György E Szönyi
BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT(As of May 2021). Gy. E. Szönyi (1952), is professor of English and former director of the Institute of English and American Studies of the University of Szeged. He is also visiting professor at the Central European University (Budapest / Vienna). As of March 2021 he is professor emeritus.
Address: Szeged / Budapest
Address: Szeged / Budapest
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Lodovico Lazzarelli also made important contributions to the forging of
Christian Hermeticism. Like Pico, he became attracted to Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah and in his work Crater Hermetis (c. 1493), he contributed to this intellectual trend with a passionate and poetical vision of ascension, the technology of which he partly borrowed from the mystical Judaica, at the same time creating (according to Wouter Hanegraaff) a particularly pure form of ecstatic Christian mystery. In my paper I introduce this text and point out the decisive meeting of Lazzarelli with Giovanni “Mercurio” da Correggio, whom he identified as the reborn Hermes Trismegistus, while he styled himself as a reborn Enoch. Their twin story is a fascinating example of early Renaissance Neoplatonic mysticism which synthesized high religiosity with classical philosophy and a fervent desire for the deification of man.
London-New York: Routledge, forthcoming in 2015. To be published in Vol 1.
In the first part of my paper I briefly outline the textual history of the Enochian lore; in the second I shall introduce some interesting specimens of this lore from the English Victorian period together with their wider historical contexts. In the meantime I hope to demonstrate in what different capacities the character of Enoch and his myth have inspired mystical and esoteric ideas over the centuries.
Lodovico Lazzarelli also made important contributions to the forging of
Christian Hermeticism. Like Pico, he became attracted to Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah and in his work Crater Hermetis (c. 1493), he contributed to this intellectual trend with a passionate and poetical vision of ascension, the technology of which he partly borrowed from the mystical Judaica, at the same time creating (according to Wouter Hanegraaff) a particularly pure form of ecstatic Christian mystery. In my paper I introduce this text and point out the decisive meeting of Lazzarelli with Giovanni “Mercurio” da Correggio, whom he identified as the reborn Hermes Trismegistus, while he styled himself as a reborn Enoch. Their twin story is a fascinating example of early Renaissance Neoplatonic mysticism which synthesized high religiosity with classical philosophy and a fervent desire for the deification of man.
London-New York: Routledge, forthcoming in 2015. To be published in Vol 1.
In the first part of my paper I briefly outline the textual history of the Enochian lore; in the second I shall introduce some interesting specimens of this lore from the English Victorian period together with their wider historical contexts. In the meantime I hope to demonstrate in what different capacities the character of Enoch and his myth have inspired mystical and esoteric ideas over the centuries.
György E. Szönyi is the director of the Doctoral School of Literature and professor of English (University of Szeged) and since 2006 visiting professor of cultural/intellectual history (CEU, Budapest). His interests include cultural theory, the Renaissance, the Western Esoteric traditions, and conventions of symbolization – early modern and (post)modern. *** Important monographs: Pictura & Scriptura. 20th-Century Theories of Cultural Representations (in Hungarian, Szeged: JATEPress, 2004); Gli angeli di John Dee (Roma: Tre Editori, 2004); John Dee's Occultism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004, pb. 2010). Forthcoming: The Multimediality of Culture and the Emblematic Way of Seeing (2020); in the making: The Enoch Readers. A Cultural History of Angels, Magic, and Ascension on High. *** This talk is based on his research he conducted in 2009 when for a year he served as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, the UK.