About the Author

Anthony Grafton is the author of The Footnote, Defenders of the Text, Forgers and Critics, and Inky Fingers, among other books. The Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University, he writes regularly for the New York Review of Books.

Anthony Grafton

MAGUS

The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa

Contents

1. Cover

2. About the Author

3. Title Page

4. Dedication

5. Introduction:
The Magus Anatomized: The Case of Faustus

6. Chapter One:
Criticism and Experiment: Medieval Magi

7. Chapter Two:
Power over Nature: Art, Engineering, and Humanism

8. Chapter Three:
The Learned Magus: Pico and Ficino

9. Chapter Four:
Johannes Trithemius: Magic and the Book

10. Chapter Five:
Occult Philosophy in Theory and Practice: Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

11. Notes

12. Acknowledgments

13. Index

14. Copyright

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1. Cover

2. Frontmatter

3. Contents

4. Begin Reading

To the memory of Louise Grafton, magician

Introduction

The Magus Anatomized

The Case of Faustus

At some point in the 1520s or 1530s, Philip Melanchthon came downstairs in his house in Wittenberg, the Lutheran citadel, to eat with Doctor Faustus. Like other German Protestant professors, Melanchthon was married and had four children, but he kept as much distance as he could from domestic affairs.1 Still, household and scholarship often came together at the dinner table, where female skill and work enabled male professors to offer hospitality to visiting scholars.2 At this dinner, though, Melanchthon did not treat his guest graciously. True to his position as Martin Luther’s right-hand man, he denounced Faustus, insisting that he give up his evil ways and repent—or suffer damnation. The magician who came to dinner replied with equal asperity, but his threats were this-worldly: “Sir, you continually rebuke me with abusive words. One of these days, when you go to the table, I will make all the pots in your kitchen fly out of the chimney, so that you and your guests will have nothing to eat.” Melanchthon’s rejoinder had all the irony and wit that the German scholars of his time—and later ones—were famous for: “You’d better not, or I’ll shoot you right in the art” (“Das soltu wol lassen, ich schiesse dir in deine kunst.”). The pots stayed in the kitchen where they belonged since the troublesome guest could do nothing against “the holy man.”3

The story is not easy to evaluate. Its author, who signed his book on magic as “Augustin Lercheimer,” was in fact a Heidelberg professor named Herman Witekind who had studied at Wittenberg. He took offense at the stories that reached print in 1587 in the first book-length account of Faustus’s deeds, the Book of Faust (Faustbuch), and he not only criticized some of them but also offered his more instructive additions. The Wittenberg Reformers, Luther and Melanchthon, played suitably heroic roles in his anecdotes.4 This particular story, if genuine, must have derived from local oral traditions.5 Melanchthon liked to tell stories about magicians—including Faustus—during his lectures. But he expanded freely and imaginatively on anecdotes with magical content, and pupils like Joannes Manlius, who recorded and published these, sometimes embellished them further as they did so.6 We do not know if Melanchthon really met Faustus. In this case, moreover, Lercheimer’s informants may well have softened the original wording of the story. Melanchthon shared his friend Luther’s taste for scatology, and it seems altogether likely that he really said, “Ich scheisse dir in deine kunst” (“I shit on your art”).7

One point, however, emerges clearly. Melanchthon’s conversation partner—the man known to us as the historical Faustus—was a magus, a learned magician. He plied this trade decades before peddlers began hawking the Book of Faust, which exaggerated his genuinely colorful adventures, around the taverns and marketplaces of Renaissance Germany.8 When he threatened to conjure a wind that would expel Melanchthon’s pots from his kitchen, he relied, as his opponent said, on an “art”—a formal body of knowledge that gave him special access to the secret powers of nature, to angelic or diabolic help, or to all at once. Melanchthon, for all his contempt, acknowledged the power of Faustus’s magic. In fact, he told his students stories of the magus’s amazing deeds. Confronted by another magician in Vienna, Faustus showed his superiority by a simple (if dramatic) trick: he “devoured” his rival and then allowed him to reappear unharmed in a cave a few days later.9 Melanchthon—himself an expert on astrology and the natural forms of magic—admitted that his antagonist had some standing in the field.10

The late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as many historians have shown, saw the development of a new discipline—or set of disciplines. Contemporary practitioners sometimes called it “natural magic” or “occult philosophy,” to emphasize that it was both profound and innocent, while critics tended simply to call it “magic” and argue that it depended on diabolic help. The most influential practitioners of magic were men, who wrote their treatises in Latin, the language of learning. Some of them became celebrities. In 1593, Caspar Waser, a young Swiss scholar who was making a grand tour of Europe, visited Naples. He saw the sights, from the Sibyl’s cave to the volcanic fields of Pozzuoli.11 But what fascinated him most were two men he spent a fair amount of time with in Naples. Ferrante Imperato, a legendarily erudite apothecary and natural historian, greeted Waser warmly and showed him his museum, which Waser thought worthy of an “imperator”—an emperor.12 Giambattista della Porta, a nobleman who wrote comedies as well as treatises on natural philosophy, hinted that he knew how to control the weather (though he refused to give a demonstration) and discussed the ciphers of an earlier writer, Johannes Trithemius.13

INT.1 Ferrante Imperato, Museum. 1599. Wikimedia Commons.

Meeting these two men—especially della Porta—the young Reformed Protestant from Zurich had entered the domain of magic. In 1558, della Porta had written a treatise entitled Natural Magic that went through many editions—fifteen in Latin, six in Italian—even before he expanded it in 1589. He presented magic as an ancient art, one that had flourished in ancient Persia and Egypt as well as Greece and Rome. Its practitioners, the magi, knew how to draw on and enhance the secret forces of nature: “This art, I say, is full of much vertue, of many secret mysteries: it openeth unto us the qualities and properties of hidden things, and the knowledge of the whole course of Nature.”14 The magi had to be experts in a range of disciplines, from alchemy to astrology, which enabled them to perform actions that ordinary, unlearned people thought miraculous. Della Porta’s treatise offered a catalogue of the wonders that the magus could perform.

From della Porta’s point of view, and very likely from Waser’s, Imperato’s museum was one great demonstration of the ways in which nature and art both created wonders: a visual counterpart to his book, especially in its later, expanded edition. Della Porta believed in direct study of nature and took pleasure, in later years, in using his experiences (as well as formal arguments) to show that ancient authorities like Aristotle had gone wrong. When he turned his attention to atmospheric phenomena, he argued that they obeyed the same mechanisms as subterranean ones: thunder and earthquakes shared mechanisms and differed only because thunder took place in the sky and earthquakes underground.15 Happily, his critical study of violent natural phenomena yielded a new form of natural magic: della Porta prided himself on knowing ways to create artificial thunder that made a terrifying noise but did no harm.16 It was these experiments, as he called them, that Waser had heard about and wanted to see performed in 1593, though della Porta did not publish them until much later. Magic, in other words, could utilize practices from cutting-edge natural philosophy.

As we will see, the new magic came in many different forms. Every synthesis was controversial, and many of them proved labile when they attracted hostile criticism. In the first edition of Natural Magic, della Porta distinguished, as most of the protagonists of this story did, between two forms of magic: a good version that exploited the powers of nature and an evil one that depended on the powers of demons.17 Yet he also described how to make talismans that could attract the powers of the planets, not only because they were made of the correct material but because they bore the correct images—recommendations that seemed to go against his own warnings and that attracted the notice of the Inquisition.18 In later editions, he eliminated these controversial practices in favor of others that he could present as entirely natural.19

But almost all of the learned magi agreed on certain points, most of which della Porta summed up very clearly in the first version of his treatise. They saw the cosmos as a single being, connected in all its parts by rays that emanated from the planets and shaped much of life on earth. Astrology, the discipline that tracked the angles at which the planets irradiated the earth at a given place and on a particular day and time, could give information about the characteristics and temperament of individuals and help them plan their lives, decide which enterprises to pursue, and educate their children. By offering analyses of the characters and prospects of peoples, it could also help to explain the course of world history. On earth, stones, plants, animals, and fish also had powers, many of them “occult”—not perceptible at first sight. Similarities and dissimilarities could serve as keys to this web of connections, enabling the magus to chart and exploit the powers it transmitted. Mastery of these properties could also be a source of power. Alchemy, in particular, could endow its students with an especially powerful form of knowledge, one that made it possible to transform matter itself. Finally, as we will see, many magi—though not Faustus—promised that their art could heal the body and even help the soul rise to union with God. The magus, in his Renaissance form, urged his followers to lead an ascetic life and promised them access to the highest realms of knowledge.

In practice, no two magi taught or advertised exactly the same set of techniques. And no two contemporaries agreed on which of them were valid. For every writer who was willing to countenance talismanic magic as a way to communicate with beneficent beings, another insisted that it was nothing more than a straight road to damnation through commerce with devils. For every theorist who praised the divinatory power of astrology, there was another who denounced it as worthless and deceptive. Pico della Mirandola was present at the creation of learned magic, and provided materials and arguments that proved durably useful. Yet he rejected astrology on principle. Everyone agreed, too, that some of the others who competed with them as magi were actually charlatans, hawking spurious techniques and recipes. Still, the continued presence into the seventeenth century of learned magic on the book market, at princely courts, and in wealthy religious communities makes clear that the promises of the magi appealed to discriminating patrons and practitioners.

This book traces the rise of learned magic, from its medieval origins to the synthesis that Agrippa created in 1533. It does not aspire to completeness. Some of the scholars and thinkers who play parts in it accepted alchemy, as della Porta did, as a discipline that could wield power over nature. Recent scholarship has made clear how widely alchemy was practiced in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, how much effective technical content it possessed, and how reasonable the claims of its practitioners were. It played a crucial role in the rise of something larger than magic: a vision of humans as able to act upon and shape the natural world.20 In this book, however, I aim to be guided by the actors in my history. Some of them, as we will see, took a serious interest in alchemy, and sometimes alchemical texts provided crucial elements for magical treatises. But most of these magi did not see themselves primarily as alchemists nor did they treat the art with the sort of attention that they devoted to others, even though they drew essential ideas from alchemical texts.

The chapters of this book follow the steps by which this process unfolded. We will follow the reasons why some medieval philosophers pursued learned magic and others forbade it. We will watch inventors who developed and mythologized their own new ways to gain power over nature and society and trace the complex interactions of technology and magic. We will follow the learned men, in Italy and in the Holy Roman Empire, who framed new justifications for pursuing magical powers and added new practices to the panoply of accepted ones. And we will examine the influential synthesis that Agrippa crafted from these multiple components.

This is the story: But what of the art itself? How did magic look and feel to the learned men who practiced it? One way to find out is to mount one of the Renaissance’s favorite spectacles: a public dissection of a single individual. Faustus, the magus we began with, makes a perfect star for this period show. Many contemporaries recorded his adventures, which later sent Marlowe and Goethe into literary flights, in vivid first- and secondhand accounts.21 A rich tradition of Faustian scholarship, erudite and combative, goes back to 1693, when Carl Christian Kirchner defended a Latin dissertation On Faust the Charlatan at the University of Wittenberg.22 Its proponents have weighed, measured, and evaluated every fragment of original evidence. Uncertainty remains on basic points. Nonetheless, the intense biographical research devoted to Faustus has established a core of usable information about who he was, what he did, and what his observers made of it—enough material to support not only a reconstruction of his career but also an interpretation of what it meant to Faustus himself and to those who knew him.23

Recent scholars—above all Günther Mahal and Frank Baron—have subjected this evidence to close examination. Baron, in particular, has done much to set Faust’s career into a recognizable period context. Their work—and their debates—provide the framework for this inquiry.24 The historical Faustus probably began life either in Helmstadt, not far from Heidelberg, or in Knittlingen, a small town near the Black Forest that still houses the Faust Museum.25 Official documents record that Georg of Helmstadt—one of the historical figures most plausibly identified with Faustus—entered the university of Heidelberg in 1483. This would mean that he was born sometime in the 1460s.26 Georg received his BA in 1484 and his MA, the basic teaching degree, in 1487, ranked second out of ten candidates.27 Thanks to the patronage of the baron Franz von Sickingen, one ill-willed contemporary reports, he became a schoolmaster in Bad Kreuznach. But he lost this position, sometime before August 1507, since he fled after being charged with committing sodomy with students.28

A series of reports track Faustus’s progress around the cities of the Holy Roman Empire. An archival document from 1520 records that Georg Schenk, the Bishop of Bamberg, paid him ten gulden for “a nativity or judgment”—both forms of astrological document that offered advice about the client’s future.29 Astrologers lived and worked in every city in the Holy Roman Empire. But Faustus proved unusually troublesome. His behavior continued to give offense. A decree of the Ingolstadt city council instructed him, in 1528, “to spend his penny somewhere else.”30 A similar document, from Nuremberg in 1532, recorded the magistrates’ refusal to offer a safe conduct to “Doctor Faustus the great sodomite and necromancer.”31 These records reveal what made Faustus’s reputation special. Magic, as Faustus practiced it, seems to have included both the technical discipline of astrology and more frightening forms of conjuring and divination. Evidently the authorities saw him as a criminal and worse. Cities expelled him. But they did not jail him—much less execute him—even for sodomy and necromancy, both capital offenses at the time.32 He enjoyed fame for his frightening power as well as for his disagreeable ways—an impression confirmed by the action of the Ingolstadt councilors, who made Faustus swear an oath not to take vengeance on them after he left their city.33

More detailed reports come from personal letters and other unofficial sources. In 1506, a Benedictine abbot, Johannes Trithemius, interrupted a journey at an inn in Gelnhausen. There he found a man named “Master Georg Sabellicus, the younger Faustus” had been handing out advertisements for himself, visiting cards that described him as “the chief of necromancers, an astrologer, the second magus, a reader of palms, a diviner by earth and fire, second in the art of divination by water”34—the same combination of disciplines that the archival documents mention, presented in strikingly boastful language. Local priests told Trithemius that Georg had made even wilder claims. He bragged that if “all the works of Plato and Aristotle, together with their whole philosophy,” should disappear from human memory then he, “like another Hebrew Ezra, would be able to restore them all with increased beauty.”35

Apparently, Faustus moved from town to town, and possibly from tavern to tavern, offering his services for money—not necessarily a dishonorable practice in the years when Albrecht Dürer did much the same in order to sell his prints. Faustus made a reputation. Trithemius directed his letter, which he wrote on August 20, 1507, to a well-known mathematician and astrologer, Johannes Virdung. Virdung, who was expecting a visit from Faustus, had written to Trithemius for information, and Trithemius set out to convince his friend that Faustus was “a vagabond, a babbler, and a rogue, who deserves to be thrashed.” “When he comes to you,” he said, “you will find him to be not a philosopher but a fool with an overabundance of rashness.”36 Trithemius mentioned that numerous informants in several cities had had similar experiences—further evidence that Faustus’s performances attracted widespread interest.

Most importantly, Trithemius’s letter identifies the primary services that Faustus had to offer. He divined the future by a variety of means, such as drawing up horoscopes and interpreting the patterns made by molten lead when dropped into water. But he also claimed to have special powers to affect the world around him. Trithemius noted that Faustus called himself “the source of necromancy, when in truth, in his ignorance of all good letters, he ought to call himself a fool rather than a master.”37 As a “necromancer” and “magus,” Faustus claimed to be able to perform wonders—to make people, animals, and objects do things entirely outside the natural order, as well as to predict the future. Perhaps Faustus went so far as to brag that he could heal the sick and raise the dead. Evidently, then, Trithemius classified Faustus as a particular, recognizable kind of bad magician: a magical service provider who predicted the future and performed wonders in the present—or at least claimed to do so.

Many accounts of Faustus from the 1530s and after originated in Wittenberg. Luther and his followers, who dominated the local university, emphasized the devil’s omnipresence and the ease with which sinful humans could sign their souls away to him. Their anecdotes about Faustus reflected their belief that he had made a formal pact with the devil and emphasized the diabolic origin of his powers—ideas that, in the late sixteenth-century age of witch persecution, would become central themes of Faustus’s story.38 Luther, for example, told his pupils that Faustus called the devil his “brother-in-law.”39 Others recorded that he traveled with two familiars, a dog and a horse, and died when the devil strangled him.40 According to one report, his body kept turning face downward on the bier even after his attendants placed it faceup.41 These necrogymnastics, like the company of uncanny animals, unequivocally revealed the source of Faustus’s powers.

Others, by contrast, dismissed him as a trickster. According to the famed opponent of witchcraft prosecutions Johann Wier, Faustus sought revenge on a prison chaplain who claimed to have run out of wine. In return for more wine Faustus gave him a supposedly miraculous salve, which would remove the chaplain’s beard without the use of a razor. The substance consisted of arsenic, which, rubbed on with no special preparations, took off not only the hair “but also the skin and the flesh,” as the victim himself indignantly recalled.42 Faustus’s contemporary, the Nuremberg Greek scholar Joachim Camerarius, himself a learned astrologer and aficionado of natural magic, warned a friend that Faust played “jugglers’ tricks” “to fill [his audience] with the wind of silly superstition.”43 These men treated Faustus not as the sober practitioner of an ancient art but as a trickster who took advantage of his victims’ human fallibility.

Yet opinions varied, and some witnesses—including Camerarius himself—spoke in more than one key about Faustus’s magic. Even the hostile and skeptical Wier admitted, in a burst of self-contradiction, that Faustus “could achieve absolutely anything with his empty boasts and promises.”44 Every story about Faustus reveals another facet of learned magic. Melanchthon glossed his critique of Faustus with an almost admiring remark about the magician’s supernatural patron: “The devil is a marvelous artisan. For by a certain art he can achieve things which are natural, and which we do not know. For he can do more than man.”45 Here Melanchthon described the devil’s art as that of a supremely inventive craftsman, a “mirabilis artifex,” who could draw out the “occult virtues” of nature as no human could.

Most of Faustus’s actual practices went unrecorded. But one episode connects him to a world of marvelous craft. He lectured publicly on Homer at Erfurt, where he briefly held an academic post. He described the heroes of Homer’s epics—King Priam, Hector, Ajax, Ulysses, and Agamemnon—in vivid detail, “each as they had appeared.” Excited students demanded more wonders. Faustus agreed to grant their desire in the next lecture hour. When a swarm of eager listeners showed up, many of them not registered, he brought the Homeric characters in “one after another,” Each hero “looked at them and shook his head as if he were still in action on the field before Troy.” Finally he introduced Polyphemus, the red-haired, bearded, ferocious Cyclops—who entered with a man’s legs dangling from his mouth, frightened the students, and refused at first to leave but instead “hammered on the floor with his great iron spear.”46

The magus knew how to stage a show. In this case, he staged a particular kind of demonstration—a practical one that others had been developing for more than a century, ever since Leon Battista Alberti amazed visitors to the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–1439 with his dazzlingly deceptive images of moving ships at sea and rising and setting stars.47 A fifteenth-century natural philosopher and inventor, the Paduan Giovanni Fontana, explained how to project images—including frightening ones. A vivid, highly dramatic illustration represents a learned man, dressed in the robes that reveal his status, holding a transparent lamp. The light of a candle transforms a tiny image of a devil armed with a sphere, inside the lamp, into a vast, frightening projection—“a nocturnal apparition designed to inspire terror,” in Fontana’s words. Such a device would have worked, though it would have been hard to use secretly. Still, Fontana insisted that he had made the device “with his own hands and from his own invention,” and at least one contemporary text describes similar techniques.48 Faustus used his own expert knowledge of optics, light, and shadow to project large-scale images of Greeks and Trojans on a sheet, which a confederate shook so that the figures seemed to move. Tricks like this explain why Melanchthon connected Faustus with technical skills possessed by the devil.

This story reveals one more aspect of Faustus’s art—one that contemporary witnesses did not discuss. When he brought the ancient heroes back to life, he entered yet another intellectual territory—that of the Renaissance humanists whom he presumably first encountered at Heidelberg. These scholars searched for classical texts that had fallen out of circulation and purged them of scribal errors. As they came to know the ancients in the close, granular way that textual criticism enabled, they felt that they enjoyed direct contact with the ancient authors they knew best—so direct that Petrarch wrote letters to his favorite Roman writers: Cicero, Virgil, and Livy.49 Some Latinized or Hellenized their birth names. Luther’s friend and Faustus’s enemy created his public name, Melanchthon, by translating his original name, Schwarzerdt (“Black Earth”), into Greek.50 Others, now known as “antiquarians,” searched for the statues and mosaics that could reveal what ancient writers and their characters had looked like, noting the clothing, armor, and other attributes that set them apart from moderns.51

INT.2 Giovanni Fontana. Magic lantern projecting an image of a devil. Bellicorum instrumentorum liber, fol. 70 recto. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cod. Icon. 242 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Faustus also seems to have chosen his name and his identity—possibly from a character in the ancient story of Simon Magus, as told in texts ascribed to Clement, a bishop of Rome in the second century, possibly from the prominent French humanist Faustus Andrelinus. According to Trithemius, he also called himself Sabellicus.52 If so, he adopted the title of a prominent Italian scholar, Marcus Antonius Sabellicus, who like Andrelinus had studied in Rome with the influential teacher and antiquary Pomponio Leto. In choosing these names, as in calling himself a “magister” (master) and a magus, Faustus emphasized his allegiance to classical culture.53

Humanists tried to restore, from corrupt manuscripts, the incorrupt and perfect words of Cicero and Livy and to reconstruct, from the bizarre rituals of illiterate priests, the dignified liturgies of early Christianity—even if, as in a famous story told by Erasmus, they found themselves trying to convince a priest who had chanted “mumpsimus” for twenty years that he should really say “sumpsimus.”54 They acknowledged the magical nature of these restorations of what had been lost for centuries by the term they applied to them in those difficult cases where ordinary inferences from evidence were not possible: “divination,” the same term Faustus used for astrology. Just as the magus divined the future, so the humanist sometimes divined the past—the part of it, at least, that his manuscripts hinted at but did not reveal. As Poggio Bracciolini put it while denouncing a scribe: “The man who copied the books was the most ignorant person alive today: I had to divine, rather than read.”55 Calling the ancient heroes back to life was humanistic magic—magic with a flavor of learning distinctive to this period. Magicians had been bringing the dead back to life for centuries. But only in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did they bring classical celebrities back to life.

Faustus, moreover, offered to carry out more astonishing feats of magical scholarship. At a faculty banquet held to celebrate the graduation of some MA students, he recited glittering lines from the lost plays of Plautus and Terence—authors whose extant works were favorites in part because they had so many quotable lines. Then he offered to bring the plays back into existence for a few hours so that they could be copied and used. The members of his audience, which included some theologians, turned down this generous offer on the grounds that the devil might have interpolated “all sorts of nasty things” into the texts.56 But it was not totally outlandish by the standards of the time. Giovanni Nanni of Viterbo, Dominican and papal theologian, had invented and published a series of texts describing the history of ancient Egypt, Chaldea, and Etruria.57 Trithemius believed that the Hebrew priest Ezra had restored the Hebrew Bible from memory after Cyrus sent the Jews back to Palestine. He himself re-created whole swathes of early German history by reinventing lost texts that described them.58 No wonder that he found Faustus’s boasts about his ability to restore lost texts especially annoying.

