David Porreca

David Porreca is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Waterloo (Canada) and Co-Director of their Medieval Studies program. He is a leading authority on the medieval Latin reception of Hermes Trismegistus and a member of the editorial board of the Hermes Latinus series (Brepols / Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis).

Hermes in the Medieval Classroom

Porreca's most significant contribution is his systematic documentation of how texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus were used as scholastic teaching tools in 12th- and 13th-century classrooms — not merely as esoteric curiosities. Through manuscript palaeography, he identifies student glosses, marginal commentary, and scholastic apparatus on texts including the Liber XXIV Philosophorum, De sex rerum principiis, and the Asclepius. His 2005 paper "Hermes Trismegistus in Thomas of York" demonstrates that schoolmen listed Hermes alongside Aristotle and Boethius as a standard philosophical authority. His forthcoming work "Hermes Trismegistus in the Medieval Classroom" (IMC 2025) continues this archival research.

The Latin Picatrix

With Dan Attrell, Porreca produced the first complete English translation of the Latin Picatrix (Penn State Press, 2019), the definitive medieval manual of astral magic. The translation includes extensive scholarly apparatus situating the Picatrix within the Hermetic Latinus tradition — making explicit the connections between theoretical cosmology (the six principles, the 24 definitions of God) and the practical astral magic that drew on them.