Today's work included reading Brian Copenhaver's piece on Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola from the Standford Philosophy Encyclopedia. This lead me to the detailed bibliography of Pico maintained by Michael Doherty, editor of the recent collection of essays on Pico that I had got out of the LSE library just before Christmas (and which featured an essay by Sheila Rabin on Pico and astrology). This bibliography also referenced a PhD thesis by someone called Darrel Rufkin specifically on Pico's Disputatione adversus astrologiam divinatricem - which is my own main interest in Pico as it is the work that Kepler discusses in De stella nova.
A quick search on Google finds me contact details for Darrel Rufkin and I had just sent him a query about where I might get a copy of his thesis when an email from Sheila Rabin arrives, a somewhat late reply to my last email to her back in November. This talked a bit about Latin translation, Lynn Thorndike and the recent performance of Philip Glass's opera on Kepler which she saw. And while I was composing a reply, an email from Darrel Rufkin arrived telling me how I could get a copy of his thesis from soemthing called Proquest. A quick preview suggests that this would be something very good to acquire and so I now have a 470 page pdf file of his dissertation. I am intending to study this in some detail, not least because it is the first PhD thesis that I have ever seen, but also because its expository structure about Pico's work is similar to my own PhD plans.
Finally, another email from Sheila Rabin who has guessed that the other Pico work I had mentioned in my reply to her was by Darrel Rufkin. Apparently he has a background in classics and has been commissioned to produce a full English translation of Pico's Disputatione.
I remain greatly impressed by how easy it is to email queries to academics and actually get a reply.
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