The rest of this book will trace in more detail the ways in which the learned magus and his new ways of making knowledge came into being at this time and in these places. This inquiry was originally inspired—as so many other works of scholarship have been—by a great historian, Frances Yates, who taught at the Warburg Institute and carried on its traditions in highly original ways. She re-created what she saw as the elegant new magic of the Renaissance: the work of men like Ficino and Pico. They replaced the older, disreputable magic of medieval sorcerers with a discipline that offered true power over nature as well as new forms of physical and spiritual therapy. New encounters with ancient books, she argued—especially those wrongly ascribed to an Egyptian sage, Hermes Trismegistus, inspired this movement. It was a revolution that faced backward, seeking to transform modern society by reviving ancient wisdom, and that helped in its turn to inspire the new science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yates told her story with great learning and a bewitching style.59

Her work met the fate that often awaits brilliant scholarship. She helped to open up the history of magic and its relationship to other fields. A number of her contemporaries—especially Eugenio Garin and Paolo Rossi—also argued, in their own ways, that the magic of the Renaissance had played a vital role in the creation of modern science and philosophy.60 The dozens of talented explorers that she and they attracted to the field have extended and revised Yates’s original thesis almost beyond recognition.61 Medievalists and Renaissance scholars alike have shown that even the most innovative magi of the age of Faust drew on both theories and practices from their scholastic predecessors.62 Historians of technology have made clear how the inventors known in the Middle Ages and Renaissance as “engineers” crafted extraordinary devices and argued, as the alchemists did, that they possessed and could provide others with special powers.63 And students have revised Yates’s depiction of the work of the most original and influential Renaissance magi, showing that they drew on a diverse array of texts and promised their readers special forms of knowledge as well as power.64 The Hermetic texts were nowhere near so central as she thought. But Yates was not wholly wrong. Always prescient, she had inklings of some of these points—especially the importance of technological innovation and the range of sources the magi drew from.

If Yates saw Renaissance magic as a solid, public discipline, classical in its source and pure in its aesthetics, both its critics and its practitioners nourished many doubts. Magic had no officially canonical texts and no set place in a curriculum. Many of their practices and assumptions came directly from medieval sources—some of them by authors who denounced magic in theory but engaged with and practiced it nonetheless. Clerical authorities periodically subjected it to scrutiny and condemnation. And magi themselves were among the first to dismiss certain colleagues as charlatans.65

Faustus was not the only fake who enraged Trithemius, as he made clear in a bitterly hostile (and somewhat satirical) passage:

The foolish mathematician, who imitates and follows the devil, opens the way to kings and princes. First he approaches curious servants, he produces carefully made up books, shows off the names of their great supposed authors, displays the images of the planets, not to mention the characters of the demons, the rings, scepters, crowns and all the instruments of demonic magic. With these he promises that he will do and show everything that a man can think or that Hell can conceal. He promises to raise the dead and all the ancient heroes, promises hidden treasures, promises to make enemy armies that have not been captured surrender. No need to say more. There is nothing so hard, nothing so wonderful, that it is not in his power to produce the desired effect. When bidden to do so, he flies through the air to Arabia, brings Hercules and great Alexander back from the dead, and will call up your father for you, if you wish, or your mother, from the lake of Avernus. As a prophet he knows all past, present and future things.66

Faust’s promises reflected not the profundity of his art but the depth of the cynicism with which he deceived his clients.

Sometimes, the good and the great eagerly consumed magical texts and services. Yet even they had their doubts. The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I made no secret of his interest in astrology, which he promoted both at the University of Vienna and at his court. In fact, he installed his favorite astrologers and magi in professorial chairs and encouraged them to publish their work in the field.67 He did little to conceal his interest in magical practices. Maximilian wore a magical ring, appropriately called “The Devil” (“der Teufel”), until it was buried with him, and he tried to use it to replenish his financial resources at a time of great need. He even asked the abbot of Stams, a wealthy monastery in Tirol, to send him one of his monks who knew how to conjure up spirits, though the abbot discreetly, and disappointingly, replied that they were all dead. When Maximilian chatted up a Venetian ambassador, their conversation turned to the dead people who had recently come back to life in the Steiermark.68

Maximilian recorded these interests, moreover, in the documents that he created as his monuments for posterity, the third-person Latin autobiography that he dictated to his secretaries and the illustrated German fictionalization of his early life and later triumphs, the Weisskunig. In his autobiography, he recalled that “wishing to inquire about the secrets of the world, he learned the art of necromancy. This he never wished to pursue, since the church condemns it and it is very dangerous to man in both body and soul. And he had books from his father’s treasures, the like of which were not to be found in this world.” This was a delicate dance to the tune of two steps forward, one step back. It left the clear impression that the young prince’s scruples did not diminish his curiosity.69 In the Weisskunig, he claimed that he had studied magic in defiance of his father’s wishes in order to expose the art as evil.70 The practice of magic, in other words, could lead to the possession of the keys to the kingdom—or at least to a place at the emperor’s side when he was feeling hard-pressed by his bankers or his enemies. But it could also stimulate suspicion, and even lead to disaster. More than one alchemist and magus ended up on the scaffold, exposed as a fraud.71 Moreover, in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as we will see, suspicion spread that most forms of magic—not only the witchcraft analyzed by Dominican demonologists but also forms of learned magic that had fascinated important scholars—were inspired by the devil and pursued by those in league with him. Brilliant scholars have explicated the logic of these suspicions.72 In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many Europeans not only reproduced and approved of this imaginary world but also claimed that they knew it by direct experience—not their own, but that of witches whom they and others had caught and interrogated. This was another mental world that many of Faustus’s contemporaries believed he inhabited comfortably—so much so that, over time, he would come to be retroactively associated with the witches and accused of having made a pact like theirs with the devil. Even as learned magic gained more adherents and stature, they had to be on guard lest their pursuits be confused with what they saw as the radically different ambitions of the devil’s minions.

Around 1500, new thinkers—religious reformers (Catholic and Protestant), female mystics and “living saints,” printers, and so on—finally entered the public realm. Deft performances in public and in print enabled them to build reputations and expand the boundaries of discussion. Correspondence—much of which circulated widely—enabled them to form new alliances. Some challenged long-established beliefs and practices; others drew on the past to reform the present. All did intensive boundary work to set themselves apart from those whose traditional powers and methods they challenged. Just as important, however, were these religious reformers’ efforts to separate themselves from those of their fellow innovators whom they might seem to resemble but whom they saw as incompetent, dishonest, or in the clutches of the devil. And all crafted new genres that enabled them to publicize their new enterprises and offer instruction to readers, as well as disciples, in their techniques. Magi responded to their presence as they did that of others closer to them with similar interests. Eventually—as Deborah Harkness has shown in a brilliant study—some magi even managed to set up the sort of household that Melanchthon inhabited and that Faustus visited.73 In the period when their art was taking shape, however, only one or two of them were enabled by patronage to live in such comfortable conditions.

The magus—at least as embodied by Faustus—was a characteristic figure of the decades just before and after 1500, the period traditionally called the High Renaissance. In those years, as Erwin Panofsky pointed out long ago, barriers that had previously separated occupations and disciplines fell, not for the first time but more dramatically than ever before. Individuals like Leonardo and Vesalius transformed traditional arts and forms of knowledge by combining the study of texts with the highest level of craft practice.74 The magus is a less respectable figure than the artist or the scientist, the Erasmian humanist or the Protestant reformer—but he belongs in a dark corner of the same rich tapestry. And his art resembled, in some ways—for example, in its fertile combination of ancient, medieval, and modern components—other arts and disciplines that took shape at the same time and that now seem more respectable, such as anatomy and natural history. Like his contemporaries in many fields, the magus both learned from and rejected his medieval predecessors. We turn to them now.

CHAPTER ONE

Criticism and Experiment

Medieval Magi

On January 6, 1431, the feast of Epiphany, Nicholas of Cusa, priest, philosopher, and future cardinal, gave a sermon about the Three Magi. He took as his text the hymn for the day, “Ibant Magi”:

The Eastern Magi saw from far

And followed on His Guiding Star.

By light their way to Light they trod,

And by their gifts confessed their God

(Ibant magi quum viderant

Stellam sequentes praeviam,

Lumen requirunt lumine,

Deum fatentur munere).1

The occasion was typical for fifteenth-century religious life. Christian communities celebrated the Epiphany not only with sermons but also with splendid festive reenactments of the arrival of the Magi. An organic part of these rituals, the hymn promoted a vivid sense of intimacy with Gospel scenes and characters. Like hymns to the Virgin and Child, roadside shrines with life-sized sculptures of the Holy Family and saints, and handbooks for pious meditation, it belonged to a particular form of spiritual life, concrete and local, that would soon be challenged and in part transformed by the religious turmoil of the Reformation and the new practices of the Catholic Reformation.2

But the content of Nicholas’s sermon was anything but routine. Since the early centuries of Christianity, theologians had celebrated the Magi, who used their astrological skills—as the hymn suggested—to predict the coming of a new king of the Jews. Not all the writers who believed this lived on the edge of Christian orthodoxy. Ludolf of Saxony, the Carthusian monk whose richly contemplative life of Jesus would inspire, among others, Ignatius Loyola, explained that “the Greeks call their wise men philosophers, the Hebrews call them scribes, the Latins call them sages and the Persians call them magi, especially because of their great accomplishments in astronomy.”3 An alien, pagan wisdom had brought the Magi to the newborn king.

Nicholas quoted Ludolf’s work. But his sermon did not evoke (much less praise) the wisdom of the Persian Magi. Nicholas addressed the Magi both as a mathematician, metaphysician, and theologian seriously interested in how to gain knowledge of the universe and as a reformer seriously concerned with the reform of his church and his society.4 He portrayed all those who went forth “only as magi or magicians,” who relied only on their own intelligence to seek the light, as the enemies of God. Perpetual students, they spent their entire lives immersed in learning, and yet they would never reach their goal. Instead, they would find themselves “with the prince of darkness, eternally separated from the light of glory.”5 The Magi, Cusanus insisted, had not known about Jesus because of their skill at astronomy or astrology. The star itself, “which showed the image of a boy born having a cross on his head,”6 revealed by its miraculous appearance that the Messiah had come—and converted them from superstition to the true religion. Nicholas drew this explanation from a well-known source: a late antique Latin commentary on the Gospel of Matthew that was wrongly ascribed to the Greek Father Origen.7

When Nicholas turned to the “populares,” the ordinary folk, to whom he dedicated the second part of his sermon, he took care to make his message even clearer. He identified the star of the Magi with the falling star called “Absinth,” which tumbles into the sea and makes its water bitter in the book of Revelation (8:10–11)—a frightening gloss that seemed to connect the star of the Magi with the appearance of Antichrist. As for the Magi themselves, Nicholas condemned them. Before God enlightened them, they had devoted themselves to diabolic magic, trying to predict—and even to manipulate—the future. And many others, he warned, were still just as superstitious as they had been. In his own time, Nicholas mournfully explained, astrologers tried to predict the future from the stars. Diviners read the future in “the mirror of Apollo,” polished stones, molten lead thrown into hot water, the fingernails of young boys, and even the entrails of animals. Still others worshipped the sun and new moon and used “characters,” “unknown diabolic words,” and “ligatures” to gain power over nature or their fellow humans.

Some of these modern magicians even appropriated the rituals and properties of the church. They used holy water or consecrated candles for magical ends, as well as “certain offerings at the altar, like stones on St Stephen’s Day and arrows on St Sebastian’s day.” Others even more foolishly tried to challenge the church’s monopoly on spiritual power. According to Nicholas, instead of summoning a priest to carry out an exorcism, magicians foolishly tried to expel demons on their own: “Only god and the angels and men who possess divine grace have power over demons, not man by himself, except to the extent that God gives it to him. So those peasants who try to expel demons with characters and certain words and verses, relying on the power of characters, are in error.”8

Nicholas left room for only one exception in this freewheeling denunciation of magical practices. Natural magicians, he admitted, following the thirteenth-century philosopher William of Auvergne, brought off subtle, apparently inexplicable effects with the powers of herbs and stones.9 In precisely defined circumstances, Nicholas conceded, these practices were licit: “First of all, we should know about manifest natural causes that are revealed by experience, as in medicine and some forms of astrology, like those concerned with using the motion of the moon [to time] planting, bleeding and sowing. So long as no form of superstition is involved, these are all allowed.”10 To this very limited extent, magic could form part of the everyday technology of Christian life.

Still, Nicholas sharply condemned a wide range of practices that other philosophers and theologians before him had allowed. He denied that one could licitly make use of the “hidden powers” with which—as learned writers had maintained for centuries—the stars induced stones, plants, and animals on earth to produce subtle and surprising effects. A long series of writers, from Al-Kindi in the ninth century to Aquinas in the thirteenth, had debated the talismans with which, so learned magicians claimed, they could capture the power that radiated down from the heavens. As Charles Burnett has shown, Albertus Magnus, adapting the views of earlier writers, distinguished three forms of talismanic magic. He rejected the first two, which employed, respectively, suffumigations (magical rituals that included the burning of certain substances) and invocations as well as names and exorcisms—in other words, communication of one sort or another with spirits—and accepted only the third, which depended on the power of the celestial spheres.11 He also argued that the form of a talisman—the images or words inscribed on it—could impart celestial power to the material it consisted of. Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, rejected the idea that a form imposed on a natural object could give it any new powers. True, he accepted, in the Summa contra gentiles, that figures might enable artificial objects to receive celestial influences—only to reject that view in the Summa theologica, quoting Augustine to support his position.12 Nicholas firmly rejected talismans: “Even if these things have causes, nevertheless a Christian cannot fittingly use them, because the devil often insinuates himself into these secrets in order to deceive.”13

Nicholas, in short, rejected the whole tradition of natural magic, in which the notion of “hidden powers” played a central role. At times, his critique of magic went far beyond even the sharpest earlier ones. Nicole Oresme, a fourteenth-century critic of magic and astrology whom Nicholas cited, devoted a massive text to explaining “the causes of some effects which seem to be marvels and to show that the effects occur naturally, as do the others at which we commonly do not marvel.” “There is no reason,” he concluded, “to take recourse to the heavens, the last refuge of the weak, or demons, or to our glorious God,” in order to explain strange happenings in nature.14 Like Nicholas, Oresme rejected all forms of astrology. Yet Nicholas took exception even to Oresme’s sober and learned efforts to naturalize the supernatural. The devil lurked in the sober, closely written pages of scholastic works on natural philosophy as well as in bedrooms and churchyards.

Even more strikingly, Nicholas tried to erase the borders that earlier authorities had drawn between learned and popular, licit and superstitious practices. Where others had distinguished low, practical magic from high, theoretically sophisticated astrology, Nicholas treated them as identical and condemned both: “The enchanters who want to enclose a spirit in a fingernail or a glass, are fools, for a spirit cannot be enclosed in a body. The astrologers with their imaginings are fools: ‘Nothing corporeal can act on something spiritual.’”15 He thus lumped together popular forms of incantation and divination, which required no technical knowledge, with the most erudite, technical forms of divination, which rested on a deep philosophical and mathematical foundation—withering both with one blast of invective. Nicholas admitted he could not treat all the technical problems connected with these matters—like the question of providence and foreknowledge—in detail in a sermon. But he also made clear that he saw the whole world of magical practices as unified—and as inspired by the devil.

The Magic of Christianity

Like the social historians of the last two generations, Nicholas emphasized the connections between high and low and those between lay and clerical practices and beliefs. Like the historians, too, he saw the church itself as connected, in some ways, to the culture of magic. Its liturgical, processional, and eucharistic rituals included many practices that magicians and others could appropriate for their own diabolic ends. Official forms of religious life provided templates for the creation of illicit, surrogate rituals.16 Like contemporary historians of religion, finally, Nicholas saw little reason to distinguish, at the level of experience and practice (as opposed to that of theology) between magic and religion. J. G. Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, argued that religion entreats, while magic compels.17 Later scholars, from Andrew Lang to the British social anthropologists of the twentieth century, have made clear that these distinctions did not hold.18 Christian congregations acted as if they could compel the saints to aid them, and magicians entreated angels—or devils—to help them, in the knowledge that a single error could enable the devil to take them away. Nicholas recognized these similarities in the means used by two churches, one God’s and one the devil’s, locked in competition with one another and each dedicated to achieving its own ends.

The church of the late fourteenth and fifteenth century attracted sharp criticism from Nicholas and other reformers. Many of the secular priests who served its parishes were poorly trained, and its monastic and mendicant orders were riven by bitter theological strife. But it also exercised a powerful appeal. The discipline, order, and beauty of the mass, the splendor of festivals, and the orderly rhythms of the liturgical year captivated most Europeans, as they had for centuries, and made them a potentially willing audience for those who could claim a still higher spiritual power.19 Materializing across Europe were mystics like Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, holy women like Santa Francesca Romana, controversial visionaries like Joan of Arc and “living saints” for whose dramatic presence, living on the Eucharist and healing the sick, Italian princes competed. God, who directly inspired them, enabled them to do anything from curing wounds to ending civil wars to predicting the future.20 In some ways, the church’s practices made it seem more (not less) probable that magical props and rituals might possess some of the powers that their practitioners claimed.

Spiritual powers took on increasingly striking material forms in the century that led up to the Reformation. For more than a millennium, Christians had collected relics—portions of holy individuals and objects that they had touched. Once translated—the technical term—to a permanent resting place, the bones of the saints, fragrant and uncorrupted, carried out more miracles than their owners had while alive.21 In the fifteenth century, the emperors and other great lords of the Holy Roman Empire began to build relic collections on a new scale. The imperial collection, which included the Holy Lance, the spear used to wound Jesus in the side, went to Nuremberg. There it was displayed once a year on a massive temporary platform, heavily guarded from the public who were left gawking upward at the reliquaries three stories above their heads.22 The impressive collection at Bamberg Cathedral, by contrast, went on show only once every seven years. On that condition, the Council of Basel decreed, everyone who visited them would receive release from Purgatory for five years and two hundred days.23 Prints spread the fame of these collections and the rituals that made their grace available throughout the empire.

Reliquaries dramatized the power of the bones they held. Sculpted busts, arms, and legs held the corresponding bones of the saints, which visitors could peep at through crystal windows. In other cases, ostrich eggs and shells were mounted on stands, so skillfully wrought that visitors were challenged to work out where nature left off and art began. Manuscript and printed inventories laid out hundreds of images of monstrances, skulls, and other holy remains, ordered in neat categories, material or formal: relics of Jesus, relics of Mary, relics of the Apostles, relics of the Martyrs, in one case, or crosses, busts, and other forms of reliquary in another.24 The immense collection of Frederick the Wise was displayed once a year and publicized by a printed catalogue illustrated with woodcuts by Lucas Cranach.25 New relics kept on arriving: some from the Mediterranean trade, centered on Venice; some as gifts from Greek or Turkish rulers; some as local discoveries.26 And they still had power. In 1430, Augustinian friars brought the relics of Saint Augustine’s mother, Monica, from Ostia to Rome. When her body entered the city on Palm Sunday, according to a humanist devoted to Monica, Maffeo Vegio, demoniacs were freed from their devils and lepers cleansed of their disease. Joyous crowds gathered.27 Monica was temporarily laid to rest in the now-vanished church of Saint Trifone in Posterula, which belonged to the Augustinian order. Miracles continued. The blacksmith who crafted the ironwork for her tomb had his sight restored, and his wife, after praying at the tomb, conceived a child.28 If these objects could possess such powers, could talismans and rings have them as well?

1.1 Lucas Cranach’s catalog of the relic collection of Frederick the Wise of Saxony, 1510. Art Institute of Chicago.

Learned Magic: The Case of Astrology

Nicholas rejected learned magic, for the most part, on principle. He referred regularly to earlier authorities, on whom he claimed to base much of his sermon: “As to the ways in which this diabolic sect started up at the beginning of Creation itself and was passed on to later members through books, see Roger Bacon.”29 One learned art in particular worried him: astrology. For the astrologers, Nicholas noted, had tried to include in their system of explanation and prediction not just the events of everyday life but also the Incarnation itself: “With great zeal others have written about this astrologically, like the Arab Messalaha [Masha’allah] and others, that the son of God who was to be made flesh had to be born of a virgin, so that both the incarnation and the birth would lie outside the normal bounds of nature. For he said, ‘There will rise in the first face of Virgo [the first ten degrees of the zodiacal sign Virgo] a virgin, giving milk to a boy, etc.’ Others did this through other conjunctions, as Ovid narrates in On the Hag [a medieval pseudo-Ovidian work] and so on.”30

What Nicholas referred to here and elsewhere, in his discussions of astrology, was one of the most dramatic episodes in the medieval European reception of Greek and Islamic learning. In the early Middle Ages, simple forms of astrology were regularly practiced in the Latin West, mostly by clerics, who used them to form and regulate the church’s calendar, to let blood, and even to predict the immediate future.31 But in the twelfth century and after, radically new intellectual species invaded, and enlarged, the modest ecological niche that religious and therapeutic calendars had previously dominated. Translators rendered into Latin a vast range of astrological texts, some originally composed in Greek, others written by Jews and Arabs in later centuries.32 These included Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, written in the second century CE. An exemplary textbook, orderly and lucid, it offered a straightforward, largely Aristotelian theoretical account of how astrology worked and described in grueling taxonomic detail the qualities and influence of each planet. A vast range of related works came with it, like the Centiloquium, falsely ascribed to Ptolemy. These gave more direct access to astrological methods and their application—and sometimes compared them, without offering any criticism, to such magical forms of prediction as the examination of shoulder blades.33

Many of these books were attractive nuisances: appealingly titled and promising great power to their readers, they were often anonymous or ascribed to improbable authors. Using them required a massive effort of sifting, cataloging, and evaluation. The magical experts of the thirteenth century—William of Auvergne, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon—found themselves plunged into a cold and murky ocean of technical literature. The origins and nature of any specimen could prove as hard to chart as those of an Atlantic current. Working in Paris—or in Amiens, in the nearby collection of Richard de Fournival—they sorted through mounds of texts, spurious and genuine, modern and ancient: Ptolemy alone, for example, was represented both by the authentic Tetrabiblos and by the spurious Centiloquium, and Hermes Trismegistus by the more-or-less authentic Asclepius and many technical works of later origin.

1.2 A reader checks off items on Albertus Magnus’s list of books on talismans, which he claims to have read so that he would know how to mock those who employed them. Albertus Magnus, Speculum astronomiae (Nuremberg, 1493–1496), sig. b recto; Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 4 Inc.s.a. 79 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

The Dominican polymath Albertus Magnus—or, less likely, one of his contemporaries—elaborated in the Mirror of Astronomy a kind of bibliographical essay, dedicated to the vital task of sorting out which works had lasting value and which were useless or even dangerous.34 Even for those subjects that he discussed reluctantly, Albertus offered detailed lists of sources. These supplied not only titles but also the first lines of the texts in question—a vital tool for identifying texts in an age of manuscripts, when books circulated without title pages or other standardized bearers of bibliographical information. After describing the ways to make talismans, he admitted that the subject left him somewhat at a loss: “These are the two sorts of necromantic images, which (as I have said) presume to usurp the noble name of astronomy for themselves; and a long time ago I inspected many of these books, but since I shrank with horror from them, I do not have perfect memory regarding their number, titles, incipits or contents or their authors.” Nonetheless he listed dozens of them, and when he finally ran out of steam, he remarked that “These are the books which I can remember now, although I may have seen many others of them”—clear evidence that he knew the necromantic literature far better than he would ever formally admit.35

The Franciscan Roger Bacon also took a systematic interest in astrology. He approached the subject critically, warning the student to rely only on original sources and to probe their reliability. One of his favorite texts was the Secret of Secrets ascribed to Aristotle, on which he drew up a commentary. Bacon compared numerous manuscripts. He noted that out of four copies he had seen in Oxford, none contained the section on how to use the power of the planets to change the character of a people, though “at Paris I had perfect copies.”36 And he warned that many magical texts had attained their notable ability to survive and cross borders by adopting false papers—the names of apparently famous and reliable authors: “Whatever they say, that Solomon composed this or that, or other wise men, is to be denied. For the authority of the church and of the wise does not accept books like this, but seducers, who fool the world. For they compose new books, and multiply new inventions, as we know by experience. And then, so that they may attract men even more strongly, they give their books celebrated titles, and impudently ascribe them to great authors.”37 As we will see, the vigor of these condemnations did not stop Nicholas from worrying that Bacon himself had fallen victim to the devil’s tricks.

