The Premodern Colloquium. Winged Horses, Celestial Asses, and Beauty through the Eyes

I discuss the reception of Plato’s Phaedrus in the late Italian Renaissance, and in particular the Phaedrean sequencing of three of Giordano Bruno’s Italian dialogues, The Exile of the Triumphant Beast, The Cabala of Pegasus, and The Heroic Frenzies. I am specifically concerned with how Bruno investigates the topic of rebirth as a reply to his immediate source, Ficino, who made much of Plotinus’ refusal to allow of human transmigration into animal forms. The movement of these three texts, beginning with the exile of the astrological beasts from their heavenly stations, and ending with the exaltation of the ass and its installation in the celestial world as a winged Pegasus, follows the trajectory of the myth in Plato’s text but also wanders in and out of the labyrinths of memory, of selfhood, of heavenly circuitry, and into a final and horrific silencing. Already, in the press toward the vernacular and the translation into what is regional, as well as in Bruno’s very sojourn in England—in these ways the writing of the dialogues resembles the transmigration of the human soul and its rebirth in ever new forms.