 Shortly after 1450, Giannozzo Manetti had completed a book On Human Worth and Excellence, which—unlike Pico’s speech—really is about dignitas as that word had been used by ancient Romans and medieval Christians: what they meant by it was ‘rank,’ ‘status,’ ‘value’ or ‘worth,’ not what Kant would mean later by Würde. Manetti’s dignitas was still essentially a Christian notion made less otherworldly by the example of ancient sages like Cicero and by the changed conditions of Italian life in the fifteenth century. The last part of Manetti’s book is an attack on a twelfth-century treatise On Human Misery by Cardinal Lotario dei Segni, before he became Pope Innocent III. Manetti took his lead from two contemporaries—Antonio da Barga and Bartolomeo Facio—who had already written about his topic but in much more conventional ways. Pico’s speech pays no attention at all to these three earlier texts on dignitas because dignitas is not his subject. Instead, he wanted to convince people to use magic and Kabbalah in order to change themselves into angels.