In this volume Jean-Marc Mandosio supplies an exemplary first installment of an edition and translation, with extended introduction and commentary, of one of Renaissance intellectual history's most elusive and intriguing works. Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples' De magia naturali (early 1490s) was only ever published in manuscript. After 1500 Lefèvre emphatically rejected natural magic – not because it was false, but because it was powerful, and therefore might mislead weak minds. Nevertheless, among certain cognoscenti of sixteenth-century Europe, Lefèvre was one of the great authorities on Renaissance learned magic. In his own lifetime Pedro Ciruelo, the reformer of Spanish universities, reprinted Lefèvre's textbooks in Iberia, and in his own works described Lefèvre as a teacher of magical influence after the likes of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The reputation was presumably enough for Andreas Dudith, the Hungarian humanist, to have the work copied for his own library – after which it appears to have ceased circulation.

Until the early twentieth century, this reputation was mostly a rumour, even though Lefèvre's influential early mathematical works did refer to magic on occasion and faint echoes can be traced through his important commentaries on the Psalms. In 1916 the great French historian Augustin Renaudet noted a manuscript of De magia naturali from Dudith's library. In the century since, the work has earned passing attention from several scholars of Lefèvre's milieu, who have tended to follow Lynn Thorndike's assumption that the MS represented Lefèvre's roving juvenilia, abandoned after the 1494 Paris condemnation of magic warned him into safer intellectual waters, which explained why the book was never published.

Mandosio's edition corrects these and many other small misinformations by attending closely to the four surviving manuscripts, which exemplify a certain kind of manuscript publication. Mandosio shows how these four manuscripts in fact reflect two main phases of production. These two phases reveal Lefèvre's sustained engagement with the work, which was circulated but never intended for print; Lefèvre's natural magic was far more than a mere passing fancy. The first book – the one Mandosio presents in this volume – was written within a few years of December 1489, when Ficino's De vita libri III was published. Mandosio demonstrates this in his generous introduction and 112 pages of commentary, noting how Lefèvre framed natural magic in terms set by Ficino's bestselling work and by the relevant sections of Pico's 900 Conclusiones (1486) and Apologia (1489). Pico is echoed in the very definition of magic as the practical application of the contemplative knowledge that Chaldean mages and Greek philosophers taught in the mists of antiquity. Book I of Ficino's De vita appears to inform Lefèvre's architectonic idea that the magician operates on the generative union of heaven and earth, stars and body.

Yet Mandosio goes on to show that Lefèvre does not simply repeat Ficino and Pico. They supply the frame, while the substance is an erudite reworking of the ancient and medieval corpus of natural magic and astronomy. From Pliny Lefèvre seems to have borrowed the Empedoclean language of love and hate as the principles of order and hidden attraction operating in the world. In particular, Mandosio remarks on the use of the pseudo-Albertan De mirabilibus mundi. One allusive section of Mandosio's introduction reflects upon the combinatory work done by the tables and lists throughout Book 1.

Thus the text of De magia naturali reveals an extremely sophisticated engagement with its sources. Moreover, the attention to schematic forms of thinking in these manuscripts is a valuable example of Lefèvre's broader intellectual interests. Lefèvre has been associated with innovative use of mise-en-page and visual thinking in his printed textbooks — these manuscripts confirm the suspicion that these interests went deep. Jean-Marc Mandosio's edition is valuable in many ways. This edition at last makes available a significant and intriguing object. It shines new light on a major figure of Renaissance humanism. It is also an elegant, generous example of how to edit and analyse a manuscript, thereby setting a case for the history of manuscript and print publication that should interest all readers of this journal.

