Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the Renaissance philosopher, was born in Mirandola, near Modena. He was a younger son in a family of feudal lords who ruled the small territory of Mirandola and Concordia in northern Italy. He seems to have received at an early age his first humanistic training in Latin and, perhaps, in Greek. Being destined by his mother for a career in the church, he was named papal protonotary at the age of ten and began to study canon law at Bologna in 1477. Two years later he began the study of philosophy at the University of Ferrara, which he continued at the University of Padua from 1480 to 1482.

After a number of journeys that took him to Paris and repeatedly to Florence, Pico studied Hebrew and Arabic under the guidance of several Jewish teachers and in...