TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS MAXIMILIAN, CAESAR AUGUSTUS, GIOVANNI FRANCESCO PICO WISHES HAPPINESS.

Marginalia includes references to scriptural passages: Isaiah 11, Psalm 7, Psalm 10, Psalm 45, Psalm 35. Also mentions Petrarch, Laurentius Valla, and Angelo Poliziano.

You gave me the occasion, most clement Caesar, to resume those studies in which I once delighted, now in leisure, as it were returning to them by a kind of right of postliminy A legal term for the right of one who had been a captive to return to their former state and rights., having previously sent them a message of dismissal, distracted as I was by the business of arms and the more serious leisure of literature. When I was with you in Germany, you showed me Crosses, Nails, Lances, and many other things, delineated by some heavenly rain upon bodies, and those things which had been signified to you in this matter by letter. When I departed from the Germans to return to Italy, you were marked by such ease—many things which would not only bolster the faith of a matter so common, but would strike a much greater wonder, and would move almost all of Germany to celestial prodigies for the sake of religion.

It happened that I decided to commit a matter so celebrated, and so worthy of the memory of posterity, to the monuments of literature, and especially to heroic verses. I feared nothing of those calumnies which "philosophiastors" Pretenders to philosophy. might cast, ignorant that the highest subjects of literature from primeval antiquity were accustomed to be celebrated in meter, and not sufficiently versed in Plato and Aristotle. From whom epigrams have been published by some, and poems by others, so that they might celebrate the precepts of the poetic art itself. The theologians themselves do not hide the hymns of the church, nor are they ignorant that Nazianzen, Jerome, Sedulius, Paulinus, and others sang poems. Nor would it have escaped them that Moses was the first to sing divine praises in a poem, and impressed the measures of verses into some divine books with a Hebrew pen. I have thought that these are not only permitted, but even expedient in our own time in every way, provided that the material is not fabulous or obscene, and provided that we are not mindful of the pagan gods, except perhaps while we examine them.

While we explore them, while we repeat that which is damned and fashioned in song, I would wish that by reading this (if there is leisure) stimuli might be added to the soul, so that you might undertake to renew and illustrate, to the best of your ability, the memory of Christ now almost abolished among the faithful in the West, and that you might utterly obliterate the impious cult of Mahomet. And since you have already long since enrolled me in your militia, and not without honor and a certain outstanding authority, we owe the sword to a victory of such a kind to be compared; but we promise a pen for publishing it. Farewell.

See our speech with Johannes Baptista...