在这本书中，让-马克·曼多西奥（Jean-Marc Mandosio）提供了文艺复兴时期思想史上最难以捉摸和最引人入胜的作品之一的版本和翻译的模范第一部分，并附有扩展介绍和评论。Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples' De magia naturali（1490 年代初期）仅以手稿形式出版过。1500 年后，Lefèvre 坚决拒绝自然魔法——不是因为它是错误的，而是因为它很强大，因此可能会误导弱者。尽管如此，在 16 世纪欧洲的某些行家中，勒菲弗是文艺复兴时期魔法学的伟大权威之一。西班牙大学改革者佩德罗·西鲁埃洛 (Pedro Ciruelo) 在他自己的一生中在伊比利亚重印了勒菲弗尔的教科书，并在他自己的作品中将勒菲弗尔描述为追随乔瓦尼·皮科·德拉·米兰多拉 (Giovanni Pico della Mirandola) 等人的魔法影响力的老师。匈牙利人文主义者安德烈亚斯·杜迪斯 (Andreas Dudith) 的名声大概足以让他为自己的图书馆复制该作品——之后它似乎已停止流通。

直到 20 世纪初，这种名声主要是谣言，尽管勒菲弗尔有影响力的早期数学著作有时确实提到了魔法，并且可以从他对圣歌的重要评论中找到微弱的回声。1916 年，伟大的法国历史学家奥古斯丁·雷诺德 (Augustin Renaudet) 在杜迪斯 ( Dudith) 的图书馆中注意到了一份自然魔法手稿。在此后的一个世纪里，这项工作赢得了勒菲弗环境的几位学者的关注，他们倾向于遵循林恩桑代克的假设，即 MS 代表了勒菲弗的流动少年，在 1494 年巴黎对魔法的谴责警告他进入更安全的知识水域后被抛弃，这解释了为什么这本书从未出版。

Mandosio 的版本通过密切关注四份幸存的手稿来纠正这些和许多其他小错误信息，这些手稿是某种手稿出版的例证。曼多西奥展示了这四份手稿实际上如何反映了制作的两个主要阶段。这两个阶段揭示了 Lefèvre 对作品的持续参与，该作品曾流传但从未打算印刷；Lefèvre 的自然魔法远不止是一时的幻想。第一本书——曼多西奥在本卷中展示的那本书——写于 1489 年 12 月的几年内，当时 Ficino 的《天书三世》出版。Mandosio 在他慷慨的介绍和 112 页的评论中证明了这一点，并指出 Lefèvre 如何用 Ficino' 设定的术语来构建自然魔法900 结论(1486) 和道歉(1489)。Pico 与魔法的定义相呼应，魔法是迦勒底法师和希腊哲学家在古代迷雾中教授的沉思知识的实际应用。Ficino 的De vita 的第一本书似乎传达了 Lefèvre 的建筑理念，即魔术师在天地、星辰和身体的生成结合中运作。

然而，曼多西奥继续表明，勒菲弗尔并没有简单地重复 Ficino 和 Pico。它们提供了框架，而实质是对古代和中世纪自然魔法和天文学语料库的博学改造。从 Pliny Lefèvre 那里，似乎借用了爱与恨的 Empedoclean 语言作为世界上运作的秩序和隐藏吸引力的原则。特别是，Mandosio言论对使用伪阿尔伯塔省的德mirabilibus蒙迪。Mandosio 引言的一个暗示部分反映了第一册中的表格和列表所做的组合工作。

因此，De magia naturali的文本揭示了对其来源的极其复杂的参与。此外，在这些手稿中对图式思维形式的关注是 Lefèvre 更广泛的知识兴趣的一个宝贵例子。Lefèvre 与mise-en-page 的创新使用有关以及他印刷教科书中的视觉思维——这些手稿证实了这些兴趣深入的怀疑。让-马克·曼多西奥 (Jean-Marc Mandosio) 的版本在许多方面都很有价值。这个版本终于提供了一个重要而有趣的对象。它为文艺复兴时期人文主义的一位重要人物带来了新的亮点。这也是如何编辑和分析手稿的优雅、慷慨的例子，从而为手稿和印刷出版的历史设定了一个案例，该案例应该引起本期刊所有读者的兴趣。