ABSTRACT

The death of Paul Oskar Kristeller has deprived the world of Renaissance scholarship of one of its dominant figures, a scholar whose erudition, originality and generosity had become academic legends decades before the end of his long and productive life. Educated in Heidelberg and Berlin, Kristeller studied with Martin Heidegger and Werner Jaeger before Nazi racial laws forced him to leave Germany for Italy. An encounter with another brilliant young Weimar scholar, Hans Baron, inspired Kristeller to study Renaissance Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino. In Italy, where he found generous support from Giovanni Gentile during the 1930s, he dedicated himself to two forms of scholarship. After Italy passed its own racist laws, Kristeller emigrated to the United States, where he obtained a post in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. The generosity and devotion to community of scholars that led Kristeller to devote so much of his time and learning to producing reference works remained characteristic of him throughout his life.