Albertus, Roger, and their colleagues in Sicily, Rome, and elsewhere saw themselves as purifying and renewing a great tradition of classical and Islamic learning. They applied their own terminology and conceptual apparatus to the principles of Ptolemy’s astrology. He had distinguished between astronomy, which yielded precise and rigorous predictions about the movement of the planets, and astrology, which could offer only approximate guidance to the effects of these movements on the messy world of the elements below the sphere of the moon. Albertus Magnus brought Ptolemy up to date. He classified astrology as a middle science (scientia media), a hybrid form of knowledge that applied mathematics to natural philosophy, thus connecting two distinct forms of demonstrative knowledge in a single discipline. By doing so, he transformed astrology from one mathematical science among many into a central node on the map of learning itself: the one discipline that could connect the different parts of the universe.38

Nicholas set out to rectify these errors, as he saw them. He believed that Ptolemy himself, the greatest ancient astronomer, had admitted that astrological predictions were necessarily imprecise. Nicholas quoted this passage against its author (in fact, he was quoting the Centiloquium, a pseudo-Ptolemaic work translated from an Arabic original): “To tell the future is to engage in divination, because that is appropriate for God alone. The astronomers go outside their boundaries and fall into an evil sense, and they are seduced by the devil in their judgments. ‘The wise man will rule the stars. All judgments,’ according to Ptolemy, ‘are between the necessary and the possible.’ Many things come into play, like imaginations and presages, etc. … For the devil, who often persuades men either to feel great penitence, so that he may kill them, or to preaching things for the safety of the people, can be recognized, because ‘he is a liar.’”39 Even the best of the ancient astrologers had enmeshed themselves in a web of self-contradictions. Worse still, according to Nicholas, they had failed to see the devil at work.

As was often the case, he drew his information from an intermediary source. But he appropriated it to his own ends. Bacon, whom Nicholas referred to with respect, provided him with the material he quoted from pseudo-Ptolemy—but in a context radically different from anything those who heard Nicholas’s sermon could have imagined. Bacon insisted that the planets directly influenced only the body.40 This could in turn affect, but not determine, the free decisions of the rational soul. Hence astrological predictions could never claim certainty: “In general, then, in our examination of what is to be considered as the view of the philosophers in this matter we note that Ptolemy states in the beginning of the Centilogium, ‘The astronomer should not state a matter specifically but in general terms, as one who views something from a distance,’ and he adds, ‘The judgments that I give you are between the necessary and the impossible.’”41 Bacon quoted pseudo-Ptolemy, and his medieval Arabic commentator Haly, to show that true astrology was not determinist. He did so precisely in order to defend astrology against the attacks of theologians and canon lawyers, who had condemned the art without studying it directly: “Since, then, the most serious charge against them [the astrologers] is the error in regard to judgment as though they wished in an infallible way to contend with divine certitude, as they are charged by people in general, let the nobler philosophers be cited.”42 Nicholas, in other words, misrepresented the central methodological arguments of scholastic astrology as condemning the whole pursuit. Even Bacon’s analysis, he told his congregation, represented a wrongheaded effort to find wheat in what was really all chaff. From his point of view, after all, Bacon was wrong to hold that the stars could influence the soul, even indirectly.

An energetic and perceptive scholar, Nicholas filled the margins of many of the books in his great library with careful annotation. He subjected the Koran, the Donation of Constantine, and other texts to brilliant, if prejudiced, exercises in historical criticism.43 When he denounced astrology and misrepresented Bacon, he did so for good reason and in his own terms. The ways in which astrology was portrayed and applied, in the learned literature he read and in the practices of men he knew, disturbed him deeply. To that extent—if not in principle—Nicholas’s condemnation of the discipline rested on a clear-eyed perception of its nature.

Since ancient times, astrologers had tried to show that they could explain past events as well as predict future ones. Among the oldest horoscopes in a Greek or Latin text are those of Romulus and Rome, which the diviner Lucius Tarrutius of Firmum drew up at the request of the Roman scholar Varro, in the first century BCE.44 In Sasanian Persia, in Byzantium, in Jewish circles in the Arabic world, and in the Islamic world itself, astrologers had extended these efforts, drawing up horoscopes for cities and empires as well as individuals.45 But astrologers had also claimed to shed light on Christ’s birth in two distinct ways. On the one hand, as we have seen, they noted that a virgin, giving milk to a child, had risen in the first ten degrees of the sign of Virgo. Here they referred to a complex set of doctrines and images, which ultimately derived from ancient Egyptian traditions. In order to tell time at night, the Egyptians had divided the night sky along the zodiac into groups of stars and mapped them on coffin lids. In the Hellenistic world, these groups of stars were reorganized further into individual constellations called “decans.” Each of them rose with and governed ten degrees of a sign of the zodiac. In varied, more or less anthropomorphic forms, ascribed by Hellenistic sources to the sages of ancient India, Persia, and Babylon, these stellar divinities played a substantial role in Greek and Roman astrology. As it happened, the first decan of Virgo was a young woman. The Arab astrologer Albumasar (Abu Ma’shar) connected her with the Incarnation: “And in the first face [decan] of Virgo rises a virgin … and she is a fair and honorable and attractive virgin, with luxuriant hair and a pretty face, and she has two stalks in her hand, and she sits on a seat and feeds the boy, giving him nourishment in the place which is called Abril. And a certain people calls the boy Jesus.”46 Albertus Magnus, Richard de Fournival, and Roger Bacon all seized on this passage to show that God had written Christ’s birth into the order of the stars. Nicholas—whose summary of this argument we encountered before—winced when he saw diabolic means used to celebrate the Virgin.

Equally distressing to Nicholas was a second astrological doctrine, one to which Bacon had devoted even more attention. Since Saturn takes about 30 years and Jupiter about 12 years to revolve once about the zodiac, they meet in conjunction (come within 8 degrees of each other) every 20 years or so. Twenty years later, they meet again, 8 signs or 240 degrees along the zodiac, and 20 years later, another 8 signs along the zodiac. Each of these meetings is known as a “great conjunction.” For a long period—usually set at 200 or 240 years—these conjunctions occur in one “triplicity,” a group of three signs of the zodiac. Then they slip onward to another triplicity, an event marked by a “greater conjunction.” After 800 or 960 years the whole process repeats itself with a “greatest conjunction.” Each of the triplicities, by ancient doctrine, corresponds to one of the four elements of which the sublunary world exists: earth, air, fire and water. The movement of the conjunctions was thus bound to a steady, mathematical rhythm and laden with profound cosmological meaning.47

1.3 Albrecht Dürer, Masha’allah studying a globe (1504). Masha’allah, De scientia motus orbis (Nuremberg, 1504), title page. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 4 Math 384 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

In the course of the Middle Ages, Islamic and Christian thinkers affixed a good deal of historical and human flesh to these dry quantitative bones. As philosophers and theologians, Abu’mashar and al-Kindi, Bacon and d’Ailly differed on many points. But all of them agreed on the central idea that the planetary conjunctions marked the turning points in human history. All of them also found it possible, like poets, to entertain contradictory ideas and still function: they asserted the independence of religion, or at least true religion, from the star. Yet they still drew up genitures for the birth of their own religious figures. Through a series of bold correlations and speculations, they traced the origins of each major religion to a planetary conjunction.

Bacon argued that only six great religions could exist, each of them presided over by the conjunction of a planet with Jupiter—Judaism, for example, was the religion of Saturn. Mercury, the planet that came into conjunction with Jupiter and announced the birth of Christ, seemed to Bacon clearly appropriate to its supremely important task. The planet’s complex motions, which had caused Ptolemy and later astronomers endless difficulties, “has reference, as they say, to the law that contains difficult articles and hidden truths, of which kind is the Christian law. But because Mercury signifies writing and writers, and depth of knowledge contained in profound books, and eloquence or sweetness of speech and tongue, oratory and its rapid flow, and the explanation of sentences, he indicates that this law will be defended by such authentic scriptures and by so many profound sciences and by such potency of eloquence, that it will always remain firm in its own strength.”48 Similarly, the moon, which would preside over the last church—that of the Antichrist—“has reference to necromancy and deceit, and therefore the law of the moon will be devoted to necromancy.” These precise correlations between sacred history and the skies, Bacon argued, should bring good Christians “great consolation.”

Bacon did more than explicate the rich network of symbolic forms that linked astrology to the history of religions. Like most astrologers, he joined to his effort to read the complex, densely layered language of the planets—a hermeneutics of the skies—a geometricized rationalism that traced their effects into every area of human life. Every celestial event was the vertex of a cone of rays that struck and changed the surface of the earth and those who lived on it. He was far from the only scholar to follow this trail. In this case, the Franciscan learned from a Dominican, Giles de Lessines, who had explored the connections between historical events and astronomical data with great precision and intelligence in a massive Summa on chronology.49 Exploiting, and sometimes appropriating, Giles’s work, Bacon showed that conjunctions and eclipses recorded in the sources could fix the dates of ancient events, including the birth of Christ. History became more precise; but its lessons became problematic and its status precarious. A great conjunction accompanied Alexander’s defeat of Darius and the translatio imperii (passage of imperial power) from the Persians to the Greeks. Ten revolutions of Saturn later, Jesus was born, and after a further ten revolutions came Mani, the founder of Manicheanism. The great conjunctions revealed themselves as the hands of a cosmic clock. But they were also the celestial causes of the earthly events they caused. Inspired, Bacon proposed a great project for both drawing every possible correlation in the past and projecting them into the future:

One can examine history at past periods, and study the effects of the heavens from the beginning of the world, as in the case of floods, earthquakes, pestilences, famines, comets, prodigies, and other things without number, which have happened both in human affairs and in nature. After he has gathered these facts, he should consult the tables and canons of astrology, and he will find that there are particular constellations corresponding to the effects in each case. He should then study with the help of tables similar constellations in future time, either near or remote according to his wish; and he will then be able to express judgments on the effects, because they will be similar to those in the past, since if we assume a cause the effect is taken for granted.50

Bacon, in other words, found in astrology the key that could unlock the secrets of the past, present, and future. It provided both a precise, unshakable chronology and a single, coherent causal explanation for the apparent chaos of events as presented in medieval chronicles.51

Convinced that Antichrist would soon arrive—since the law of Muhammad was nearing its end, and the Mongols, the race of Gog and Magog, had been released from their confinement—Bacon proclaimed that the church desperately needed a complete, rigorous, and accessible guide to the movement of the planets over time. He even set out to put it into effect himself, trying to create a table of planetary motions “from the beginning of the world down to the end, so that a man could examine everything that was in the heavens every day, just as we look up the feasts of the saints in the calendar, and then every day we could consider the causes of everything that changes on earth in the heavens, and look for similar arrangements of the heavens in the past, and find similar effects; and we could do the same for the future.”52 His efforts failed for practical reasons, as he bitterly reported to Pope Clement IV. Prescient as usual, he saw that he would need a research team to carry out this work: “I have often set about composing those tables, but I could not complete them because of lack of funds and the stupidity of those with whom I had to do. For properly one should have ten or twelve boys instructed in the common rules and tables of astronomy, and when they knew how to operate properly, then for a whole year they would have to find the motions of the individual planets for every day and hour.”53 For all his frustration, Roger remained confident in the validity of astronomy and astrology and saw them as the basis on which he could rear the new structure of his scientia experimentalis—a new form of inquiry into nature that would supplant theology itself in determining which studies were licit and which were not.54

Others supplied, in a rough and ready form, what Bacon could not. Though Oresme and Henry of Hesse tried to refute the astrologers’ claims, enthusiasm for their art grew in the later Middle Ages. The Black Death sparked interest in astrology. John of Ashenden and others circulated predictions, which they claimed to have issued before the plague broke out and in which they attributed it to the great conjunction that took place in 1345. The Great Schism in the church, which inspired many with the belief that Antichrist was on the move, had similar effects. From the mid-fourteenth century onward, accordingly, astrologers like Anthony of Mount Ulm and theologians like Pierre d’Ailly drew up retrospective astrological surveys of the history of the world and extended these forward into the future. Sometimes they started at Creation and sometimes with the conjunction that supposedly heralded the flood (and actually marked the Indian era of the Kaliyuga, 3102 BCE) in the Alfonsine Tables, the standard medieval reference work for astronomers. They connected great events with these. And they fluently explained away any discrepancies—for example, the fact that the conjunction before Christ’s death was not one of the greatest—on the grounds that the conjunctions sometimes took a long time to act and had different effects on different peoples and places.55

When Nicholas looked over the astrological literature of the last two centuries, he recognized not only the precise limits that astrologers had accepted in theory but also the determinist rhetoric that stamped their study of religion in practice. More important still, he knew that this rhetoric had infiltrated the highest levels of the church itself. One of the most prominent participants in the Council of Konstanz, which inspired Cusanus’s early commitment to the Conciliar movement, was Pierre d’Ailly. He devoted much of his time at the Council to compiling an ever more detailed set of correlations between planetary movements and historical events, past and future. D’Ailly scored at least one goal, moreover, when he predicted—absolutely correctly, for a French Catholic—that Antichrist would probably arrive in 1789 CE. His work rested in principle, as Laura Smoller has shown, on Bacon’s Opus maius. Like Bacon, D’Ailly firmly believed that the great conjunctions were the ground bass for the music of time itself. In his Concordance of Astronomical Truth with Theology, he made the general point starkly clear: “All astronomers agree that there never was one of those great conjunctions without some great and notable change on this earth.”56 Like Bacon, d’Ailly found astrology consoling, at least in a Christian sense. It confirmed his late belief—inspired by his success in steering the church to reunion at Konstanz—that Antichrist was not, in fact, already waiting in the wings of history’s theater.

If the star Absinth had converted the original Magi to better ways of thinking and believing, the Christian magi of Nicholas’s time had been misled by apparently authoritative texts, and some of them occupied high positions in the church itself. He directed his attack, in other words, not just at past texts but also at current practices—and not just at marginal figures but also at central ones. When he cited Nicolaus Magni’s work against astrology—which was completed just before Christmas in 1416, very likely at Konstanz itself—he took sides in an internal debate, with Jean Gerson and Nicolaus Magni and against d’Ailly.57 When he condemned Bacon’s theses, he also condemned d’Ailly’s applications of them and identified the Cardinal himself as a magus.

Astrological Practices

Nicholas had more than astrological history in mind when he trained his guns on contemporary astrologers. He insisted that their art was intimately, even organically, connected with active magical practices: prayers and burnings of incense to the planets, for example. Surprisingly, Bacon’s case—which he knew well—suggests that Cusanus was absolutely right. In principle, Bacon despised magic. As sharply as Cusanus, he insisted that “many books are to be shunned, because of their verses, and characters, and prayers, and spells, and sacrifices, and things of this sort, for they are purely magical.” Christians who condemned astrology did so, in fact, because the magi had defiled it with genuinely illicit practices: “But accursed magicians have brought the greatest discredit on this branch of science, since not only in their evil practices have they abused characters and incantations written by the wise against harmful things, but they have added false incantations and worthless and fraudulent characters, by which men are seduced.”58 Only at the low level where magicians and old women chanted their spells, Bacon claimed, was astrology infected by magic.

Yet Bacon himself admitted that “the wise” had composed spells and devised characters. And in fact, the Arabic texts that flooded north from Iberia and sometimes westward from the Crusader kingdoms in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries included more than theoretical textbooks. There was also, for example, the Picatrix—a manual of ceremonial magic, based on Indian as well as Greek, Persian, Syrian, and Arabic sources, which probably took shape in the ninth or tenth century. This too presented itself as a work of learning: the author wrote that he had gone through “224 works of my predecessors, the ancient sages, word for word, and from all of them I composed as their flower and lily, so to speak, this book, spending six years of continuous work on the task.”59 It embedded magical practices in a coherent cosmology, tracing the powers of the stars back to the one Creator that had brought them into being. The Picatrix thus offered Latin readers something exciting: a celestial form of magic that connected the rigorous cosmology of the astrologers to the granular practices of magic. Its ascetic, erudite practitioners could learn “the works of the spirits of the planets, of the mingling of the stars, and generally of the assembling of the things necessary for an image, so that the image may receive the virtues of the planets: for example, burnings of incense, and the foods from which the operator must abstain so that his work may easily reach completion.”60 The Picatrix explained not just how to fabricate amulets that could draw on the power of the stars and planets but also how to give a rigorous and learned cosmological explanation for their powers.

Bacon’s eager response to such practices helps to explain the horror that his work inspired in Nicholas. Roger regularly denounced “magic” and “magicians.” “False mathematics”—the form of astrological practice that involved using “characters, verses, conjurings, superstitious sacrifices and various sorts of deceit” to influence and draw down the power of the stars—met with his special contempt.61 He defined it, along with divination and other pursuits, as associated with magic and denounced its practitioners, who “attributed to mathematics the miraculous works that proved the Christian faith, saying that Christians were mathematicians and magi who seduced the people.”62 And he left the impression that lies like these filled what he called “magical books.”63 Yet one of the most popular works on this sort of mathematics—the Secret of Secrets, ascribed to Aristotle—fascinated Bacon.64 This complex treatise, at once a mirror for princes and an astrologer’s desk reference in the form of a letter, made clear that astrology could provide a guide to every aspect and every moment of daily life. At least one monarch, Charles V of France, shared Bacon’s taste for the book. A French translation of it appears in a manuscript written for him.65 Aristotle made clear to his onetime pupil, Alexander the Great, that astrological talismans promised extraordinary political power. Bacon—and the author of the Secret of Secrets—agreed that astrology offered more rigorous knowledge of whole lands than it could for individuals. This point was not merely theoretical: in fact, it had important practical implications. In the course of the Secret of Secrets, Alexander asked Aristotle whether he should exterminate an evil race. No, the philosopher replied: Alexander should use a talisman to transform the celestial influences that formed them. Here, Bacon wrote in his commentary on the text, “he touches on a great secret. For he wants Alexander to change the bad qualities of the earth and air of those regions into good ones, and that their evil characters thus be changed into good ones.”66

Bacon knew that he was treading on dangerous ground here. He found that the section on talismans did not appear in many manuscripts of the Secret of Secrets. He explained its absence as he explained the theologians’ attacks on astrology, as the result of ignorance and malice: “But asses reject this because of the greatness of the wisdom involved, and because of the nature of the language. For the translator gives some words which magicians use, as I explained earlier. And many copies do not have this material, since fools did not wish to write it, but erased it from their books.”67 The very fact that some scribes and owners had omitted this passage underlined its importance.

It was not only—or chiefly—the authority of erudite texts that inspired Bacon with the sense that astrological talismans could play a vital role in the immediate future of the church. He compiled his systematic work, the Opus maius, as well as his commentary on the Secret of Secrets, in the years just after 1250. The vast Mongol empire that dominated Eurasia was expanding westward. Bacon, as Amanda Power has shown, devoted much of his energy to finding ways to defend Christendom against its enemies.68 He feared that the Mongols were using astrology to further their progress. As he peered at the enemies of the church, reading reports of their powers, he found himself afraid that they had already pulled ahead of Christians in what amounted to the first arms race aimed at dominating space.

Worse still, Bacon believed that the Mongols had already sent agents to the West, equipped with sophisticated methods for manipulating their enemies. In 1212, for example, someone had led the children of France to their destruction. And in 1251 Bacon himself had witnessed another Mongol agent in action, using an astrological device to terrifying effect:

In our times the shepherd leader stirred up all Germany and France, and drew to him a multitude of men, and had favor in the sight of the whole body of the laity in contempt of the clergy and to the confusion of the Church. He stated to Queen Blanche that he was going to her son beyond the sea, with such words deceiving a very wise woman. The wise should not doubt that they were emissaries of the Tartars and Saracens, and that they had some means by which they fascinated the people. I saw him with my own eyes carrying openly in his hand something as though it were a sacred object, and in the way a man would carry relics, and he went with bare feet, and was always surrounded by a host of armed men, yet so dispersed in the fields that he could be seen by all who met him, making an ostentatious display of that which he carried in his hand.69

This scene stands out in Bacon’s work, for its vividness and for his insistence on presenting it as something he had seen firsthand.

What Bacon witnessed was the movement of the Pastoureaux—the shepherds’ and peasants’ crusade, preached by the Master of Hungary, which set out to rescue Louis IX from captivity but was eventually broken up by military action after it fell into disorder.70 Another contemporary, the historian Matthew Paris, described the Pastoureaux in some detail. He agreed that their leader always carried something in his clenched hand, which he described as a “letter and mandate from the blessed Virgin.”71 Bacon interpreted the document he glimpsed rather differently: as an astrological device. After all, he pointed out, the Tartars had defeated an overwhelmingly larger army of Turks, “which they could not have done through their fighting power, as is clear, and therefore they used works of wisdom, and especially astronomy, by which they profess that they are ruled and led in all things.”72 The Saracens, similarly, made heavy use of astronomy, which their wise men knew how to practice.73 Christian wise men were certain that they had some craft by which they enchanted the people.74 Their “emissary,” the leader of the Pastoureaux, carried an object with him as reverently as if it were a holy relic. This, Bacon’s account implicitly suggested, was an astronomical talisman of the immensely powerful sort described in the Secret of Secrets. He had witnessed, he believed, a foretaste of the celestial magic that Antichrist would use to attack the Christian church, and he did his best to persuade the authorities to adopt similar measures in their own defense. Experience combined with reading to persuade Bacon that talismans could be charged with power and used by virtuous rulers for good ends.

No wonder Bacon reacted with such enthusiasm to the “maximum secretum” Aristotle had to offer in the Secretum Secretorum—a talisman or amulet that could not only make men obey but also change their characters for the better. No wonder either that Nicholas shrank in horror as he read the works of Bacon and his followers. For all their erudition and theoretical rejection of magic, they had genuinely believed that astrology offered the key to world history, practical guidance for everyday life, and magical help for the church itself. They threatened Christendom with subversion, both with their theories and with their practices—a threat that seemed all the more dire, perhaps, because their motives were so altruistic. Astrology and astrologers were everywhere in the later Middle Ages and after, offering advice to the good and the great, most of whom listened eagerly, as well as to ordinary people. Michael Ryan has revealed Aragon as a “kingdom of stargazers” whose occult interests did not prevent them from wielding great influence; Monica Azzolini has shadowed the Sforza dukes of Milan in the archives and shown that every political and medical decision, great or small, rested on the court astrologer’s advice; and Lauren Kassell has shown from exemplary case studies how these practices remained central to everyday life in the sixteenth century and after.75 From Nicholas’s point of view, even the most learned astrologers inhabited a spiritual dark zone where no Christian should go. From their own standpoint, however—as Bacon’s case and the others we have looked at more briefly confirm—matters looked very different. Bacon and his colleagues occupied influential positions at universities and courts. They regarded certain forms of astrology—even the ones that most horrified Nicholas—as worthy and reasonable continuations of their effort to understand the natural and divine worlds. They even believed that they could use these to support Christianity against its enemies. An observer with Nicholas’s convictions had plenty of reason to worry as he surveyed the practices and claims of learned magi over the last two centuries.

