Pietro Bongo (alternate spelling: Petrus Bungus) was a renaissance Italian writer.
[2] He studied the four mathematical arts of the quadrivium: arithmetic and geometry, music theory and astronomy, and philosophy and theology, beside the classical poetry and the occult sciences of magic and kabbalah.
[4] His major work, the Numerorum Mysteria was first published in 1591 and received an imprimatur from the Catholic Church.
Bongo draws on a wide range of sources, including the pagan literature and philosophy of Classical Greece and Rome, early Church Fathers and the mainstream Catholic tradition of scholarship, as well as very recent scholarship of his own day.
He quotes extensively in a self-conscious display of erudition, which demonstrates the sheer wealth of reference opened to scholars by the development of printing.