Cornelis Johannes SCHILT
Abstract. In 1614, eminent scholar Isaac Casaubon refuted the antiquity and authenticity of the Corpus Hermeticum and by consequence its author, Hermes Trismegistus. From that moment on, the Hermetic writings with their supposedly pre-Christian revelations would only be studied by a handful of people on the fringe–or so the story goes. In truth, there is very little to back up either the Casaubon demolition-thesis, first promoted by Frances Yates, or the arguments provided by historians to explain the continued interest in Hermes’s writings and the associated ancient wisdom tradition. This paper exposes the shaky foundations of both the demolition thesis and the continuation arguments and shows how our modern appreciation of choice scholarship can hamper our evaluation of the past. As a promising methodology to circumvent our modern biases, the data-driven digital humanities approach promoted by the ERC-StG project VERITRACE is introduced, the early results of which can be witnessed in subsequent papers included in this special issue. Here, several hundred thousand early modern volumes are mined for traces of four corpora: the Corpus Hermeticum, the Chaldean Oracles, the Sibylline Oracles, and the Orphic Hymns, and for its discussion of the prisca sapientia discourse they exemplify.
Keywords: Hermes Trismegistus, prisca sapientia, Isaac Casaubon, Ralph Cudworth, Frances Yates, digital humanities, Church Fathers, Isaac Newton