Everyday Magic

Nicholas did not limit his survey—or his criticism—to learned astrologers who would have denied that they were magicians. He also denounced, at length, a lower level of magic. Like high magic, it involved books; but it also involved all sorts of props, from liquified lead to be dropped into a bowl of water to wheels for finding treasure (and, often, books or papers whose writing lent them magical powers). Like astrology, magical divination could be analyzed and its components classified. But all of its constituent parts were damnable: “The forms of divination, which the devil provides, are many: aeromancy, pyromancy, hydromancy, geomancy and so on …. All of this is prohibited.”76

How much Nicholas knew about the details of this sort of magic his sermon does not make clear. Earlier theologians and canonists, like Nicholas Magni, had condemned every one of these practices. A somewhat later critic of the magical tradition, the fifteenth-century physician Johann Hartlieb, described in detail a world of half-learned practices that strikingly resemble those that Nicholas briefly mentioned. Hartlieb, a well-traveled man and serious book collector who lived from around 1400 to 1468, studied at German and Italian universities and later worked for the rulers of Bavaria. He served as a counselor and physician to Albrecht III. He also flirted with the arts of divination, as his treatise on chiromancy shows. He wrote his Book of the Forbidden Arts late in life, around 1460, at the request of Markgrave Johannes of Brandenburg. In it Hartlieb laid out in a precise taxonomy, modeled on that of the liberal arts, what he defined as the seven forbidden arts: necromancy, or diabolic magic; geomancy, or prediction by throwing dice; hydromancy, or prediction by examining water; aeromancy, or the examination of wind direction and sneezes; pyromancy, or seeing visions in fires made from wood cut on a special day; chiromancy, or palm reading; and scapulomancy, or the use of shoulder blades and other bones for divination.77

1.4 Johannes Hartlieb presents his work on the interpretation of human hands to Duchess Ann of Bavaria. Chiromantia (ca. 1488–1490); Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Xylogr. 36 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Hartlieb’s system of classification was not entirely new: Nicholas and many others had followed Isidore of Seville in speaking of four arts of divination: aeromancy, geomancy, hydromancy, and pyromancy. But Hartlieb stated again and again that he drew his material not only from legal and theological texts that denounced magic but also from the practitioners he himself had interviewed and referred to as “masters in the art.” Many of these masters, especially in pyromancy, were women—not a wild assertion, or necessarily a misogynistic one, at a time when women still practiced many crafts in German cities. Hartlieb traveled far and worked hard to locate and question them. He learned that some of them had signed pacts with the devil, while others were simply tricksters.78 Frank Fürbeth’s close study of Hartlieb’s work suggests that he—like Nicholas—saw almost all the forms of magic he surveyed as requiring diabolic help. He explored them in order to reveal the hidden mortal dangers that they posed to the magician’s soul.79

Hartlieb described and classified these practices with an entomologist’s fierce attention to detail and color. He named the names of spirits—like Salathiel, the chief water spirit—and recorded specific spells. In order to fly on a horse, as Faustus did, one must write secret words like “debra ebra” on oneself with bat’s blood. “This practice is widely known among princes,” Hartlieb commented.80 He also reviewed such real and dubious works of magic as the Picatrix, the Book of Raziel, the work of the thirteenth-century Hasid Eleazer of Worms, and the Book of the Three Magi, which is known only from his testimony.81 Practitioners of the magical arts, by his account, cited such texts to support their practices. And they were dangerous, for their contents were partly true and their presentation appealing. “I have seen much in this book,” Hartlieb wrote of the Book of the Three Magi, “that causes even me to wonder how it might be so true and proper.”82

All forms of divination, Hartlieb concluded, ultimately involved the same mortal sin. They all relied not on the supposed words of power and rituals that their practitioners carried out but on the devil. Sometimes divinatory practice wrongly treated natural phenomena as supernatural. When a diviner threw molten lead into water and used its new color and shape to predict the future, he was only reading things into the changes that were caused naturally by the degree of heat to which the metal was subjected and the altitude from which it was dropped. The devil, of course, could make such predictions come true—when he wanted to do so—but otherwise remained aloof. In other cases, diabolic influence was more evidently at work.83 Only the devil could make visions appear in a small boy’s fingernail—a form of divination that Hartlieb described in particularly vivid detail. And the same devil who enabled this technique to work, when he wished, could also disable it at well.

A later section of the work makes clear how pervasive these techniques seemed to Hartlieb. A form of scapulomancy that he described as particularly popular required use of the bones of the goose breast that just about everybody ate on St Martin’s Day (or eve), November 11. As unbelief had grown in recent times, he said, not just laypeople but prelates, archbishops, abbots, and others—those who in other respects lived impeccable religious lives—had begun to use their goose breasts to foretell the weather: “The goose breast,” he reflected sarcastically, “can do all that.”84 In 1455 Hartlieb had even met a famous warrior who made a firm prediction, based on his goose breast, that a harsh winter was coming. When Hartlieb tried to contradict him, he insisted: “so long as the Teutonic knights followed the bone, they had great standing and honor.”

Yet Hartlieb’s relation to the full panoply of practices that Nicholas rejected was not simple. He told the warrior that if the Teutonic Knights really based all their successes on the goose breast, they were in trouble. His own prediction of a mild winter, based not on a diabolic art but simply on good scientific astrology, proved correct. Saturn’s entry into a fiery sign showed that there would be no cold winter for three years.85 Hartlieb studied the low forms of magic that he rejected with eager fascination as well as horror. Speaking of necromancy, Hartlieb raised the question of whether one could summon the dead man to come back within thirty days and describe his situation: “O,” he wrote, “I dare not say what I myself have researched and seen and heard, for I am still in doubt.”86

Hartlieb was a competent observer. His account squares with the evidence of magical manuscripts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Of the ars notoria, for example, Hartlieb said vaguely that it used “some words, figures and characters to learn all the arts.”87 This account is perfectly accurate: many of the textbooks of the ars notoria that survive in manuscript offered techniques for gaining knowledge of the liberal arts quickly. These were couched, just as Hartlieb suggested, in strange alphabets that sometimes took on decorative functions, as illuminators played with them.88 As Richard Kieckhefer has shown, a manuscript now in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek offers a long series of “experiments” in most of the techniques that Hartlieb describes: ways to cause someone to fall in love, to deceive an enemy, to predict the future.89 A spell for making a dead man apparently come back to life—a practice Hartlieb described, as we have seen—included an exclamation rather like Hartlieb’s: “This experiment is very valuable and should be concealed, for it is extremely powerful.”90 Like Nicholas, Hartlieb insisted that the borders between magic and religion were slender, even nonexistent, and described magicians as worshipping powers other than the Christian God. The Munich manuscript—which in this respect followed the tradition of the Picatrix and other, more erudite manuals of ceremonial magic—also instructs practitioners to lead an ascetic life, to burn incense, and to invoke the help of angels by the dozen (all of them named), as well as that of God himself.

The world of lower, literate magic that Hartlieb described, and from which the Munich manuscript emerges, seems to have been populated largely in the later Middle Ages by members of the clergy. Some belonged to what Kieckhefer has termed a “clerical underground”: students or priests without benefices, who hoped that magical skills could bring them an income and preferment, for which they could not otherwise hope, but sometimes higher clerics as well. Others had permanent places in well-endowed monastic orders and communities.91 Sophie Price has shown that the monks who belonged to Saint Augustine’s Abbey, an ancient and wealthy Benedictine house in Canterbury, assembled the largest collection of magic books in Europe.92 Ample evidence confirms that their techniques were popular in practice, especially in cities and at courts. Many accusations of necromancy were leveled at clerics. In 1406–1407, a group of priests was denounced for attacking Benedict XIII and the king of France with magical formulas and a box of spells actually turned up. But in 1409 Benedict himself was charged with necromancy at the Council of Pisa, and a book of spells materialized under his bed as well. It seems a different world from that of Bacon or d’Ailly: one in which clerics in search of opportunity descended the slippery slope from performing the church’s magic to moving outside it.93

And yet, the two worlds met at more than one point. Both genuinely required books. Raimundus de Puteo, a thirteenth-century magus whose clients included heretical men and women and high clerics, admitted as much to the inquisitors who interrogated him in 1277. He even described his book’s binding and cited its first line.94 Both forms of magic were intricately related to the Christian religion. And both relied on certain closely similar assumptions. For all his rejection of magic in all its forms, Bacon admitted that some words had power. Words, after all, were the most direct products of the human spirit: no wonder that they had a deeper and more powerful effect than anything else. Low magicians believed exactly the same thing. And they looked for these words, just as higher magi did, in the east—or that part of the east to which they had access. These practices, moreover, like the practices of astrology, survived and flourished in the sixteenth century. In England in the 1530s and 1540s, for example, as clerics spilled out of the dissolved religious houses, magical practices of every kind flourished, from the fashioning of magical rings to the use of astrological talismans to conjure spirits.95 The authors of such texts cheerfully combined their religion with their magic, conjuring spirits in one case by “all the relics of male and female saints which are in the whole world” and in another by their twelve names written “with the blood of a bat on the right side of a host.”96

Even Nicholas’s comprehensive and detailed survey missed what was perhaps the single most vital source for magic of the word. For centuries, Jews had served western Christians as moneylenders, medical practitioners, and, supposedly, magicians.97 In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Jews and their words of power came to be associated more and more with magic. Stories of their efforts to stab the Host or to use the blood of Christian boys for making matzo spread through the Holy Roman Empire, circulated by the powerful authorities who staged show trials and given even greater currency by printing and the woodblock images that made them vivid.98 No wonder that Hebrew names of God and the angels, long part of the magical tradition, appeared in manuscripts like the one in Munich. As late as 1527–1528, so Martin Luther recalled, a visitation of the Saxon churches had shown that many “village pasters” had “lots of books … with the names of the Tetragrammaton [the four-letter Hebrew name of God], Ananisapta and many stranger prayers, signs, names of angels and devils, which are certainly Hebrew.”99 True, Luther rejected such forms of magic with utter contempt. When a Jewish magician offered Albrecht of Hohenzollern a talisman “with strange characters that should protect him against cold iron,” only to be stabbed to death when Albrecht put his talisman to the test, Luther held that justice had been done. The Jew had learned “that his Schem Hamphoras, Tetragrammaton and other fine magic didn’t help him.”100 Yet he recognized that many others found Jewish magic perversely appealing.

The Lessons of the Magi

Magi appeared at many points in later medieval society. Some insisted that their practices were not magical at all, others admitted that they practiced magic. Some computed planetary positions, some stared at bones. Some hoped to enrich Christendom with new forms of knowledge, and some worshipped devils. Some engaged in all of these pursuits at once, and some of their clients certainly benefited from all of them. Pope Clement IV, a severe lawyer who worked for the ascetic king Louis IX of France, consulted Raimundus de Puteo at least twice—and supported the work of Roger Bacon, who dedicated the Opus tertium to him, as well.101

Scholars encountered magical practices of all sorts—or at least claimed that they did—in this period, and the rise of new scholarly methods in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries did not eliminate magic and divination from their concerns. Consider the testimony of one contemporary of Nicholas of Cusa—the learned humanist Gaspare of Verona, who taught groups of young men in Rome how to read and interpret Latin poetry.102 A committed classicist who valued his connections to such Roman power centers as the Curia of Nicholas V and the palace of Cardinal Capranica, Gaspare wrote with disdain of the ways of predicting the future mentioned by the Roman satirist Juvenal: “The divine law says much about the different kinds of prediction. They are prohibited, as are several forms of divination, such as necromancy, chiromancy, auguries, divination from entrails, divination by fire, auspices. And that is how it rightly dealt with the individual forms.”103 He underlined these words by citing an impressive example of the right way to deal with those who engaged in such filthy practices: “The exemplary Cardinal Capranica ordered that a certain woman, a witch and necromancer, who practiced that condemned art in the region of Perugia, should be burned. He could have done nothing better or more just, and indeed he is most just from the top of his head to the heels of his feet, a most prudent, most learned, and most profoundly wise prince.”104

Yet Gaspare also claimed a certain expertise in magical practices, even when he refused to discuss them—as when he remarked that he would leave discussion of “how poison is cooked up” to poisoners.105 He dedicated a long excursus to illiterate diviners in his native countryside, whose methods he praised unreservedly for their effectiveness:

I have seen certain old men in my countryside outside Verona, peasants, who, if someone lost an ass or a horse, could predict and immediately see where the lost possession war. After they recited their words and carried out certain rituals, a sort of star seemed to fall in the place in which the thing in question was being sought, and finally it was found. Once, when there were very violent storms, with thunder, lightning, and rain, one of these men predicted that there would suddenly be a thunderbolt, and it would strike the top of a certain mountain, and it happened just as he predicted. This illiterate and ignorant man was then in his eightieth year.106

Gaspare’s approval of this traditional form of divination—the sort that had been practiced by cunning men and women across Europe for centuries—evidently did not extend to more learned practices. In his will, he forbade his son to engage in a whole series of standard magical practices: “And Francesco, the son of the testator, must not venture to do any alchemy or to hunt for treasures or to follow any part of necromancy” on pain of losing his inheritance and receiving his father’s curse.107 Yet he recorded that he himself dug “a great cave, where he found marvelous minerals,” in the time of Pope Paul II.108

No generalization can cover Gaspare’s complex, contorted relation to the magical tradition—to say nothing of the whole sprawling, varied scene that Nicholas tried to survey. Three points, however, seem to emerge with special clarity. High and low pursuits touched one another—and touched the magical rituals of the church—at many points. Magic—and the complex group of other pursuits, including astrology, that were assigned to it—did not form a single, solid bloc of theories and practices but developed rapidly and provoked controversy at particular moments when writers and books came together: Paris in the mid-thirteenth century, Konstanz during the Council, 150 years later. At the same time, however, from the thirteenth century on, two forms of magic had established themselves in the world of books. One, classical in origin and densely erudite in texture, regularly attracted the interest of serious philosophers. The other, miscellaneous and diffuse, was chiefly studied and practiced at a lower social level. But these extremes converged more than once, in the libraries of those who wanted to root out all magical practices and in the lives of those who wanted assurance about the future—and, as we have seen, even in the works of learned astrologers. To that extent at least, Nicholas’s sermon offers surprisingly helpful guidance to the camp of his enemies. His enemies did exist, the practices he condemned were real. As he argued, a marriage of magical practice and learned tradition had already taken place—even if most of those he charged with the responsibility for these frightening errors would have denied that they practiced magic, even that of the Magi themselves. And he was not alone in thinking as he did. Ulrich of Strasburg, a student of Albertus Magnus, “wrote exuberantly in the 1260s,” as David Collins has pointed out, “that Albertus was ‘a man, divine in every sort of knowledge … and skilled in magic.’”109 In the fifteenth century, some Observant Dominicans wanted to see Albert canonized. But Dominicans were also driving a new campaign against witchcraft, which often involved treating learned magic and popular necromancy as Nicholas had: as organically connected. By the end of the century, supporters of Albert’s candidacy for sainthood had begun to claim that, far from being a magus, he had rejected all magical practices.110 The presence of magi rang alarm bells.

Yet the identity of these magicians in Nicholas’s time and after was anything but clear. In the age of the great witch hunt, the intellectual foundations for which were beginning to be laid when Nicholas spoke, most of those accused of witchcraft were women. Thousands were denounced and tortured, tried and executed, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. But most of them were not accused of making horoscopes or invoking the power of the stars. Their power to make men impotent and harm crops, animals, and babies came from the devils with whom they worked, not from technical skills. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, however, these divisions were not clear. Women as well as men were accused of adopting the techniques of high and low magic.

One case—really a pair of related Inquisition trials in Modena, Italy, almost a century after Nicholas preached his sermon—makes clear that the gender of the magus was not fixed, although women who practiced learned magic, like women who studied Latin and translated Greek texts, normally learned their skills from male mentors. In 1519, the Modenese inquisitor examined a female witch, Anastasia “la Frappona” from Cutigliano. To make a young man love her, she had used a complex set of magical techniques, involving a circle, a waxen image into which she stuck needles, and the burning of incense.111 The inquisitor, assuming that a poor woman could not have devised these methods, demanded “from whom she had the wax image.” Anastasia admitted that she had been given it by a relatively learned man—the poet Panfilo Sassi. “He,” she confessed, “also taught her about the circle and the burning of incense and the insertion of those needles, and everything she had described. But she said that the same Sassi had later told her deliberately that he had only taught her these things to fool her.”112 A few years later, the inquisitor brought in Sassi himself, and it turned out that he had not been joking at all. After interrogation—which did not involve torture—Sassi agreed to abjure “the heresy that says and insists that one should burn incense to the spirit of love to get something from him, a heresy that I once taught, and by doing so came under suspicion of holding this heresy, though I did not believe it.” At the same time, he agreed to abjure further heresies: among them, apparently, the doctrine that “demons are not damned, and are not in any dark place in the underworld.”113 Evidently, Sassi’s claims that he had never believed in his love magic were not the truth but a conventional excuse. He escaped punishment, adroitly convincing the local bishop and clergy to defend him against the Inquisition. His collaboration with Anastasia reveals just how labile the identity of the magus still was—and suggests yet another way in which it could be suspicious. Other women were also tried in the years around 1500 for engaging in ritual magic.114 For the most part, though, as Frank Klaassen has shown, the learned magician of the later Middle Ages was a man, most often of clerical status—and in many cases one who sought powers and status denied to him in life in the rituals and conjuring that Nicholas so abhorred.115 The learned, articulate magi to whom we will now turn followed medieval tradition in viewing their pursuits as masculine.

In one passage of his sermon, Nicholas grudgingly admitted that some of the pursuits of Bacon and the rest were licit after all: “Other things are carried out by sleight of hand and by perspective, etc. Things like this, if they are not carried out to deceive, can be done, and all of them without idolatry.”116 Here as elsewhere, a brief allusion conceals more than it reveals. Nicholas referred here to another whole world of practices and beliefs that had taken shape in the last two hundred years and that would prove as vital as those of the medieval magi to the learned magic of the Renaissance.

CHAPTER TWO

Power over Nature

Art, Engineering, and Humanism

In December 1452, Giannozzo Manetti, the learned Florentine ambassador in Naples, gave the Aragonese ruler of Naples, Alfonso, a present: a treatise in Latin entitled On the Dignity and Excellence of Man.1 Alfonso, an erudite king, cultivated a taste for inflicting embarrassment in artful ways. A Sienese ambassador at Alfonso’s court attracted unfavorable attention during his visits with the black-clad king, since he wore clothing that featured ornately embroidered brocade. So Alfonso had his courtiers rub themselves against the pretentious Tuscan until his garments were spoiled. A second pretentious Sienese, invited to hunt with the king, had to follow him through hedge after hedge on a day of torrential rain, until his coat, boots, and fancy horsecloth were ruined. The king and his courtiers laughed for days over these triumphs, in which his fashionable “inhibition about display” inspired sadistic exercises in hazing.2 Alfonso also liked Latin. In the realm of letters too, accordingly, he staged Herculean contests, “hours of the book.” Before the king and his courtiers, scholars demolished one another’s efforts to correct classical texts and compose modern ones. Alfonso enjoyed both their displays of learning and the chance to watch them being humiliated in public.3

Manetti’s offering, though not brilliant, may well have appealed strongly to Alfonso, for the humanist couched it in lucid Latin and implicitly directed it against another scholar’s work. Alfonso had long taken an interest in the well-established subject of the dignity of man. The court historian Bartolomeo Fazio, another product of Florence, had already dedicated a work on the same theme to Pope Nicholas V, and Manetti read it at Naples.4 But Fazio described man as a passive observer of a magnificently harmonious universe and argued that attaining salvation formed the crown of all his glory. Manetti, by contrast, insistently validated lived experience and creative work. Drawing on the anatomical studies of an early fourteenth-century medical man, Mondino de’ Luzzi, he praised the beauty and excellence of the human body. He followed a tradition that went back to the ancient world as he explained in detail why every bodily organ had the ideal shape for its function. More remarkably, Manetti also devoted long passages to describing inventions and works of art. These, he argued, proved the excellence of the human intellect.5 Where Nicholas of Cusa grudgingly accepted a few forms of human power over nature as legitimate, Manetti celebrated many of them, both in antiquity and in modern times.

The ancients had invented ships—devices that astonished their first viewers. In later centuries, however, navigation had “grown so much, down to our time, that it has become almost miraculous. For they have not only become accustomed to sail the British and the ‘icy Ocean’ regularly, as the poet [Juvenal] has it, regularly, but they have recently gone on to penetrate into deepest Mauritania, beyond the utmost bounds of earlier navigation. We have heard that they have found there a good many inhabited and cultivated islands which were completely unknown before now.”6 The obelisk still standing by the Basilica of Saint Peter at Rome, the pyramids, and the Ark of Noah—itself modeled on the human form—revealed the “industry” of the ancients. But the modern Brunelleschi had erected “the great, or rather that astonishingly great dome [of the Florentine cathedral] with no wood or metal scaffolding, something almost unbelievable.”7 Ancient painters had represented animals and fruit so vividly that they seemed real. Horses neighed at their painted counterparts, and birds tried to nibble painted grapes. The greatest ancient sculptors, like Praxiteles, had produced statues that aroused lust in those who saw them—like the famous Cnidian Venus, which Manetti, deceived by an error in the text of one of his sources, thought was an Indian Venus. Yet Giotto and Ghiberti deserved comparison with these ancient masters.8 Manetti did not venture to claim that modern writers could bear comparison with the ancients. The legitimacy of the modern age extended only to the mechanical arts. And he lavished praise on the ancient art of astrology. He told the story of how the early Greek sage Thales had made himself rich by predicting a rich olive harvest and how the Hellenistic mathematician Archimedes had created an artificial version of the celestial sphere.

As Manetti interspersed well-worn anecdotes from Pliny and Valerius Maximus with bright new stories about the present, he touched on themes that provoked and interested other denizens of the Aragonese court. Lorenzo Valla, the most brilliant of Alfonso’s hired intellectuals, devoted a dazzling set piece, originally meant to form part of his history of the reign of Alfonso’s father, Fernando I of Aragon, to arguing that modern Latinists, however classical they tried to make their styles, had to use new words in some cases: “It is certainly necessary for the learned sometimes to establish what words should be used for those things which have been devised in relatively recent times.”9 Enthusiastically, Valla explained that the existence of modern inventions revealed the continuous creative activity of the human intellect: “For the intellects of mortals are not exhausted—and we must certainly confess this, unless we are too envious to admit that we deserve to approach the cleverness of the ancients, in many—if not all—honorable and useful things.”10 Many of the examples of modern ingenuity that Valla cited actually originated in China and not the Latin world: the horologium or clock, the campana or bell, and the pyxis nautica or compass—the very device that enabled the Portuguese to navigate around Africa and show that Ptolemy’s Geography was incomplete, as Manetti pointed out. But Valla was more interested in proving that moderns could still produce astonishing inventions than in identifying which moderns had actually done so.

