary Renaissance source with the critical apparatus, textual notes and historical commentary, that lets a reader check Ficino's own claims against their context rather than taking a modern paraphrase on faith. Its limit is that Ficino's astrological magic was itself controversial in his own time, defended by him partly as natural philosophy rather than sorcery, so a claim about how it was received needs the wider Renaissance debate over Ficino's project, not the text alone.