La scienza nuova. Ermetismo e magia rinascimentale, 3 ed. riv. e ampl.

The new forms of feeling, the new anthropological culture that was created and developed by the events of European Humanism and Renaissance flowed almost immediately into most fields of scientific knowledge, creating a new sensibility that, beyond the traditional patterns of the past, laid the foundations for the complex tracks of modern science. The several scientific discoveries that marked the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not "immediate" events arising "ex nihilo", but were rooted in a peculiar cultural backdrop combining the old and the new, tradition and breach, conservation and progress. The recent historiography has shown how modern science, in its most visible aspects and phenomena (scientific and experimental methodology, conceptual abstraction, mathematization) did not arise from nothing but, like any other change, was the result of the complex and laborious evolution of ideas and experiences that encapsulated persistence and innovation. The paper discusses these issues, on the basis of texts and sources by some of the most important exponents of Hermetism and scientific thought of the Renaissance (Corpus Hermeticum, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Leonardo da Vinci, Agrippa of Nettesheim, Copernicus, Bruno, Campanella, Francis Bacon). The result is an interesting framework that shows the fundamental contribution given by the hermetic and magical thought to the new conception of man, nature, universe and to their new knowledge.