Valla revered the ancients. But for all their skill with water clocks and sundials, they had created nothing to rival the large mechanical escapement clocks that graced the centers of Italian cities in his own time: “I do not speak of the sort of clocks which are ancient, and not terribly remarkable, and which were the product of simple experience. I speak of the true clock, which is seen to possess not only the count of the hours, but also, so to speak, a language: for [the Greek word] logos means both, reason and language. This sort of clock has, so to speak, a life of its own, as it moves spontaneously, and makes the days and nights for man. Not only does it reveal the time to the eye, but it also announces it to the ears of those far away and at home, as the bell which is placed on top of it specifies the number. Nothing could be more useful or more pleasant than this.”11 Like Manetti, Valla interpreted a modern technical achievement as evidence that the human mind had not ceased to work creatively. If anything, he showed even more enthusiasm than Manetti. Where Manetti praised the “industry” and “brilliance” of inventors and artists, Valla used the classical terminology of literary praise established by the Roman poet Horace in his Art of Poetry. Escapement clocks shared something of the virtue of good pieces of writing. Like the best poems, they combined utility with pleasure.12 In using these carefully calculated terms in such a novel way, Valla departed, rhetorically at least, from his own usual attitude of deep, unquestioning admiration for ancient Rome. In the preface to his work on Latin usage, Valla described the Latin language in its perfect classical form as a “great sacrament,” an outward sign of inward grace, that enabled the arts to flourish and humans to communicate across space and time. Yet a look at cutting-edge machinery made him realize that the moderns had their intellectual virtues, too.13 Enthusiasm for discoveries and inventions was contagious. In a set of biographies written a few years after Manetti composed his treatise, Fazio composed careful descriptions of the works of modern painters Gentile da Fabriano and Rogier van der Weyden, in which he emphasized their mastery of the techniques of foreshortening and perspective.14

Manetti’s friends and rivals, in other words, were discussing the issues he had raised—the relation between ancient and modern technology and the arts, the possibility that moderns could rival the ancients, the possible extent of human power over nature—before he put pen to paper. The Neapolitan court, moreover, was far from the only center of learning in Renaissance Italy where such issues provoked discussion. Manetti came from Florence. There, in the 1430s, he had witnessed Brunelleschi’s creation of his dome and the rituals that accompanied the cathedral’s dedication. In fact, he had written a long prose poem about this occasion, in which he praised in phosphorescent Latin the magnificence of the processions and the splendor and perfection of Brunelleschi’s building. Like Noah’s ark, Manetti explained, the Florentine cathedral mirrored the shape—and embodied the proportions—of a perfect human body.15

One of his friends, inspired by the same occasion, came to even more dramatic conclusions. Leon Battista Alberti, as he wrote in a famous letter to Brunelleschi, found his first sight of Florentine art and technology in the 1430s—especially that of the cathedral—so overwhelming that it transformed his understanding of the world:

I used both to marvel and to regret that so many excellent and divine arts and sciences, which we know from their works and from historical accounts were possessed in great abundance by the talented men of antiquity, have now disappeared and are almost entirely lost. Painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, geometers, rhetoricians, augurs and suchlike distinguished and remarkable intellects are very rarely to be found these days, and are of little merit. Consequently I believed what I heard many say, that Nature, mistress of all things, had grown old and weary, and was no longer producing intellects any more than giants on a vast and wonderful scale such as she did in what one might call her youthful and more glorious days. But after I came back here to this most beautiful of cities from the long exile in which we Albertis have grown old, I recognized in many, but above all in you, Filippo, and in our great friend the sculptor Donatello and in the others, Nencio [Ghiberti], Luca [della Robbia] and Masaccio, a genius for every laudable enterprise in no way inferior to any of the ancients who gained game in these arts. I then realized that the ability to gain the highest distinction in any meritorious activity lies in our own industry and diligence no less than in the favors of Nature and of the times. I admit that for the ancients, who had many precedents to learn from and imitate, it was less difficult to master these noble arts which for us today prove arduous; but it follows that our fame should be all the greater if without preceptors and without any model to imitate we discover arts and sciences hitherto unheard of and unseen. What man, however hard of heart or jealous, would not praise Filippo the architect when he sees here such an enormous construction towering above the skies, vast enough to cover the entire Tuscan population with its shadow, and done without the aid of beams or elaborate wooden supports? Surely such a feat of engineering, if I am not mistaken, that people did not believe feasible these days and was probably equally unknown and unimaginable among the ancients.16

Here Alberti made clear—even more passionately than Valla, to say nothing of Manetti—what the achievements of the Florentine artists meant to him. Though these contemporaries of his had been autodidacts, they had created works eminently comparable—or even superior—to those of the ancients, many of whom learned from living masters—and they showed, by doing so, that moderns could triumph in the liberal as well as the mechanical arts. He listed seven arts—the number is no coincidence—whose practitioners seemed to have disappeared. These included three mechanical ones, painting, sculpture, and architecture; three liberal ones, music, geometry, and rhetoric; and the art or science of augury (divination)—in part, perhaps, a reference to astrology, in which Alberti took a deep interest, as he did in astronomy.17 The work of the Florentine artists, he claimed, showed that moderns could do original work in any field. Alberti, in other words, now believed that modern writers and mathematicians could be favorably compared with the ancients. The claim was only appropriate, since the text he presented to Brunelleschi, On Painting, was itself an effort without precedent in ancient literature, in its objective to understand painting in both mathematical and rhetorical terms. In it he described a new system for representing human bodies and three-dimensional forms in paintings and reliefs, which Brunelleschi himself had devised and that the Florentine artists he praised, Ghiberti, della Robbia, and Masaccio, had all put into practice in diverse ways. Brunelleschi’s dome was at once the most visible and the most radical of these Florentine innovations. Yet all of them—as Alberti suggested by connecting them with divination—made a deep impact on a vast multitude of viewers. Alberti revealed his belief in the novelty of his own book as well when, after discussing various theses on the origins of painting, he wrote: “But it does not matter that much to know who first invented painting, since I am not examining, as Pliny did, the history of painting, but the art itself, in a completely new way.”18 It would have been hard to dismiss an ancient authority more brusquely.

Alberti did not exaggerate when he said that he had once been prey to a deep, paralyzing nostalgia for the ancients with whom he now felt able to struggle on even terms. The illegitimate scion of a great Florentine family, he made his way at first as a writer of elegant Latin prose. And he did not find it easy.19 The first treatise he wrote, a Latin diatribe On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Letters, offered a mordant, Nietzschean dissection of the scholar and his life chances. Most learned humanists, Alberti explained, desperately hoped to rise in society but foolishly spent all their time in libraries, where their shanks became thin, their eyes turned red, and they became incapable of wooing a fair woman or impressing a powerful man.

Alberti—and others like him, such as the wealthy connoisseur of ancient art and literature, Niccolò Niccoli, whom he loathed—suffered from a crushing case of the anxiety of influence. They had devoted themselves so energetically to scholarship that they could not find even a subject that the ancients had not already treated exhaustively: “For as I looked about nothing ever occurred to me which had not already been neatly appropriated by those ancient and divine writers. Accordingly, no possibility has been left open even for the most learned man in this age to say something better than they did, or for me to work out similar things in an appropriate and worthy way. The ancients have covered all serious and all comic topics, and have left us only the ability—and the necessity—of reading and admiring them.”20 As scholars dwindled into spineless pedants, their social position dropped into a deep abyss. Only the lame, the halt, and the stupid, Alberti railed, were thought fit for literary studies. “The ones the girls turn down,” he complained, “those are the ones they instruct to study letters. It seems as if they openly feel that really good intellects could be employed better and more appropriately in any task other than that of letters.”21 The only way to revive literature was to appreciate the works of contemporary craftsmen at their best—as one could in Florence, which served as a forcing house for advanced forms of art and architecture in the first decades of the fifteenth century.

Manetti’s enthusiastic discussion of contemporary art and technology, in other words, was only one contribution, and not the most memorable, to a public conversation that took place in Italy from the 1430s onward, a moveable feast of words that changed places and participants more than once.22 Alberti and the other scholars who praised clocks and paintings developed their enthusiasm for modern inventions and artworks in dialogue with articulate craftsmen. These men were themselves engaged in dialogues, with one another and with a philosophical tradition that stretched back through the medieval universities to ancient Athens. Out of these long- and short-term discussions, a new sense of human power over nature emerged.

Bacon and the Powers of Invention

Nicholas of Cusa singled out magnetism, sleight of hand, and perspective as harmless ways to show off human ingenuity. Sleight of hand will not occupy us further. But when Nicholas referred to magnetism and perspective, he clearly identified Roger Bacon, as the authority he had in mind. And for Bacon, these pursuits had a special meaning. In the Opus tertium, the phosphorescent manifesto that Bacon drafted to win papal support for his project, he argued at length that a whole series of sciences could give men power over nature. Some of these he knew chiefly from Islamic sources. Alchemy, for example, fell into two branches, both vital. Speculative alchemy, which “the ordinary run of scholars ignore,” offered basic information about the natural world: “For the generation of men, and brutes, and vegetables, is from the elements and humors, and it is connected with the generation of inanimate things.”23 Alchemy of this kind provided vital information about the names and properties of medical simples—medicines that consisted of a single ingredient. Bacon analyzed human physiology in alchemical terms. He regarded blood—for example—as a compound humor that could be separated by analysis into its original, simple humors, and he made these in turn the basis for a whole theory of medicine. Operative or practical alchemy offered even greater rewards: “It teaches how to make noble metals and pigments, and many other things, better and more plentifully by artificial means than nature herself makes them.”24 This sort of alchemy, Bacon claimed, could both enrich the state and discover ways of prolonging human life—a problem to which he devoted much attention.

Optics and perspective also promised immense power. After a close study of Al-Kindi’s work on the behavior of rays, Bacon devoted himself to constructing, in the most rigorous possible way, a geometrical optics—a study of the behavior of light that would not only explain the laws of its motion but also afford men the power to manipulate it. In the long letter in which Bacon denounced magic and distinguished his own arts from it, he emphasized that his new form of optics would enable man to fabricate “perspicua”—“lenses”—that would in turn transform the appearance of things in highly useful ways: “Bodies can be figured in such a way that the greatest things appear very small, and the reverse, and that high things appear low, and the reverse, and hidden things appear manifest.”25 Julius Caesar had used a lens of this kind to spy out British cities and camps before he crossed the channel. More important still, the art of perspective could create powerful weapons: “But one of the higher powers of geometry is that rays may be drawn and collected through various figurings and reflections, at any distance we wish, so that any object they strike may be burned. For this is attested by lenses that burn before and behind, as certain authors teach in their books.” A really perfect burning mirror “would be worth more than an army against the Tartars and Saracens” since it could wipe out any army and its camp.26 Eventually, Bacon hoped, perspective might even provide new and better information about the positions of the heavenly bodies.

Even more powerful than alchemy or optics was another discipline, which Bacon referred to as “the science of experiment (scientia experimentalis).” This science, he argued, “is more perfect than all the rest, which serve it, and in a miraculous way it provides certainty for all the others. And this is called the science of experience. It pays no attention to arguments, since they do not give certainty, however strong they are, unless some experience of the conclusion is also present.”27 The science of experience, Bacon wrote, was to the rest as the navigator to the carpenter. As the navigator showed the craftsman how to build a ship, so this science taught all the others how to go about their work.28 Where contemporary philosophers concentrated on knowledge arrived at by demonstration from first principles, “demonstratio quia,” Bacon saw far more promise in the use of individual “experiences” to confirm and apply the laws of nature. He hoped—as he hoped in his study of astrology—that he could supply knowledge that would help Pope Clement IV, whom he knew, and perhaps other powerful men as well, defend Christendom against Antichrist. That explains why he pursued forms of knowledge that had no place in the curriculum so energetically—even, perhaps, into the workshops of artisans.29

What Bacon had in mind, of course, was not experimental science in a modern sense—as the name he chose for it, a terminological Greenland, enticingly but wrongly suggested to some historians in the past. Rather, as he enthusiastically explained, he saw his contemporary Peter of Maricourt, also known as Petrus Peregrinus, as an exemplary “experimenter.”30 Peter devoted an elaborate treatise to the manifest properties of the magnet. He explained, in vivid detail, the powers of lodestones, the nature and behavior of their poles, and how to use them. Peter’s vivid accounts of objects revealed his personal knowledge of their properties and recorded his conversations with ordinary seamen: “The color of a lodestone ought to be like that of iron, dull, mixed with blue pigment, so that it looks like a piece of polished iron infected by corrupt air. I have never seen a stone like this that did not have a powerful effect. Such stones are generally found in northern regions, and sailors take them away from all the northern ports of the ocean, as for example in Normandy, Picardy and Flanders.”31 He gave precise directions on how to prepare a lodestone, using a metal instrument with which jewelers normally fashioned crystals to round it into a sphere and finding the pole by establishing where an iron needle stands upright on the stone. And he explained how to use such stones, properly prepared, to find directions, craft a moving model of the celestial sphere and even create a perpetual motion machine.32 Peter’s “experiments,” precisely described and equipped with diagrams, served not as a way to investigate the powers of stone but to confirm and apply them.

Bacon praised Peter and his work with immense enthusiasm: “I only know one man,” he told Pope Clement, “who really deserves praise in the works of this science, for he does not care about speeches and verbal combat, but pursues the works of wisdom, and attains rest in them. Where others in their blindness try to see, like the bat seeing the light of the sun at dusk, he contemplates in the full light of day, because he is the lord of experiences.”33 Peter, Bacon insisted, had deliberately set out to learn the practical arts, since he “feels abashed if some layman or hag or soldier or peasant knows what he does not.” Hence he had mastered the processes of metalworking, the arts of war, agriculture, and surveying: “He has even examined the experiences and predictions of hags, and their verses and those of all the magicians.”34 Only Peter’s dedication to his art kept him at work in Paris when he could have earned a fortune by serving a great ruler.

The science of experience, as Bacon saw it in Peter’s work and elsewhere, had a lot to offer. It would enable those who had mastered it, Bacon promised, to see through the false promises of the magicians and reject their incantations as useless. But it could also enable its students to perform feats that resembled—or outdid—the works of magic: “There are many miracles, which, though they are not very useful, still offer an indescribable vision of wisdom, and can be applied to proving all the secret things that the ignorant people contradict, like the attraction of iron by adamant. For who would believe that this sort of attraction of iron takes place if he did not see it? And there are many miracles of nature in this attraction of iron which the ordinary people do not know, and which experience teaches the one who takes an interest.”35 Bacon, in other words, insisted that his new science could yield effects as powerful as those of nature—but based on the manifest (not the occult) properties of things. No wonder that Nicholas of Cusa felt able to accept Bacon’s own work as natural while firmly rejecting the tradition of natural magic: Bacon’ s own rhetoric supported that view.

Bacon, however, went further than one would have suspected from hearing Nicholas’s sermon. He claimed that the sciences he practiced could not only rival, but outdo, nature herself. Most medieval alchemists, following an influential work ascribed to the ninth-century alchemist Geber, drew on Aristotle’s Physics to argue that human arts could emulate, and complete, natural processes.36 By contrast, Bacon insisted that alchemy could yield precious metals “better, and more plentifully,” than nature. The science of experience, he argued, could do even more. Nature could make gold pure to twenty-four degrees: “Nature can go no further, as experience teaches. But art can make gold reach higher levels of purity, up to infinity.”37 Now that Bacon had unlocked the secrets of experience, he found that “nothing is hard for me to believe, when I examine it well.”38

In a famous passage, Bacon evoked the world of wonders that the science of experiments could produce: “Instruments of navigation can be made without men to row, so that very great ships, in river and ocean alike, are moved by the power of one man, and faster than if they had a full crew. Similarly, carriages can be made that can move without animals, with an incredible force, like, I suspect, that of the scythed chariots with which the ancients fought. Likewise, instruments of flight can be made, so that a man sits in the middle of the instrument, turning a device, which makes artificially constructed wings beat the air, in the manner of a flying bird.”39 Sometimes, as E. R. Truitt points out, Bacon wrote as if he hoped to re-create an ancient technology, evoking Caesar’s spyglass and Roman chariots and perhaps looking back to the revealed knowledge of Adam and the Patriarchs.40 In other cases, he laid more emphasis on the discoveries that lay ahead: “For even now the wise do not know many things which ordinary students will know in the future.”41 In either event, one point was clear. Just as mastery of the stars and their influences could give men power over other men, knowledge of the manifest properties of plants, animals, stones, and light could enable men to manipulate the physical world around them in dramatic and even terrifying ways. The true experimenter could rival, and even outdo, nature’s most impressive and frightening phenomena: “For sounds,” as Bacon explained, “can be made like thunder, and flashes in the air, more horrifying than if they were produced by nature. For a little bit of material, one thumb’s worth, makes a terrifying sound and shows a powerful flash.”42 Magic was not only unlawful but unnecessary: devices crafted by human intellect and energy could produce wonder.

Makers Speak for Themselves

In the fifteenth century and after, some of those who practiced the arts and devised the inventions that Bacon praised began to speak for themselves—especially in Italy, where many competed to catch the ears of patrons who prided themselves on their artistic and technical expertise, and where communes and despots proved themselves willing to support immense, financially draining projects.43 The Italian and German engineers who worked in Italy in around 1400 had ample reason to boast of their achievements. They built immense cathedrals, not only in Florence but also in Milan, Pienza, and elsewhere. They designed self-propelled wagons powered not by cattle but by hidden crews, who turned geared shafts. These served both as siege machines and, more plausibly, as pageant carts, where they vividly demonstrated a ruler’s ability to call upon the powers of nature. In an age of bitter warfare, when Hussite wagon trains defended a religious revolution in Bohemia and thwarted the chivalry of the Holy Roman Empire, and cannon changed the face of battle, the engineers recorded and devised innovations of every kind.44

These feats impressed even the most hard-nosed contemporary observers. Buonaccorso Pitti, a wealthy Florentine merchant who helped to conduct the Florentine campaign against Pisa in 1403, recalled how the Ten of War, the committee in charge of military affairs, learned from a priest that an old gate in the walls of Pisa, though bricked up so that it was flush with the rest of the surface, was hollow and unguarded: “The Ten took counsel on this matter with one Domenico, “a great master of devices.” After hearing them out, Domenico went secretly to examine the bricked-in stretch of wall for himself and, seeing the holes left in the exterior by the scaffolding, concluded that it must indeed be hollow. The engineer claimed that he could insert gunpowder into the holes, ignite it, and make a breach through which the Florentines could enter Pisa. His plan fizzled when the Pisans dug trenches and posted guards in front of the old gate.45 But the Florentine patricians clearly took a serious interest in his proposal—as they did in Brunelleschi’s unsuccessful plan to move a river from its course in order to flood the city of Lucca.

These men did more than practice the mechanical arts—though they valued their skills in these greatly. They also insisted that their craft had a major intellectual component. Their very title, ingegneri or ingeniatores—“engineers,” in a particular period sense not to be confused with modern ones—designated them as men of the intellect, ingenium, as well as creators of clever new devices, ingenia.46 These were the terms that Manetti consciously echoed in his praise of human inventiveness. Some of the engineers, moreover, like Giovanni Dondi and Konrad Kyeser, came to engineering after studying medicine. They set out to combine the skills in astronomy and astrology they had acquired as students in the medical faculty with their practical pursuits.47 Dondi became famous for the astronomical clock he built in Padua, which simulated the movements of the planets and facilitated the drawing up of horoscopes. Kyeser, like Mariano Taccola and others, also insisted that astrology governed the work of engineers. He began his treatise, the Bellifortis, with a detailed treatment of the planets and their powers.48

For hundreds of years, mental walls that seemed harder than stone ones had hindered traffic between the city of books and contemplation where scholars cogitated and the city of labor and energy where the craftsmen cut stone and wood. Practitioners of the crafts, as Pamela Smith and others have taught us, had their own understandings of the cosmos and the materials they worked with, and their own panoply of embodied skills, almost impossible to describe usefully in words, even to patrons who greatly esteemed their work.49 In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these walls were breached. Craft practitioners crossed boundaries into new realms, and artists began to dissect human bodies—a pursuit previously reserved for medical men. Leonardo became an expert anatomist: so much so that he enjoyed having his studio littered with body parts. He also argued forcibly that he was a better anatomist than any professor because his mastery of perspective and foreshortening enabled him not just to describe what he saw in a body cavity but to record it in vivid detail for others. In Leonardo’s manuscripts, the illustrations were not merely decorative, but they also interacted with and enriched the text. His radically innovative collages of image and text not only recorded but also embodied the artist’s claim to be a learned man in his own right—and one of a new kind.50

Leonardo was an engineer, in a period sense, as well as a painter, draftsman, and anatomist. And in giving his experience of nature written form, he emulated what his predecessors had been doing since the fourteenth century.51 Artisans of many kinds began to write: manuals appeared on everything from painting to pyrotechnics, usually aimed more at patrons than at practitioners.52 Dondi, Kyeser, Taccola, Fontana, and other engineers also produced texts.53 Though these vary in many ways, all of them resemble Leonardo’s notebooks. Like Leonardo, the engineers systematically combined illustrations—both diagrams of mechanisms and images of them at work—with text. Like Leonardo too, and before him, they made bold claims for themselves and what they had to offer, insisting on their high status and high ideals. Taccola, for example, hurled all his rhetorical tropes into one basket, as he appealed simultaneously to the best-known ancient engineer and to the sputtering late medieval crusading enterprise: “I, Mariano Taccola the notary, also called the Archimedes of the great and powerful city of Siena, did not draw up these devices with my own hand to operate against Christians, but I devised, created and drew them so that they might come into play against infidels and barbarous races.”54

2.1 Mariano Taccola, Ships, vehicles and machines, De ingeneis, fol. 60 recto; Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 197, 2 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Like other engineers, Taccola hoped to use his manuscripts to make his way. He thought they might clear his path to the ear trumpets of potential patrons, like the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, to whom he presented one of them. But Taccola did more than boast. He also provided accurate drawings of contemporary devices, like the armed wagons of the Hussites. Taccola boasted that his lifting machines could do more than the most powerful draft animals: “My inventions are stronger than oxen.”55 Coming from Siena, a city whose industries relied on an elaborate network of underground waterworks, Taccola knew a great deal about hydraulics.56 He himself devised both an elaborate caisson for working underwater and a powerful syphon. His work changed shape and content, moreover, as he saw and evaluated others’ designs and contemplated the havoc that his own devices might wreak. When he illustrated his syphon and showed how it could be used to flood an enemy’s fields, he also warned against doing so: “Flooding cities, castles or fields does not form part of the custom of warfare, to avoid the danger that the flood will take lives, so it should not be commended. Rather, those who do this commit an infamous act. And therefore we should remain silent about this matter.”57 Here Taccola implicitly criticized Brunelleschi, who had tried and failed to flood the city of Lucca. The new, powerful engineering had already begun to develop a rhetoric of social and environmental responsibility.

