Published in: Forme del neoplatonismo: Dalla eredità ficiniana al platonismo di Cambridge, Atti del convegno Firenze, 25-27 ottobre 2001, ed. Luisa Simonetti, Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, Atti del Convegno 25 (Florence: Olschki, 2007), 75-96. THE PLATONIC ACADEMY OF FLORENCE AND RENAISSANCE HISTORIOGRAPHY 1 A decade ago I published a series of articles showing that the traditional understanding of the Platonic Academy of Florence was a myth. 2 The well-known texts of Marsilio Ficino upon which previous generations of scholars had based their understanding of this suppositious academy had been misread. I subjected the key passages to close analysis and provided new contexts, parallel passages and other supporting evidence showing how these texts should be read. The conclusion was inescapable. Not only is the expression Academia Platonica itself absent from contemporary sources (it is not attested in the relevant sense before 1638), but one can find no unambiguous evidence for a Platonic institution or society or sect or philosophical confraternity grouped around Marsilio Ficino, such as has been variously imagined by numerous scholars of preceding centuries. The Platonic Academy of Florence was another invented tradition, like the twelfth-century School of Chartres, debunked in the 1970s by Sir Richard Southern. My argument was primarily a philological one. I tried to recover the precise usage of the word academia in fifteenth-century documents, with a view to understanding the historical context and contemporary meaning of Ficino’s movement to revive Platonic philosophy. I am