 The influence of Pythagoreanism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance was extensive and was found in most disciplines, in literature and art as well as in philosophy and science. Here only the highlights of that influence can be given (see further Heninger 1974, Celenza 1999, Celenza 2001, Kahn 2001, Riedweg 2005, Hicks 2014 and Allen 2014, to all of whom the following account is indebted). It is crucial to recognize from the beginning that the Pythagoras of the Middle Ages and Renaissance is the Pythagoras of the Neopythagorean tradition, in which he is regarded as either the most important or one of the most important philosophers in the Greek philosophical tradition. Thus, Ralph Cudworth, in The True Intellectual System of the Universe asserted that “Pythagoras was the most eminent of all the ancient Philosophers” (1845, II 4). This is a far cry from the Pythagoras that can be reconstructed by responsible scholarship. Riedweg has put it well: “Had Pythagoras and his teachings not been since the early Academy overwritten with Plato’s philosophy, and had this ‘palimpsest’ not in the course of the Roman empire achieved unchallenged authority among Platonists, it would be scarcely conceivable that scholars from the Middle Ages and modernity down to the present would have found the pre-Socratic charismatic from Samos so fascinating” (2005, 128).