Engineering and Magic

In one vital respect at least, the engineers departed from the path that Bacon and Nicholas would have wanted them to follow. Almost all of them connected their practice, implicitly or explicitly, with the powers of magic. They accomplished this in different ways. Sometimes they simply claimed to practice both arts. Kyeser, for example, described and illustrated not only wheeled carts but also magical practices, which he portrayed with equal enthusiasm. Along with the ancient planetary gods, an unclassical spirit named Salathiel appeared in Kyeser’s work. According to Johannes Hartlieb, writing half a century later, the “masters” of the art of hydromancy—or divination by water—believed that God had not created water since the Book of Genesis described the spirit of God as hovering over the waters. “They hold,” he added, “that there are special spirits that dwell in the water. These, they believe, can reveal all things, future and past. And they call the greatest and most powerful of these spirits Salathiel.”58 Kyeser described other demonic sources of power as well. Taccola’s notebooks also discussed practices that came respectively from the high magic of astrology and the low magic of recipe books. To find out if the year will be a good one, he advised, examine the state of the moon on Christmas night: “If it is one day old, the gain will be poor. The larger it grows on that night, the greater the gain will be. And if it becomes altogether full, there will be great fertility.”59 To defeat an enemy he recommended not only use of the best war machines, but also putting owls in his room to draw in bad air, addressing nasty letters to him to deprive him of sleep, and poisoning “the boy or concubine who very often sleeps with him: poison shall be given to him or her for 15 days or a month. His or her breath and heat and sweat will poison the mate who sleeps with him or her.”60

One of the best-informed humanist observers of the new technology, Antonio Manetti, seems to have found a uniquely elegant way to highlight the connection between magic and engineering. The same Florentine manuscript that contains his life of Brunelleschi—a work that reflects close personal knowledge of the architect—also contains a work of fiction, almost certainly by Manetti as well: the “Novella del Grasso,” known in English as the story of the fat woodcarver. Brunelleschi and his “brigade” of close friends, so the tale goes, carry out an exercise in ingenuity described as subtle by the author. Through a series of calculated deceits and illusions, they convince the object of their plot, a woodcarver, that he is not himself but someone else, and land him in prison. The whole story breathes with admiration for the “ingegno” of the great engineer and architect who conceives and executes the plot—one in which human brilliance replicates one of the standard feats of the magicians.61

Manetti’s story was not the only text that cast magic and engineering in strikingly similar keys. One of Taccola’s curious inventions involved a dog, tied by a long line to a bell at the top of a tower. The dog’s desperate efforts to reach food and water left just beyond his range would make the bell ring, creating the illusion that a deserted fort was still occupied.62 Taccola suggested that this illusion would enable a lone soldier to leave the fort, obtain food and water, and return to it before the enemy realized he was gone. What he did not say about this shaggy-dog story—but very likely knew—was that this trick replicated, by manifest means, a feat that the magicians could also pull off. A magical manuscript of the fifteenth century, preserved in Munich, offers an “experiment” for producing the illusion of a strong castle. The author explains at length how he called on diabolic help to convince his lord that an enemy army was approaching. The emperor and his counts did not know what to do, and when they fled, the devils followed them, shooting arrows. At just the right moment, the clever magician offered a way out: “O Salaul,” he cried,

“Make a wondrous castle before the emperor and his men, so that the emperor and his men can enter it.” And it was done. A perfectly safe castle was made for the counts, with tower and moat, and the drawbridge down. It seemed excellently constructed and filled with mercenaries, who were crying out, “O lord, enter quickly with your companions.”63

The magician described the battle episode by episode, as if he were looking at a series of illustrations from the engineers’ manuscripts: the mercenaries raised the drawbridge, but the spirits attacked the castle with war machines.64 At that point, however, Salaul turned up again and apologized for the fact that he, his associates, and the castle must depart since they could not remain for more than a quarter of an hour.65 After the actors and set disappeared, the emperor and his courtiers found themselves, to their surprise, in a marsh. The narrator, full of aplomb, calmly remarked that “This episode has been quite an adventure.” Then they all had dinner.66 Both magicians and engineers, in other words, claimed that they could create powerful illusions—and saw doing so as a significant part of their arts. The theatrical style that magic and engineering assumed in this period would persist for centuries.

The fifteenth-century Paduan engineer Giovanni Fontana, who had studied with Biagio Pelacani, cast the explanations of his devices in a cipher—a deliberately mysterious secret alphabet—and used other devices as well to highlight his interest in magic.67 Magicians invoked devils. Fontana showed how to create a mechanical devil, perhaps for a mystery play, with moveable eyes, tongue, horns, arms, and wings.68 Necromancers raised the dead. A wooden skeleton linked by cords to a wheels concealed below it, Fontana explained, would appear to move its members “just as the figures in mechanical clocks do.” Tongue firmly in cheek, he called this design, perhaps destined for a clock, “resurrectio mortuorum artificiosa”—“a crafty way to bring the dead back to life.”69 In these cases, Fontana showed how to use mechanical devices—instead of the magician’s circle and incense—to create the same psychologically effective illusions. Elsewhere Fontana made fun of popular forms of magic—like the stones with two horns, that women thought could protect them against lightning.70 But he also admitted in another work, this time on the art of memory, that men could obtain true knowledge by demonic or angelic inspiration and by dreaming as well as by trial and error, and he treated the ars notoria, astrology and talismanic magic, as valid, powerful disciplines.71 At times he acknowledged that he had cast his inventions in provocative forms. Certain men at Padua, though “most learned,” falsely accused him of raising “infernal spirits” from Tartarus to help him, using a pentacle of seals and secret seals—perhaps the very reaction that he hoped to provoke with his resurrection machines and fire-farting rockets in the shape of rabbits and birds.72

These engineers’ manuscripts, in other words, amounted to something like the realization of Bacon’s project for a “science of experience.” In keeping with Bacon’s predictions, they showed how to work wonders, using the manifest properties of matter. In keeping with Bacon’s practice, they also deployed the techniques of high magic and took advantage of occult properties—though they also claimed to summon daemons and angels. Like Bacon, the engineers took a special interest in those devices that showed the human ability not just to emulate but to outdo nature: wagons that moved without draft animals, powerful weapons, and the like. Fontana wrote an encyclopedia that made his allegiances even clearer than the magnificent illustrated codex that portrayed his mechanical devices: “God has given men so much force of intellect that they have devised many arts, and brought about many things that nature herself could not have done.” As examples of arts that did not rest on the direct imitation of nature, Fontana cited the things “which the people call ingenia, many of which architects have attained with geometrical measures, physical arguments or arithmetical reasoning. For example, there is the screw, from which is derived the pump, which expels water in a spectacular way. And there is the multiple set of pulleys, an extraordinary device through which ropes run, and which can pull or suspend incredible weights with a light pull …. There is also the terrible machine which we call the bombard, which destroys every form of resistance, even marble towers.”73

Ancients, Moderns, and Practical Arts

Like Bacon and Manetti, finally, a number of the engineers took up and discussed the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. Like many of their contemporaries, engineers liked to cite ancient precedents and emulate ancient models, even when doing so apparently undercut their own originality. Roberto Valturio, a military engineer from Rimini, tried to show that the cannon, the single most novel feature of Renaissance warfare, was another creation of the greatest ancient engineer: “The bombard, as it is commonly called, is a metal device which shoots out, far and wide, by the setting of fire and sulphurous, indeed Tartarean powder, bronze missiles and flaming balls and heavy, round stones. It shakes the walls of cities and destroys everything in its path. It is believed that Archimedes devised it at the time when Marcellus was besieging Syracuse, to defend the liberty of his fellow citizens and avert or delay the fall of his native city.” Magnificent illustrations evoked the power and the terror of the inventions he described. A civic humanist in his own way, Valturio regretted only that the rulers of his day used a machine that Archimedes had created to protect the liberty of his city to subjugate free communities.74 Valturio’s classicism was not unusual. Ghiberti and other engineers eagerly studied the ancient works on engineering of Hero and others, as soon as these began to circulate in the West, and drew on them as well as the work of medieval and modern writers.75 Pragmatic and problem-oriented engineers like Brunelleschi—who analyzed jobs in terms of time and motion, and hired vendors of bread and wine to climb his scaffolds around the Cathedral, so his workmen would not have to spend too long on their breaks—took a deep interest in the material remains of the ancient past.76

Yet engineers could not win patronage except by doing something completely—or at least apparently—different, as Brunelleschi did when he built the dome over the Florentine cathedral. Even Valturio readily admitted that the moderns had improved on antiquity. His patron Sigismondo Malatesta, for example, had devised a new kind of cannon. Its bronze shells, full of gunpowder, ignited as they left the cannon.77 And in the wider context of Italian artisans’ practice, efforts to enforce claims to intellectual property became more and more common in the fifteenth century, as Pamela Long has shown in absorbing detail. Brunelleschi, though he did not write, went further than most of his contemporaries in asserting his creative powers. In 1421 he obtained a three-year patent from the Florentine Signoria for a new kind of cargo ship, probably designed to bring materials for the construction of the Cathedral up the Arno.78 Infuriated by Ghiberti’s attempt to share credit for the Florentine cathedral, he fashioned the models for the dazzling new machines and tools that his workmen built of turnips and other vegetables as well as clay; presumably Brunelleschi chose this material not only for its ease of modeling but also so that the models would rot before anyone could copy them.79 And he warned Taccola, in a conversation that the Sienese engineer carefully recorded, never to reveal his secrets to anyone else since by doing so he would risk both slander and plagiarism:

2.2 Roberto Valturio’s design for a war machine. Valturio, De re militari libri xii, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 23467 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Do not share your inventions with many persons; share them only with the few men who understand and love the sciences. If you disclose too much about your inventions and achievements, you give away the fruits of your genius. Many willingly listen in order to criticize the inventors and belittle and deny their achievements, so that no one in honorable places will ever again listen to them. Then, after some months or a year, these persons use exactly the same words in speech or writing or design. They boldly call themselves inventors of things that they first condemned, and they take for themselves the glory that rightly belongs to the inventor.80

Brunelleschi went so far as to suggest that the Operai, or citizen’s committees, that governed projects like the Florentine cathedral—and that repeatedly ridiculed his proposals and interfered with his work—be replaced with a committee of the competent: “Let a council convene, with an assembly of experts and masters in technical art, to discuss plans and construction of the work.” The “morons” and “charlatans” who could not understand Brunelleschi’s proposals must make way for wise men who could see that it was possible to make new devices and recognize the talents of those who proposed them. Well before Manetti and Alberti began to compare the results of ancient and modern technology, the engineers were already doing so, and in their discussions terms like “invention” were beginning to take on their modern meanings alongside more traditional ones.81

Engineers and Artists

The engineers finally made one connection that Bacon and Nicholas had not—a connection that would prove vital in the fifteenth century. They all took an interest in and most practiced what one might now refer to as the fine arts. A gifted draftsman, Taccola produced such useful drawings that plagiarists and imitators were still copying them over a century later. Vannoccio Birginguccio and others incorporated Taccola’s works into their printed books of machines. A skillful sculptor as well, Taccola also crafted sixteen wooden heads for the choral seats in the cathedral of Siena.82 Brunelleschi, of course, practiced sculpture as well as architecture. Ghiberti, who won the commission, which Brunelleschi had wanted, to make the bronze doors for the Baptistery, also claimed to be an architect—so ardently that Brunelleschi was forced for a time to accept his collaboration while working on his dome. He also produced a fascinating text, the Commentaries, a massive tome that included a history of painting, an account of his own achievements, and an effort to ground perspective in formal optics. Fontana considered the situation of painters in his own time too depressing to discuss. But he dedicated a work on perspective to Jacopo Bellini.

Theatrical machines—machines that worked in public with no visible human or animal effort to power them—became a node where engineering and the fine arts visibly and effectively intersected. When dynastic and diplomatic considerations required public celebrations, as they frequently did, lords and subjects, artists and craftsmen collaborated, devising machines that could inspire wonder in a sophisticated audience. In late May 1475, for example, Costanzo Sforza, lord of Pesaro, married Camilla of Aragon, natural granddaughter of Alfonso of Aragon, the king of Naples. Costanzo, a cultured young ruler, loved both technology and the arts. He fortified his pleasant seaside city, in the most up-to-date way, to protect it against tyrants, and adorned it with a fine ducal palace. When he married a great and learned lady, accordingly, he left nothing to chance. Camilla’s entrance to the city was the occasion for everything from “a splendid joust with four prizes” to an hour-and-a-half-long speech in Latin by the humanist Pandolfo Colenuccio, in praise of marriage, which he recited so beautifully that his audience wished it longer.83 A Florentine humanist, Niccolò di Antonio degli Agli, recorded this and the other festivities in a set-piece text, which the scribe Lionardo da Colle copied on vellum in 1480 as a gift for another great and cultured warrior prince, Federigo da Montefeltro.84 Giovanni Santi, Raphael’s father, illustrated the booklet—and very likely served as the technical event planner for the occasion, though Niccolò did not name him.85

At least as Niccolò told the story, neither the prowess of the jousting knights nor the eloquence of the erudite humanist amazed the crowds more than the “various and delightful spectacles” that Giovanni Santi “laid out with marvelous skill and subtle craft.”86 When Camilla and Costanzo approached the city, forty merchants and citizens came to meet them on a ship “moved by men, with the most extraordinary ease and marvelous ingenuity, on wheels,” its full sails swelled by the wind.87 On Sunday, the day set aside for the wedding, the “great room of the court” was decorated with splendid images of the planets and the signs of the zodiac. Through a round door in the middle of the zodiac, which gave glimpses of “a splendid paradise full of gold and silver,” figures representing the sun and moon descended on clouds to recite poems, after which they ascended again “with marvelous speed and skill.”88 On Monday, in the same room, the lords and their subjects saw a mountain covered with trees and populated by hares, goats, deer, bears, wild boars, and other animals. Then a lion and a wild man entered the scene, and their antics amazed all beholders.89 Later still, the Jewish community of Pesaro arrived, accompanied by elephants, one of them bearing the Queen of Sheba, and another mountain followed.90 After them came floats bearing the gods of the planets, as well as an even more splendid one representing the triumph of love, with twelve rotating “spiritelli”: wheels from which fireworks blazed.91 Even after the joust a final float arrived in the Borgo. This represented the triumph of fame and bore a beautiful woman, three men “very richly armed in the ancient style, one for Scipio, one for Alexander, and one for Caesar,” and a “round ball, which was entirely blue, and the color of water, except that the part of the earth which is inhabited, and above the water, was laid out and depicted according to the true cosmography.”92 The content of this elaborate program evoked cosmic harmonies, favorable planetary influences, and other elements of the magical universe as it had taken shape in antiquity.93 But the methods used to carry it out were anything but magical, and Niccolò took care to make that clear.

To judge from Niccolò’s comments, every aspect of the festivities pleased the audience, from the rich colors and materials used in the decor to the sugared biscuits and other precious delicacies that they savored between acts. But nothing astonished them so much, or so consistently, as the ingenuity and skill that had gone into the creation of so many vehicles and beings that moved on their own. Again and again, with great precision, Niccolò recorded the wonder that Giovanni Santi’s technical feats inspired. The ship that met Camilla and Costanzo, he noted, moved so smoothly that one could not see who was pulling it or even tell it from a real ship.94 The moon and sun impressed the feasters above all by the speed and silence with which they came down from the zodiac and rose back into it. The elephants created by the Jewish community impressed viewers because “the legs of the men inside them were so well covered by those of the elephant that it would be impossible for anyone who had not seen this marvelous device to write of it.”95 And the big camel that turned up a little later, ridden by an Ethiopian, “was so well represented and with so much art that it seemed alive, and it was large, and opened its mouth and extended its neck and sank to the ground as real camels do.”96

In fact, Niccolò found these devices so impressive that he did not give credit to Giovanni Santi or any other professional but to the man who had paid the piper. Most of these inventions, he claimed, emerged from the “wit and intellect” (“ingegno & intellecto”) of Costanzo Sforza himself. Through challenge after challenge, the lord of Pesaro “never tired of showing the diligence and the strangeness of his mind.”97 The terms that Niccolò used here were freighted with meaning. Engineers, as we have seen, strongly identified themselves with the “ingenium” or “ingegno.” They called their devices “ingenia” and themselves “ingeniatores.” Niccolò described Costanzo’s feats for Federigo, that great patron of both architecture and engineering. He constructed the lord of Pesaro as an engineer in his own right, a techy Prospero who not only paid for but staged his own masques. By doing so he made clear how brightly the arts of the engineer now glowed in the eyes of patrons and humanists.

When engineers took up the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, they did so in the light of aesthetics as well as that of engineering practice. And they saw their relation to their forerunners in very different ways, which depended as much on the context in which they wrote as on their personal tastes. Giovanni Dondi boasted of the novelty of his astronomical clock. He made clear that the ancient writers on astronomy, such as Ptolemy, “had taught that the orbs and circles appear in so great and such remarkable profusion, that it is not easy, except for a very few, to grasp their imagining in full.”98 Even the diagrams did not help most men understand this apparently “laborious and difficult” science. Hence they went about “like blind men without sticks, getting lost and begging for help from others.” Dondi, however, proclaimed that “with divine help, I have worked out a way to create a material object, in which all the motions in longitude that astronomers ascribe to the planets, with their circles and their proper quantities, can be perceived by the eye.”99 Not only did Dondi claim authorship of his device, but he also made clear that he had followed a modern source: “I drew the beginning of this proposition and creation from the subtle and elegant device of Campano of Novara.” When it came to his clock, in other words, Dondi did not hesitate to assert his own intellectual property and defend that of other moderns.

Dondi did not claim that the moderns were superior to the ancients in every respect. He readily admitted that no modern writer of Latin—even Petrarch—could rival the ancients. And he said the same about contemporary fine artists and architects:

Of the artistic products of ancient genius, few survive. But those that do remain anywhere are eagerly sought and seen and highly prized by those who feel strongly about such things: and if you compare them with those of today, it will soon become obvious that their authors were by nature more powerful in genius and more learned in the mastery of their art. I am speaking about ancient buildings and statues and sculptures, with other things of that sort. When some artists of this time scrutinize the productions of that age carefully, they are struck with amazement.100

When Manetti and Alberti connected the fine arts with the practical ones and both with the legitimacy of the modern age, in short, they followed paths the engineers had already broken but went considerably farther.

Alberti, who saw himself as both humanist and engineer, insisted more aggressively than Manetti on man’s power over the natural world, and he reversed Dondi’s judgment about the quality of modern works of art and literature. In this respect at least, his Florentine experiences may genuinely have proved decisive. Optics had long formed part of the package of powerful disciplines that the philosophers and engineers pursued. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, optics came to serve a new role in the world of the mechanical arts. The geometrical analysis of light and vision—so, at least, Alberti and others argued—underpinned the new perspective with which Florentine artists like Giotto, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, and Masaccio had created powerful illusions of three-dimensional buildings, objects, and human bodies on two-dimensional walls and panels. Optics might not create burning mirrors: but they did allow Ghiberti to give the impression that the complex structures in his second set of doors for the Baptistery really receded from the picture plane. Ghiberti took such pleasure in the new science that he copied extracts from its textbooks. And he portrayed his work explicitly as an effort to construct for himself problems in perspective and then solve them: “I strove,” he wrote, “to imitate nature as closely as I could, and with all the perspective I could produce.” He explained that he had set all his “histories” in frames, for example, “because the eye from a distance measures and interprets the scenes in such a way that they appear round.”101

Alberti gave full expression to views like these in On Painting. “The painter’s duty,” he wrote there, “is to inscribe and paint any given bodies on a surface, with lines and colors, so that at a certain distance, when one has established a certain place for the centric ray, whatever you see in the painting seems to have the same relief and to be exactly like the bodies in question.”102 The ability to represent reality in a coherent, illusionistic way—as exhibited in the work of the very artists Alberti singled out for praise—underpinned his confidence in the moderns. In a way, the painters and sculptors had realized Bacon’s program for optics. If they could not destroy armies at a distance, they could make objects appear closer or farther away—and in a way that, Alberti thought, rested on formal geometrical principles. No wonder Alberti approved so exuberantly of Masaccio and Ghiberti.

Secret Writing: Alberti Reengineers Cryptography

No writer of this period did more than Alberti to lay out the possibilities of technics in forceful ways. Practices of invention and rhetorics of innovation became tightly entwined in his writing. Two of his treatises in particular—his short work on cryptography and his massive treatise on architecture—had a potent impact on the practices and beliefs of the magi. One of the last texts Alberti wrote, On Ciphers, begins vividly in the gardens of the Vatican.103 Alberti and his Florentine friend Leonardo Dati, a papal secretary, discuss the newest European inventions as they ramble appreciatively through the pope’s artificial wonderland: “We highly praised the German inventor who recently, by means of movable type characters, made it possible to reproduce more than 200 volumes from one original text in 100 days with the help of no more than three workmen. With a single impression he can indeed obtain a whole sheet of paper of the larger size completely printed.”104 This general discussion of others’ inventions rapidly modulated into something more specific. Dati pressed his friend, a lover of “recondite arts and hidden natures,” to give his opinion about those who might be called “solvers of ciphers and explainers of secrets.” In response, Alberti began to explain what secret writing involved.105

Since ancient times, official letters had been enciphered in a wide variety of ways. Sender and recipient could agree on a set list of words with secret meanings, so that A meant “king,” B meant “church,” D meant “pope,” and so on. Or they could replace letters with special characters.106 By the mid-fifteenth century, however, governments had grown, and their chanceries—the offices that worked on official documents—had become large and specialized. The first resident ambassadors, those unhappy souls who, as Henry Wotton unwisely remarked, were sent to “lie abroad for their countries,” had turned into fixtures in Italian courts and cities. They had to find ways of communicating privately with their governments at home. So did military commanders. Over the years, the experienced secretaries in ducal, urban, and ecclesiastical chanceries, whose world Marcello Simonetta reconstructed in a richly detailed study, devised methods for doing so. Certain chanceries—like the Milanese one of the Sforza, which employed Simonetta’s ancestor Cecco—specialized in complex ciphers, and kept elaborate records of them to aid in deciphering the dispatches of their own agents and cracking those of others.107 Like Alberti, they knew that proper names and patterned words proved especially vulnerable to decipherment. Like Alberti, they knew that vowels appeared far more frequently than consonants and used multiple symbols for vowels even in their simplest ciphers. And like Alberti, they knew that many different forms of cipher could prove useful in practice. Michele Zopello described forms of secret writing in the treatise that he dedicated to Pope Calixtus III in the 1450s.108 His substitution cipher provided six symbols for each of the vowels, only three for consonants, and offered further symbols for nouns likely to appear often, such as “Pope” and Church.”109 Francesco Tranchedino, who joined the chancery of the Sforza dukes of Milan in 1464 and worked there until near the end of the fifteenth century, compiled a different cipher sheet for each of his dozens of correspondents.110 For the humanist Francesco Filelfo he used three different alphabets, in which numbers, astrological symbols, and other signs stood for the Latin letters. Still others, “which mean nothing,” could be interjected to throw off would-be decipherers.111 When corresponding with the Bishop of Parma, by contrast, Tranechedino used not only special alphabets but also signs that indicated combinations of letters and still others that referred to peace and war, the pope and the emperor, the Venetians, the Florentines, and the Genoese.112 The papal chancery—the largest and most efficient in Italy—harbored multiple efforts to develop effective ciphers.

2.3 Michele Zopello, substitution cypher, Literarum simulationis liber, fol. 19 verso. Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, MS LJS 225.

