Jeffrey Witt: Defining Heresy. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's use of patristic sources to define 'right belief' and his scholastic precedents.

This paper will consider Giovanni Pico's use of patristic sources to define the boundaries of the faith community, namely to develop his definitions of faith, heresy, and infidelity. Amos Edleheit has argued that Pico's position and his assessment of patristic authors, as developed in his Apologia, "[represents] the evolution of a new humanist theology, which rejects most of the medieval tradition” (Ficino, Pico and Savonarola: The Evolution of Humanist Theology, 2008, p. 282). I will argue that this is not the case. On the contrary, Pico's position, and his interaction with patristic sources, has clear precedents in the preceding medieval scholastic tradition.