WIND, E.,
Heidnische Mysterien in der Renaissance. Mit einem Nachwort von B. Buschendorf. Übersetzt von Chr. Münstermann unter Mitarbeit von B. Buschendorf und G. Heinrichs.
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1981. 483p. Original cloth. Paste-down endpaper with small lightly damaged spot. Small name stamp to free endpaper. ‘The pagan mysteries’ mentioned in the title are not the mystery cults, but truths transmitted under a mythological or imaged form borrowed from ancient religions. The relation between these truths and their figured or veiled representation is the common theme of the fourteen chapters (…) centered either on the interpretation of a major work, or on the different forms under which a moral or philosophical idea was represented, or on the diverse uses of a given mythological motif. The basic intention of the author is to find thus in the art of ‘poetic theology’ what the Neoplatonists and certain other scholars of the Renaissance believed was revealed in the religions of antiquity (…). Little by little, the book becomes a true analysis of a certain form of thought proper to the Renaissance whose abstract tools had been furnished above all by Nicolas de Cusa (…), although ancient and modern Neoplatonism have contributed in no small way to their clarification.’ (ROBERT KLEIN on the english original ‘Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance’, in Renaissance News, 1960, pp.237-40).
€ 37.50
(Antiquarian)