Abstract

This dissertation examines magic and its relation to rhetoric in the writings of two Renaissance authors, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Ludovico Ariosto. ;Pico's work would seem to exemplify the rupture existing between magic and rhetoric in the Renaissance: in a famous letter written to Ermolao Barbaro in 1485, he developed a bitter critique of rhetoric, and in the following year he wrote his Conclusiones which contain a strenuous defence of magic. This dissertation, however, seeks to reveal the unifying elements existing between these two disciplines. ;The first chapter is devoted to a detailed rhetorical analysis of Pico's letter to Barbaro which shows that rhetoric, with its ability to lie and deceive, represents for Pico the very negation of the synthesis between signs and referents towards which he strives. ;In the second chapter I will argue that Pico attempted to find a tenable philosophical solution for the epistemological instability of language in cabalistic magic. I conclude, however, that Pico is not successful in escaping the problematic role that language assumes in the process of knowledge, and that his magic is fundamentally rhetorical in kind. ;In the third chapter of this dissertation I will show that in his comedy Il negromante, as well as in the character Atlante of the Orlando Furioso, Ariosto thematizes magic and rhetoric in order to affirm his own poetic authority. Both magic and rhetoric, however, prove ultimately impotent in Ariosto; this failure casts doubt on Ariosto's attempt to assert his own poetic power. In turn, Ariosto challenges the confidence of Humanists and Neoplatonists in the epistemological power of these two disciplines.