Paolo Lucentini

Paolo Lucentini (d. 2008) was an Italian medieval scholar and the founding editor of the Hermes Latinus series (Brepols / Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis), the definitive critical edition project for Latin texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus.

The Hermes Latinus Project

Lucentini's great achievement was to create a rigorous editorial framework for 'Latin Hermeticism' — establishing what counts as a Latin Hermetic text through manuscript evidence, attribution history, and doctrinal analysis rather than content alone. His co-edition of De sex rerum principiis with Mark Damien Delp (2006) is the standard reference, situating the text within the broader 12th-century Hermetic dossier and demonstrating the continuity from ancient Hermeticism through medieval Latin synthesis to Renaissance recovery. The series, now continued by Porreca and Antonella Sannino, provides the scholarly infrastructure for all serious study of medieval Hermetic transmission.