Unfortunately, as Alberti pointed out, all of these normal systems would eventually prove vulnerable to anyone who scrutinized them systematically and had some idea of the plaintext’s subject matter. Two first principles should guide the cryptographer’s work: all users of a system must have a “constant rule” that enables them to read enciphered texts in the same way, and the system must prove opaque even to “the most skilled investigators and astute conjecturers” when they examine its results without an index.113 Only empirical study of language could provide the raw materials for ciphers that would meet these high standards. Fortunately, Alberti had performed an analysis of Latin and Italian while composing his grammar—the first one—of the Tuscan language. It yielded precise results: in poetry, the proportion of consonants to vowels is 8 to 7, but in prose it is only 3 to 2. Closer examination reveals that o and a appear most rarely, e and i most often, in prose works.114 Alberti then offers similar figures for the consonants.115 Anyone aware of these relationships could easily begin deciphering a given text, simply by assuming that the most common letters in the ciphertext, whatever these might be, corresponded to the most common Latin letters as they appear in the plaintext. The cryptographer, accordingly, must systematically conceal those most common letters and the frequencies that betrayed them.

Alberti solved this problem with what he described as a completely new device, one that took advantage—like the printing press, which may even have inspired it—of the possibilities of mechanization. Like the press, Alberti’s device could reproduce a message in a form that did not depend for its existence on a single material record. More radically than the press, it atomized the text itself, in such a way that only someone equipped with the same device could reconstitute it. He made two bronze wheels, Alberti told Dati, “one of a larger diameter which I will call stationary, the other of a smaller diameter, which I will call movable. The diameter of the stationary disk is one ninth greater than that of the movable disk.”116 He marked off the circumference of the larger wheel in equal divisions and inscribed the Latin capital letters, except for the uncommon H and K, and the numbers 1 to 4 in them.117 He also marked off the rim of the smaller wheel and inscribed in its divisions the same Roman letters, in minuscule. Then he set the smaller wheel on top of the larger one, with a pin running through the centers of both. To make the system work, he explained, one must give one of these “formulas” to the writer and another to his “distant friend.”118

The two users of such a formula must agree that a particular letter on the mobile wheel—k, for example—will serve as an index. The writer will begin his letter with a capital B. The reader, on receipt, will turn the mobile wheel until the letter k, on its rim, matches the letter B on the rim of the larger wheel. Then he can decipher the letters that follow in the ciphertext—until the appearance of another capital instructs him to realign the wheels: “When I have written three or four words,” says Alberti, “I will change the position of the index in our formula, turning the disk until, say, that the index k is under capital R. Then I will write a capital R in my message, and from this point onward the small k will no longer mean B but R.”119 Given sufficiently frequent changes of alignment, Alberti promised, no decipherer would be clever enough to detect the plaintext. In effect, Alberti had devised the principle of mechanical variation on which the German Enigma cipher would rest in the twentieth century—and that made that cipher immune to attempts at cracking until both the machine itself and codebooks and other documents became accessible to the British code breakers at Bletchley Hall. He could not conceal his delight in this “method of writing of my own invention” or his belief in its novelty and in the value of keeping it secret: “It is easier to use than any other cipher, quicker to write, faster and more convenient to read if the prearranged rules are respected, harder to solve if the key agreed upon between the correspondents is unknown. The most acute and painstaking intellects, the constant application of the most perspicacious intelligences, every inquisitive ability and every effort, I affirm and dare say, will be in vain. Nobody, besides those who know the key, can learn anything of what was written using this cipher of mine.”120 Alberti’s language reveals that he saw his device as magically effective—and like magic, a secret art—but also one that rested on replicable techniques, not images or incantations.

Alberti knew that cryptography had long been literally associated with magic. Though he denied any interest in disappearing inks based on onion juice and similar substances, he admitted that he knew at least one such method: “There are parts in the human body more concealed than a horse’s hoof, where a fairly long message can be written with a liquid which can easily be read after twenty days or more. In the meantime it will not be effaced either by sweat or water, even in a warm bath.”121 He also referred to the best known of all mysterious forms of writing, the hieroglyphs, “based upon the resemblance between signs and nature, such as those carved on the ancient Egyptian obelisks” and the more arbitrary symbols of the sort regularly used in chanceries.122 But he made clear that his mechanical method for encipherment, like all other normal ones, rested on arbitrary, not natural, equivalences between ciphertext and plaintext. Otherwise, after all, any cipher could prove only too penetrable. Unlike the magicians, accordingly, he explained exactly how to construct his machine, step by step: “I will now retrace the path I followed, as I believe it will be useful.”123 By doing so, he made it possible for others—like Giambattista della Porta—to devise machines of paper that achieved the same ends even more decisively.

The shape of the instrument Alberti devised offers a powerful clue to its intellectual origins. The appearance of a circular device in this context has naturally sparked thoughts of the Majorcan mystic Raymund Lull, who had devised a system of concentric wheels as a way of establishing all possible connections among the divine attributes. Lull’s devices may well have inspired Alberti’s project, as it inspired other efforts to use volvelles for the most varied imaginable purposes.124 But Alberti, who never mentioned Lull, more likely drew the practical model for these implements from the engineers and surveyors whose work he knew firsthand.

Alberti had a special fondness for tools that functioned by rotating. He decided to carve the name of Bernardo Rucellai in a porphyry slab at the threshold of the church of Santa Maria Novella, which he supplied with a magnificent new façade. Finding that he could not attain the corners that he sought, or the proper polish and finish, he had “a little revolving drill made, with a handle like a spit.” It turned copper emery disks, which achieved the finish Alberti sought (though with great difficulty, which discouraged him from trying further experiments).125 Decades before he and Dati prowled the Vatican gardens, Alberti had employed disk-shaped instruments to survey the city of Rome. By calibrating the rim of such an instrument in degrees, imagining it on the top of the Capitoline hill, and reading off the distance in degrees from zero to the direction of any given building, he showed that one could produce a polar coordinate map of the city.126 When Alberti drew up his little book On Statues, he applied a similar tool to related ends. Mark off the circumference of a bronze disc, he explained; fix a movable “radius” to its center; and hang a plumb bob from the end of the pointer. By placing this instrument on the head of a sculpture, one could plot “the variations in limbs from time to time caused by movements and new positions of the parts” in precise, quantitative detail.127 The same instrument, Alberti pointed out, could be applied to “a live model in order to make a figure artistically and methodically.”128 Most strikingly, he noted that with this tool “you could … if you wished, make one half of the statue in the Lunigiana and the other half on Paros.”129 Messages were not Alberti’s first venture into using a disk to duplicate something complicated. His ability to create these useful machines for duplicating works of art and transmitting information across space no doubt explains why he was so quick to appreciate the beauty and novelty of the first printing press—which may, in turn, have suggested the idea of distributing the letters of the alphabet randomly, rather than in their normal order, around the rim of his cipher wheels. When Alberti designed his “formulas,” he worked—as he had when measuring statues and cities—within the practical engineering tradition that he had encountered in the Florence of the 1430s and to which he had contributed new devices of his own invention.

Alberti was not the only engineer to take an interest in ciphers. Fontana—like Alberti, someone who combined a formal university education with a strong interest in practical devices—enciphered parts of the captions to his drawings of simulated witches and moving skeletons. But Fontana—like most of the chancery employees—simply drew up an alphabet of curious signs that served as equivalents to Latin letters. This would have proved vulnerable to any sustained effort at decoding.130 Alberti, by contrast, based his work on a precise quantitative analysis of the behavior of letters in Italian prose and devised his cipher wheel as a way of making particular letter patterns unrecognizable. In doing so he combined interests and methods characteristic of the engineering tradition with the linguistic and philological methods of the humanists—the same methods that he employed, for example, in the 1430s, when he drew up the first formal grammar of Italian and used quantitative analysis to establish the basic linguistic facts about the Tuscan dialect.

Alberti’s efforts to wed practical engineering to the study of language were not confined to the realm of ciphers. In a short treatise that he wrote late in life, the Trivia senatoria, Alberti devised a tool for orators—one that appeared in a manuscript of the work as a pair of wheels, their circumferences marked with the different forms of speech and the “places” or “topics” (loci) that should be treated in them.131 “In this way,” he wrote, “we will combine and compare the ones with the others, both those of their kind and those not of their kind, and having examined and pondered the parts of each, we will choose the more appropriate points, and those that are most precisely relevant to the matter.”132 By turning these as he outlined a speech, the orator could make certain that he touched on every subject that any given subject matter and genre required. This device formally mechanized the humanist art of arts, eloquence itself. The cipher wheel Alberti described in On Ciphers, in other words, marked a natural development of mathematical and philological techniques that he had already applied in other domains. Alberti’s new cryptography—like the workshops of the artists he knew and praised—became what Pamela O. Long has called a “trading zone,” where scholarly and practical traditions intersected. In that new form, it became, as we will see, a central part of magical practice.

2.4 Alberti, circular device for measuring proportions of humans and statues. Leon Battista Alberti, Della architettura, della pittura e della statua, tr. Cosimo Bartoli (Bologna, 1782). Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg.

Power over Nature

Alberti also thought that the moderns had genuinely attained a new level of physical power over nature. The sheer scale of Brunelleschi’s dome, as we have seen, impressed Alberti and Manetti alike. So did the ingenuity of the machines he used to build it. Other new buildings also created a powerful impression. Urban rulers and clan heads began to collect parcels of adjacent lots, tear down old buildings, and build city houses on a grand new scale. Alberti’s friend Flavio Biondo, the greatest antiquary of the fifteenth century, wrote that Michelozzo’s Medici palace was fully comparable “to the works of the onetime rulers of Rome, and indeed the most prominent of them. In fact I, who have restored ancient Rome in my writings, do not hesitate to state that there are no remains of any private house of a great man in Rome, which show more magnificence in their construction.”133 Architecture amply confirmed, as Manetti pointed out, the “industry” of modern man.

Both the engineers and their observers saw as the core of their achievement something more complex than sheer hard work. During the last thirty years or so of his life, Alberti spent a great deal of his time on what became his greatest single treatise—the massive On the Art of Building. Here he continued and synthesized the work of the engineers, dealing in detail with the management of water and the basic machines. In a revealing passage, the machines with which he and other builders lifted columns and other heavy objects were compared to living beings: “But here,” he wrote, “we need only consider the machine as a form of extremely strong animal with hands, an animal that can move weights in almost the same way as we do ourselves. These machines must therefore have the same extensions of members and muscle that we use when pressing, pushing, pulling and carrying.”134

Alberti was not the only engineer who proclaimed the power of devices based on a clear understanding of nature. Fontana argued, following his teacher Biagio of Parma, that armies seen marching in the heavens were not omens revealed by divine providence but illusions created by atmospheric refraction:

Biagio Pelacani, my former teacher, tells the story that in his time, in the year of grace 1403, horsemen and footmen armed with lances and swords appeared, attacking one another, in the clouds every day for three days, before the third hour, in Lombardy, near the town called Busseto. Those who saw this were terrified, not knowing the cause of this novelty. For it happened that at a distance from this place, in a certain plain, there were armed cavalry and foot soldiers, whom the Duke of Milan had assembled so that they could besiege Bologna. And since at that time there was a watery cloud in the sky that could accept a likeness of those armed men in motion, men who were in neighboring places, seeing the cloud, concluded that there were daemons in the air, fighting, with the appearance of armed men, and that they had come there either voluntarily or by the art of magic.135

The angels who appeared in the sky over Milan, similarly, were likenesses of “an angel at the lofty, sharp peak of the tower of S. Gottardo [in Corte], made with a trumpet and sword in his hands, and he presented himself to the aforesaid watery cloud as to a mirror.”136 The sophisticated perspectival studies of Fontana’s time, which inspired some of his devices, also allowed him to naturalize events that his contemporaries normally took as preternatural or even as supernatural. Many, so he had read, had seen or heard reports of ships, castles, cities, and “impossibly big dragons and unheard of, bizarre monsters” in the air.137 Pamphlets and rumors that bore news of this sort could have a powerful impact on politics and group behavior.138 Unhesitatingly, Fontana proclaimed that one could duplicate all of these phenomena “by art, and not even a magical one, but by pure craft.”139

Fontana took a similar line in his illustrated treatise on weapons and other marvelous devices. Here he showed, drawing on a great tradition of visionary design that flourished both in medieval legends and in the contemporary gardens of the rulers of Burgundy, how to make a whole series of automata that would evoke wonder: a bird that flew, a fire-farting rabbit, and a mechanical devil, brilliantly designed to move its facial features, arms, and wings.140 He had these devices illustrated both in real time (as they would look while in operation) and in diagrammatic form to make clear exactly how they functioned.141 In his drawing of a mechanical she-devil, for example, Fontana offered two different visions of his automaton on a single page. In the foreground, the artist showed the creature moving rapidly forward, flapping her wings and breathing fire. Behind it, he laid bare the structures that made the illusion work. With one very striking image, half diagram and half representation, Fontana’s illustrator revealed the armature on which the devil’s costume rested, the ropes that connected her head to her shoulders and her tail and made them move in synchronization, the basket-shaped structure that protected her moving parts, and the assembly of pipes inside her head that enabled her to shoot fire from the ears and mouth—a striking mechanism, oddly reminiscent of Picasso or Max Ernst.142 Here Fontana visually mechanized the apparently preternatural or supernatural. He made clear that his devices could create the same psychologically effective illusions as magical spells without invoking demonic power, and he denounced the fools who thought he conjured demons to achieve his effects. The automaton was the most prominent and clearest example of a larger argument. Though pictures like this do not appear in other engineers’ manuscripts, it seems certain that similar considerations underlay—for example—Brunelleschi’s efforts to understand the logic and play of mechanisms like cranes.143 The fifteenth-century engineer—as Fontana embodied and Alberti understood him—was ready to play Frankenstein. He could already build a partial simulacrum of a human being, and by doing so he showed not only, as Archimedes had said in another context, that he could move the world but also that he could disenchant it.

It was no accident, then, that Manetti and Alberti celebrated a particular (and somewhat peculiar) set of skills as the hallmark of the modern mechanical arts—and as the evidence of human creativity. They emphasized the ability to move large objects on the one hand and to call up effective illusions on the other; they evoked the moderns’ mastery of perspective, astrology, and machines. By doing so, they both drew on an existing tradition and identified the Florentine artists they knew as the ones who had most fully realized its promise. Brunelleschi and the rest had altered the face of the world and the condition of mankind.

At least once, Alberti revealed his firm conviction that machines and sweat—not incantations—offered the greatest sources of power to humans. He wrote a short treatise, a dialogue, on the obelisk that stood by the Old Basilica of Saint Peter through the Middle Ages. Guarino of Verona, the humanist who played Alberti’s spokesman, mocked those who believed that it had been made and installed “by the art or the power of demons.” Others, he reported, speculated idly. They claimed that the obelisk was “built up or composite” and cut small chips off it in an effort to prove their point. “At last,” Guarino winds up, “they babble about how the work was carried out not by human power but by necromancy, magical arts and the incantations of Vergil.”144 To be sure, medieval legends had credited Vergil with bringing the obelisk to Rome, as well as the helical columns that flanked the high altar and presbytery in Saint Peter’s, and supposedly came from Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.145 Like Bacon, Alberti rejected magic and the legends that sustained it. Experts knew better. The obelisk was a solid block of stone, which he—or Guarino speaking for him—examined in detail, taking account of the impact of weather over the centuries on the bronze ball that capped it. Only appropriately designed machinery could have moved or erected this mass of rock. “Our architects,” Alberti wrote, “have established the precise nature of the effort or expense needed to raise it. Indeed, some can be found who promise to use devices to move the stone, still standing, either into the entrance of the church of S. Pietro or elsewhere in the city.”146 He had in mind engineers like Aristide Fioravanti, a specialist in moving large objects. In 1451–1452 Fioravanti transported two monolithic columns from S. Maria sopra Minerva, the Dominican church near the Pantheon, across Rome and the Tiber to Saint Peter’s. Fioravanti may well have played a part in mid-century plans, never realized, to move the obelisk.147

2.5 Giovanni Fontana depicts a she-devil who emits flames from her ears and mouth. The strings within her body were used to flap her wings. Bellicorum instrumentorum liber, fol. 63 verso. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cod. Icon. 242 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

2.6 Two mid-fifteenth-century antiquarians examine the Vatican obelisk. Giovanni Marcanova, Sylloge, fol. 6 verso. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Garrett MS 158.

In a bravura conclusion, Alberti found further confirmation for his belief in human power in the Roman historian Sallust’s account of the conspiracy of Catiline. If the ignorant knew, Guarino says, “that as Sallust asserts, the mountains were levelled and the oceans built upon, they would do even more railing.”148 In the passage that Alberti cited, Sallust lamented the fact that as Romans became rich, the natural world had been transformed by “a great many private individuals” (a privatis compluribus) to display their wealth and power.149 As abridged and quoted by Alberti, however, the ancient historian seemed to support the arguments of the modern humanist: the human power that evoked wonder derived from resources and skill, not from magic and incantations.

In his treatise on architecture, Alberti transformed Sallust’s melancholy phrase into a dazzling set piece, an encomium to the transformative power of architecture. Architects, he wrote, engaged themselves heroically in “cutting through rocks, tunneling through mountains, filling in valleys, by restraining the waters of the sea and lakes, draining marshes, building ships, altering the course and dredging the mouths of rivers, building bridges” and by doing so “opened up new gateways to all the provinces of the world.”150 This passage, as we will see, attracted considerable attention. The Augsburg humanist Conrad Peutinger, an aficionado of the arts, annotated it enthusiastically. Manetti exclaimed that human industry had transformed the world into a simulacrum of heaven: “They are ours, that is human, since they are all the products of human industry: all the houses, all the towns, all the cities, and finally all the buildings all over the world. They are so great that on account of their excellence, they ought properly to be evaluated as the work of angels rather than men.”151 Both men celebrated the feats of navigation that had stitched networks of trade and communications across the known world and beyond. And both men made clear that machines embodied the creative energy of the human mind at its highest level. The chief lesson that the humanists drew from the work of the engineers was clear: the advancing edge of human effort had transformed, and was continuing to transform, the natural world. Like Bacon and the alchemists he cited, the artist-engineers and the literati who praised them framed a vision of human power, found ways to praise the creativity of their own culture, and identified a set of objects and techniques: all produced by applying force to materials that evoked as much wonder as any product of magic. Even the most text-obsessed and speculative of the early magi, Marsilio Ficino, drew on the engineers’ ideas and their work, as well as that of their observers, when he set out to define a new sort of magical practice and a new vision of the magus. But the relationship between magic and engineering was anything but stable.

2.7 Conrad Peutinger marvels at Leon Battista Alberti’s account of architects as the conquerors of cities. Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria (Florence, 1495), sig. a ii recto, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 2 Inc.c.a. 1540 m. (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

CHAPTER THREE

The Learned Magus

Pico and Ficino

The last time that the distinguished Latin poet Baptista Mantuanus spoke with Pico della Mirandola, their conversation had to do with magic. It filled the poet, good Carmelite monk that he was, with the desire to know still more. He wrote to the philosopher’s nephew Gian Francesco, “I seemed to be on fire with the desire to ask many questions about hidden things, which we mortals think of as wonderful and unknown. For some reason, the first topic that occurred to me was whether amulets and pieces of coral, and the like, which are tied around the necks of infants, do any good. He answered that they do have some power, and that that belongs to the realm of natural magic, but that for the most part these customs are condemned and superstitious.”1 The conversation took an appropriately uncanny course. Pico, who appeared to the poet before dawn, did so in a dream, as Baptista noted, pointing out that such dreams tend to come true. He stammered and explained his speech impediment as a sign that he had left his long treatment of nature and philosophy incomplete. And after he gave his verdict on the necklaces used to ward off the evil eye from babies, he simply disappeared. Baptista probably expected his friend to make a dramatic exit, since Pico had been dead for some weeks when the dream took place. Even if it was fictional, the conversation reveals something important. Informed contemporaries saw Pico as an authority on magic, in theory as well as in practice, and on the popular as well as the highbrow level.

Pico’s mastery of occult sciences helped to make the bond between him and his older Florentine friend Marsilio Ficino. For Ficino also dedicated himself to studies of supernatural and celestial forces as well as philosophical issues. He offered firm, impressive interpretations of the strange phenomena that became more and more frequent in Italy as the end of the fifteenth century approached. Writing on Christmas Day 1478 to Pope Sixtus IV, Ficino recalled that in the previous year, certain relics of St. Peter found at Volterra had produced “twelve great miracles in one month.” Ficino and three other “colleagues in philosophy,” stirred by these signs, held a formal discussion. First they studied the prophets, and decided that the pope would someday do famous miracles for all the peoples of the earth, gentiles as well as Christians. Moving on to astrology, they noted that Saturn and Mars had just been in conjunction and would soon be so again, that eclipses of the sun and moon were about to take place, and that Mars was in an unfavorable relation with the beneficent planet Jupiter. They drew the obvious inference: war, plague, and famine were about to strike, kings would die, and a new heresy would arise.2

“The mind,” Ficino wrote, “shudders to tell what follows, the ship of Peter will soon be tossed on the waves of the Tiber—may it not come to pass. Barbarians will then devastate Italy. But since Mars, the ruler, overcame Saturn, the author of plague, hunger, treachery and heresy, in all the celestial figures which I described, we agreed that all those evils would spring from the war.”3 Up to this point, Ficino’s accuracy attracts admiration. The Italian wars that broke out in 1494 matched his predictions, horror by horror. In the end, however, the astrologers found consolation in another higher power besides that of the stars. Diseases, they noted, test the abilities of doctors as storms test those of steersmen. Divine providence had used the stars to send all of these evils at once—in order that Sixtus, rising in all his majesty like Neptune in the midst of the storm, could show his mettle by calming the winds and the sea—ultimately taming Mars and Saturn.4 As astrological details gave way to flattering mythological rhetoric, Ficino’s vision of the future lost clarity—and accuracy.

The practices Baptista asked Pico about came from the world of popular magic—the traditional spells, rituals, and objects charged with power that some clerics were beginning to treat as something far more threatening. The formal prediction that Ficino offered the new pope just as clearly derived from the world of learned magic at the point where it was hardest to distinguish from Christian prophecy. When Ficino set out to synthesize Christian world history with astrological prediction, he did no more than Pierre d’Ailly had done earlier in the century, or Johannes Lichtenberger in his own time.5 Though Ficino sometimes wavered, he never wholly lost faith in astrology. He held off publishing his epoch-making complete Latin translation of Plato until 1484, presumably because a great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter fell in that year.6 As late as 1498, he wrote—though he did not send—an open letter to the college of Cardinals in Rome, in which he argued that astrologers could tell that Savonarola, whom he despised, had been subject to “many and varied or unfortunate influences of the stars.” In fact, the data in the skies proved that Savonarola had become subject to “a whole range of wicked demons.”7 Ficino’s practices were as traditional as his belief—shared, as we have seen, by Albertus Magnus, Richard de Fournival, and Roger Bacon—that true prophecy and good astrology would inevitably coincide.

