Pico della Mirandola

In his book "The Light in Troy," literary scholar Thomas Greene points to a 1513 letter written by poet Pietro Bembo to Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mirandola.

We meet a cast of characters, each with the ringing verisimilitude of well-researched, real historical personages from the heretical Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola to the statesman Lorenzo de' Medici and various clergy, peasants, nuns and friars of feuding orders.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola came from aristocratic stock: the Pico dynasty ruled Mirandola, a tiny northern Italian principality, from a fortified castle that still bears the family name.

“Do you think that I have the same memory as Pico della Mirandola’s?” the former Italian President Giorgio Napolitano huffed in exasperation in a Palermo appeals court late last year, when he was being grilled over events from two decades before.

The 15th Century also had mystics such as Margery Kempe and pioneering humanist philosophers such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.