“Jewish Magia in Renaissance and Baroque Italy: Preliminary Notes on Ms. GFC 325.”

The articles presents the preliminary results of a study on an early modern Italian manuscript of Jewish magic, introducing its most relevant physical, structural and content features and showing how this remarkable source — like the many other Hebrew magical manuscripts which still lie unpublished in public and private collections around the world — may prove extremely useful for reconstructing important aspects of both Jewish and Western intellectual history. Based on an analysis of the linguistic and content specificities of the codex and textual parallels with other magical excerpts, the article provides a preliminary reconstruction of the historical context in which the magic handbook was written and the logic with which the author gathered, adapted and translated the magical knowledge conveyed in it.