The Learned Magician: Points of Agreement, Points in Dispute

Yet historians of magic inevitably link Pico and Ficino with the rise of a particular kind of magician: one who claimed a wide range of powers, enjoyed a high status, and created a disturbing kind of cultural and influential conflict. And they are right to do so. Pico and Ficino were read with enthusiasm and interest by a wide audience. More than thirty editions of Ficino’s long treatise On Life, which contains long sections on making talismans and similar arts, appeared in the sixteenth century. Pico’s Oration, Apology, 900 Theses and Disputations against Divinatory Astrology sparked intense debates, not only in the world of theology and philosophy but also in the more specialized one of the medical schools. The spread of syphilis made the question of what caused diseases especially urgent, and doctors lined up for decades to agree with or refute Pico’s argument that the stars did not produce particular events on earth. The two were paired, at least in memory, in many realms of the world of learning. Those who carried their teachings further—like Johannes Reuchlin and Henrich Cornelius Agrippa—remembered them as working together in the golden Indian summer that the scholars of Medicean Florence enjoyed under Lorenzo, in the 1480s and early 1490s.

In some ways, it seems strange that the two men had so much in common. Two contemporary careers could hardly have followed more divergent paths. Ficino, born in 1433, was the son of a Florentine medical man and a product of the city’s professional upper stratum. He devoted himself from the 1450s onward to learning and worked his way from the great Latin classic of Neoplatonism, the works of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, to those of Plato and his ancient interpreters, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus. He became a priest in 1473, but Cosimo de’ Medici’s support enabled him to devote most of his time to translating into Latin the complete works of Plato, the Enneads of Plotinus, and much else. Ficino was a brilliant philologist, who emended difficult Greek texts as he rendered them into Latin. Working in Florence and at the villa that Cosimo gave him at Monetvecchio, near his own villa in the hills outside the city, he became—even to those who had doubts about his learning and perspicacity—the “father of the Platonic family.” His long and stable career as a great star in the intellectual skies over Tuscany was interrupted only in its later years, when the Medici were expelled from Florence and Savonarola (whom he feared and loathed) helped the Florentines restore their republic. Yet he lived to see his Dominican enemy discredited and executed. His versions and interpretations of Plato would dominate all efforts to understand the Platonic tradition until late in the sixteenth century.8

The stable position that Ficino enjoyed in Florence made it possible for him to intervene in the crisis of Giovanni Pico’s life and career. For Pico lived a life as adventurous and wild as Ficino’s was scholarly and sedentary. Born in 1463 to a princely family that preserved its independence and earned its living running a mercenary army, Pico sold his birthright and devoted himself to scholarship and books. A prodigy, he memorized texts at a glance and could repeat them word for word, not only forward but backward. He studied the classics at Ferrara and scholastic philosophy at Bologna and Paris. He mastered Greek—he seems to have been the first Renaissance humanist to quote the Hellenistic poet Callimachus from firsthand knowledge—learned Hebrew, and worked with Jews and Jewish converts to learn more.

Pico’s courage—or rashness—manifested itself in many ways. In 1486 he ran away with the wife of a Medici tax official, losing his retinue, whom his pursuers slaughtered. Ficino, who wrote a defense of his friend, fondly noted that one must expect young gods to behave a little wildly. In 1487 he invited scholars from all over the world to come to Rome at his expense and debate nine hundred theses on all areas and traditions of thought, including magic and Kabbalah (which he called Cabala, as many Christians would). He printed his theses and drafted an oration, which he intended to deliver before the games began. But the disputation never took place, and the speech was never presented. Pico found himself expelled from Paradise by an angel with a flaming sword—or at least he suffered the confiscation of his reader’s ticket to the Vatican Library, to which he had to return the last book he had borrowed. A committee, impaneled to review his nine hundred propositions, condemned a few of them as heretical—notably one in which he argued that magic and Cabala provided more certainty than any other disciplines about Christ’s miracles. Others they labeled as suspect. Pico wrote an Apology in which he defended himself sharply against his critics, repeating much of what he had said in the Oration. He treated his critics with disdain. One of them, he remarked, thought that “Cabala” was the personal name of a wicked man who had written against the Christian religion.9 But gradually he became desperate. Fleeing from Rome, he went all the way to France, where he was arrested and brought back. Pico escaped punishment only because Lorenzo de’ Medici invited him to Florence. There he spent his last years, engaged in a lively three-cornered conversation with Ficino and the great philologist Angelo Poliziano, and listening to Savonarola, whom he revered. He died in 1494, long before the outcome of Savonarola’s sermons was clear.10

Points in Dispute

It is hard to imagine two thinkers more different than the systematic, erudite older man and his dashing, even more erudite young friend. And it is even harder, at first glance, to understand how they assembled many of the ingredients that went into the new figure of the magus in ways that appeared to dozens of the same readers. For the two of them diverged on vital points, some of them central to their metaphysics and others to their magic. Ficino’s central achievement, on the theoretical level, lay in the new conceptual frame with which he explained the influence of celestial bodies on terrestrial beings. His cogent, hierarchical, and organic vision of the universe made clear—as many previous theories had not—exactly how the heavens could affect human beings on the earth.

The stars, Ficino argued, following Al-Kindi and Bacon, send out their influences in rays, which traverse the “spirit of the world.” The human being, a composite of body and soul, also possessed a third and vital element, which joined the other two. This “spirit,” a subtle vapor produced from the blood—pure, hot, and clear—flies upward to the brain. There “the soul uses it continually for the exercise of the interior as well as the exterior senses. This is why the blood subserves the spirit; the spirit, the senses; and finally, the senses, reason.”11 The rays from the planets, transmitted through the “spiritus mundanus,” come into contact with the “spiritus humanus.” Through that they can influence the “imaginatio” and “ratio” but not the free “mens” of man. This tight-knit and symmetrical system, constructed from both Neoplatonic and Stoic ingredients, made clear what connected every set of elements in the system, from the stars to human appetites. It also explained how individuals could bring superior forces down to aid them without engaging in illegal communication with supernatural beings. Ficino filled much of his great work on astrological medicine, On Life, with prescriptions drawn from traditional sources. These ranged from the writings of ancient Greek medical writers like Galen through the scholastic treatments of natural magic and philosophy to the Picatrix and other sources, many of them long familiar to European philosophers. But he fused them into a coherent whole in a way no previous thinker had done.12

Though Pico professed his respect for Ficino’s achievement, he also rejected much of it. In his massive inquiry into astrology, the Disputationes, he argued at length that efforts to tie the influence of the stars to specific events on earth could succeed only by treating the evidence as Procrustes treated his house guests. Those who explained world history through the great conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn that took place every twenty years ignored the obvious and troubling fact that the correlations between events on heaven and on earth were very loose. Those who explained human character by the arrangement of the heavens at an individual’s birth reasoned just as poorly. The short span of time that had passed since astronomers began precise observation—which Pico, like medieval experts on chronology and modern historians of science, dated to the accession of Nabonassar to the throne of Babylon in 747 BCE, following the records in Ptolemy’s Almagest—did not allow particular configurations of all the planets to recur.13 Any interpretation of a horoscope, Pico argued, drawing on the earlier polemics of Nicole Oresme and Heinrich of Langenstein, must therefore lack an empirical basis.14 Ficino, by contrast, took the planetary conjunctions as indicators of the past and future. He saw the position of Saturn, in the ascendant at his birth, as having determined the entire course of his life and as perfectly correlated to his own contemplative, melancholy character. At one point he even insisted that Saturn, then in the retrograde arc of its epicycle, had prevented him from walking to Pico’s house.15

Worst of all, Pico tore down the delicate structure of causes that Ficino had erected to explain how the heavens exercised their influence on mankind. Pico admitted that the heavens affected the earth in general ways since the sun clearly warmed it, and the moon clearly cooled it. He even suggested that a new astrology based on the simple correlations drawn by peasants and sailors between the skies and weather conditions might be of some use. But he denied that the planets spoke to—much less fixed the characters or shaped the daily lives of—individual men and women.

In many respects, Ficino remained within the tradition of learned magic that stretched back to the high Middle Ages. He described—with much hesitation—the talismans into which, so the Picatrix and older sources claimed, the ancient sages had called down celestial spirits.16 In doing so, he regularly referred to the arguments with which Thomas Aquinas, two centuries before, had generally condemned talismans as ineffectual since the inscription of words or figures on a piece of stone or metal could not change its substantial form. But he seized upon and quoted the one passage in Thomas’s Summa contra gentiles where the Dominican theologian seemed to concede that talismans might have some power after all.17 Still, Ficino admitted that talismans were less useful than normal medicines and possibly dangerous as well.18 His exposition was marked with profound ambivalence.

Ficino’s practices, as he described them, were even less radical than his precepts. Writing in the 1450s, Giovanni Fontana had described talismans that, like Ficino’s, came from the fourteenth-century work of Pietro d’Abano. Like Ficino, he had envisioned one of them as replicating the first decan of Virgo—the young woman with two stalks of grain, feeding a child, who, as we have seen, had long played a role in astrological thought. Giovanni showed none of Ficino’s hesitation in proclaiming the merits of these magical devices. He reported that Indian and Persian astronomers, among others, “said that they saw some of those images, since their sight was powerful and very sharp at certain times, when they were on regions and mountains in the brilliant serenity of the night. And knowledge of the characters they attribute to the angels of the spheres, planets and stars was granted or revealed to them.” The figures that Hermes, Enoch, and others moulded or sculpted in metal, sealed in wax, clay or gum, or painted came directly from their observation of the heavens.19

Pico also cited medieval precedents. When he distinguished between the two forms of magic, high (good) and low (evil), he repeated what the thirteenth-century proponents of natural magic had argued—as he himself acknowledged when he noted that “of the more recent writers, I find that three have had an inkling of it: Al-Kindi the Arab, Roger Bacon, and William of Paris [Auvergne].”20 Defending himself in the Apology, Pico insisted that he had followed established ecclesiastical opinion: for example, that of “that excellent theologian William [of Auvergne], bishop of Paris, the contemporary of Robert [Grosseteste] of Lincoln.”21 But he went far beyond what Bacon or Albertus Magnus had done when he cast the distinction in what became its classic Renaissance form: “We have shown that there are two forms of magic, one of which consists entirely in the work and authority of demons, something which is absolutely damnable and loathsome. The other, when it is properly investigated, is the absolute completion of natural philosophy.”22 Earlier thinkers had distinguished, as we have seen, between demonic and natural magic. But they did not make the case as powerfully as Pico did, and they did not argue that magic could complete natural philosophy—much less did they make it, as Pico did, the natural transition to theology.

Points of Agreement

Why then did Pico and Ficino believe—and why did their contemporaries agree—that they had so much in common and that their work transformed the magical tradition? The first answer is simple: both men asserted the vital importance of magic, however differently they defined it, at almost the same time—the later 1480s. Though many thinkers, as we will see, did not share their views, some impressive contemporaries did. Antonio Benivieni was a Florentine medical man who emphasized careful examination of living patients and precise autopsies of those who died.23 Yet he included in his case book the story of a soldier who had a weapon buried in his chest, which no surgeon could remove: “So in default of medical aid, as this could not be done without risk of death, he called on a diviner who placed two fingers on the wound. Then murmuring some chants or other he ordered the weapon to come forth from the bone. It obeyed without harming the sick man’s body (though not without the loss of both their souls) and the soldier a few days later was duly cured and recovered.”24

Pico planned to stage his disputation in 1487, while in 1489, Ficino, who had been working on his book On Life and the translation of the older materials he used in it, wrote up the third book, which deals with magical talismans. Even though Ficino and Pico disagreed on important points, they nevertheless followed many parallel paths. Both of them insisted eloquently that though magic included concrete practices, it was far more than their sum.

Pico, in the Oration with which he meant to begin his great disputation, evoked the powers of magic with a lively, even phosphorescent rhetoric that later writers would quote over and over again in the decades to come:

As the one magic exposes and enslaves man to unclean powers, the other makes him their lord and prince. In the end, one magic cannot claim the name of art or science, whereas the other is full of the deepest mysteries, including the most profound contemplation of the most abstruse secrets, and leading at last to knowledge of Nature as a whole … this magic makes public, as if it were the Artificer, wonders concealed in the world’s secret parts, in Nature’s heart, in God’s hideaways and storerooms, and as a farmer marries elm to vine, so a magus joins earth to heaven, linking things below to properties and powers of those above.25

Pico’s language was not only charged with energy and life but also carefully measured. He made clear, as the scholastics had, that the magician only turned a key that opened existing doors. The art of magic gave its practitioners not power over nature but access to her secret gardens and the ability to cultivate them by her rules.

No one read Pico more attentively than Ficino. In his own self-defense, written only two years later, he too compared the magus to a farmer:

He is a cultivator of the world. Nor does he on that account worship the world, just as a farmer does not worship the earth; but just as a farmer for the sake of human sustenance tempers his field to the air, so that wise man, that priest, for the sake of human welfare tempers the lower parts of the world to the upper parts; and just like hen’s eggs, so he fittingly subjects earthly things to heaven that they may be fostered.26

Just as Pico insisted that the magician did nothing to nature except obey her and act as her midwife, so Ficino insisted that the magician’s activities had nothing to do with worship. Incantations and burnings of incense were not rituals that competed with those of the church, even if Roger Bacon and many others since his time, down to Nicholas of Cusa, had understood them exactly in that light. Much less were these rituals ways of communicating with demonic beings. They simply formed part of the spiritual agriculture—the cultivation of the world’s secret energies that wise men had always practiced.

For the next century and beyond, everyone seriously interested in magic would read, copy out, and rework these formulations. Giambattista della Porta, the most adept magician in mid-sixteenth-century Naples, had little in common with Benito Pereira, the Spanish Jesuit who wrote an influential denunciation of divination based on dreams and astrology, both components of learned magic. Della Porta praised high magic as the key to power over the universe. He rewrote Pico to place a stronger emphasis on operation rather than contemplation and emphasized practical forms of magic, like those involving perspective, but he retained Pico’s strong emphasis on the two forms of magic.27 Pereira, by contrast, almost parodied the magical tradition. To give an example of occult powers, he cited Augustine’s account of humans who could produce musical farts at will. Yet both of them agreed with Pico, not only that a good form of magic existed but also that it could cause events that ordinary people would see as miraculous, though they were wholly natural.28

Both Pico and Ficino, in other words, promised that good magic, in their sense, did not promise a violent transformation of the natural world but the full realization of its powers. Both of them, moreover, used the same ancient source to back up this seemingly modest claim. Of the ancient writers on magic who mattered deeply to both of them, Plotinus had made the strongest argument for nature being a single, organic being connected in all of her parts by influences that moved instantaneously. Pico cited him at the core of his discourse on magic: “Plotinus,” he wrote, “also mentions it where he shows that the magus is Nature’s minister, not her Artificer. That man of the loftiest wisdom approves and confirms the one magic and abhors the other, so that, when he was summoned to the rites of evil demons, he said that it was better that they should come to him than he to them. And rightly so.”29 Ficino, for his part, not only relied on Plotinus but translated the ancient edition of his writings by Porphyry, the Enneads, into Latin. The entire third book of On Life began as a commentary on the magical sections in book four of the Enneads. Both Pico and Ficino equipped magic with a new form of defense: the Neoplatonic cosmos of Plotinus served as a frame to justify—and delimit—the practice of magic.

Magic in a New Key: The Inward Turn

Pico and Ficino pitched their claims for magic, moreover, in a new key—one that neatly matched the tastes of their erudite contemporaries. Pico urged those who were to hear his Oration to pursue magic as part of a coherent program of self-cultivation, which he organized along ascetic lines. The wise men, he urged, must realize that man held a unique position in the order of being. Of all created beings, only humans could move up or down the ladder of being. They could slide downward into the realm of animals, fish, and stones. But they could also climb upward into the orders of angels. Only the pursuit of knowledge made this ascent possible. Moral philosophy would free one from the tangles of the passions—a point on which Pico knew whereof he spoke. Dialectic, the art of reasoning, would cleanse the soul, removing the dirt of ignorance and enabling it to reach a sort of equilibrium. Then natural philosophy would flood the soul with its light. This would allow man finally to reach the highest form of knowledge: that of divine things. The magus, as Pico described him, studied the wonders of nature not to transform his environment but in order to transform himself: “For there is no greater stimulus to religion or to any worship of God than constantly contemplating God’s marvels. After exploring them carefully through this natural magic of which I speak, we will be stirred to worship their Creator with a hotter passion, and then we shall be forced to sing that famous song, ‘full are the heavens, full is the whole earth with your glory’s greatness.’”30 Magic, properly understood, was a spiritual exercise, and its practitioner was—or could become—an ascetic holy man, just as Nicholas of Cusa had feared.

Ficino, for his part, embedded his treatment of magic in a larger program for self-cultivation. His book on talismans, On Obtaining Life from the Heavens, was the third of three books, On Life. In it he tried, as he did in the other two, to solve a single problem: how to improve the health and lengthen the lives of scholars. The learned, he explained, offering the medical background for the sufferings Alberti had described so vividly, were beset by problems that were not so much the result of their occupation as part of the preconditions for it. Systematic as always, Ficino gave astrological, natural, and human causes for the scholars’ occupational diseases. Mercury and Saturn, the planets that presided over the discovery of new forms of learning, are cold and dry: “And this same nature Mercury and Saturn impart from birth to their followers, learned people, and preserve and augment it day by day.” Naturally, the soul tended to shrink inward as it contemplated, as the soul did in the universe—and black bile was analogous to black earth. The continual effort to use one’s brain dried it up, and made it cold, turning the blood dense, dry, and black. The more profound the scholar’s thoughts were, and the harder he worked, the likelier his body was to become “as if it were half-alive.”31

Ficino offered a vast array of suggestions on how the scholar might avert the rise of phlegm and black bile that would make him melancholy. He cautioned against sex, especially wild sex; eating and drinking too much; and staying up late. He urged the scholar to follow a very precise regimen: “There should be twice as much food as drink: the proportion of bread to drink should be two to one; of bread to eggs, one and one-half to one; of bread to meat three to one; and of bread to the moister fish, green vegetables, and fruits, four to one. The meal should not begin with drinking, nor should the drink be too abundant at any time.”32 And he recommended a vast range of time-consuming pursuits and money-devouring luxury goods, from going to the country to consuming potable gold, that could enhance the health of elderly scholars.33

Ficino shrank from no measure, however costly or hard to carry out, that might help his readers:

Immediately after the age of seventy and sometimes after sixty-three, since the moisture has gradually dried up, the tree of the human body often decays. Then for the first time this human tree must be moistened by a human, youthful liquid in order that it may revive. Therefore choose a young girl who is healthy, beautiful, cheerful and temperate, and when you are hungry and the Moon is waxing, suck her milk.34

He also suggested that the old and decayed could suck blood, like leeches, from the arms of young men.35 These sinister recommendations—which sound oddly like an allegory of modern graduate education—flank admonitions to take walks in the country, eat precious substances such as rose-sugar with gold leaves, and undergo aromatherapy. Some of the most learned men in Europe took them seriously. The English medical man John Caius—who believed on principal that care of the sick should rest on texts in the languages of learning, Greek and Latin—sickened and died in the early 1570s.36 His onetime student Thomas Muffett asked, revealingly, “What made Dr Cajus in his last sickness so peevish and so full of frets at Cambridge, when he suckt one woman (whom I spare to name), froward of conditions and of bad diet; and contrariwise so quiet and well when he suck another of contrary disposition? verily the diversity of their milks and conditions, which being contrary one to the other, wrought also inn him that sucked them contrary effects.”37 Caius was practicing what Ficino had preached.

Bent as ever on system, convinced as ever that the universe formed a single dynamic hieroglyph that he could read, Ficino wrapped even the most traditional of his prescriptions in his lucid, all-enfolding causal system. The eleventh-century Salernitan medical man Constantine the African had recommended centuries before that “melancholics should become used to some extent to going for walks, as dawn appears, through regions that are wide open, and flat, sandy and fragrant.”38 In doing so he attended, as medical men had since antiquity, to what they called the six nonnaturals: air and environment, food and drink, exercise and rest, sleep, excretion, and emotions. These were factors that did not form part of an individual’s constitution but shaped it in important ways.39 But when Ficino told his readers to spend as much time as they could “in lofty, clear, and temperate places,” he also explained why, in terms of his own astrology: “For thus the rays of the Sun and the stars touch you more readily and purely on all sides, and they fill your spirit with the spirit of the world shining forth more richly through the rays.”40 Earlier forms of magic—like the ars notoria—had offered rituals, practices, even visions of the heavenly mansions. But none had offered deep knowledge of the magician’s body and soul.

More than one modern historian has been struck by the similarity between Ficino and the twentieth-century analyst, sitting in a luxuriously appointed room and offering the sort of therapy that, if it does not always put the patient back on his or her feet, at least explains why analysts have such large houses.41 But Pico and Ficino addressed contemporary (not modern) needs and interests. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, literary scholars and moral philosophers had devoted themselves to writing treatises on how to form the self. New tools for introspection—from varied models for writing about one’s life to varied models for understanding the condition of one’s soul—were forged by adherents of every philosophy from Aristotelianism to Epicureanism. At the same time, medical men devised an increasingly wide range of therapies, precisely calibrated to the needs of the increasingly wealthy class of urban patricians. They wrote not only general treatises on medicine but also manuals of medical practice, which offered detailed information on treatment, and individual reports on the treatment of individual patients. They insisted that they, rather than midwives, should look after the wives of the good and the great when they became pregnant. They also developed attractive, expensive new therapies—like the water cures that were offered at an ever-expanding number of spas, many of them developed and advertised by medical men.42

The magic of Pico and Ficino turned inward: away from the control of the world that Roger Bacon and Giovanni Fontana had both longed for, away from the talismans that could move crowds and the predictions that could move the whole church, and toward the needs and problems of the individual person. Their carefully calibrated efforts to provide increasingly higher levels of knowledge, as well as increasingly precise individual forms of therapy, mirrored the desires of their readers. Ficino, indeed, offered many different treatments. In his letters, he regularly advised his many friends in the Florentine patriciate on how to control and improve themselves, physically and mentally.

Enlarging the Magical Tradition

Pico and Ficino, moreover, both added vital resources to the magical tradition—resources that would prove vital for decades to come. Like his predecessors, Ficino mastered the medieval and Arabo-Latin literature of magic and astrology. But he also added to it a range of late antique and still later Greek sources, which he himself rendered into Latin. These included the Enneads of Plotinus, the life of Plotinus by Porphyry, On the Mysteries of the Egyptians by Iamblichus, the work on demons ascribed to the Byzantine writer Michael Psellus, and more. Early in the 1460s, at the personal request of Cosimo de’ Medici, he set aside his work on Plato to translate the texts now called the Hermetic Corpus. Along with an ancient Latin translation, the Asclepius, these claimed to present the cosmology and theology of the ancient Egyptians, which bore so close a resemblance to Christianity that Michael Psellus thought the devil himself must have dictated them. To Ficino, texts like the Hermetic Corpus and the Chaldaic Oracles ascribed to Zoroaster represented the sources on which Plato himself had drawn. They did not describe the details of magical practices, as Brian Copenhaver has rightly emphasized. But Ficino found in them accounts of the larger processes by which the soul descended into nature and rose from it again. They framed the magical tradition and set it within the philosophical tradition. In Ficino’s view, in other words, a chain of texts stretched back to deepest antiquity. It showed that great thinkers had understood the cosmos in similar terms. Some of the earliest of them had been, like Zoroaster, the sort of philosophers called “magi.”

If the oldest of Ficino’s texts—as he saw it—gave magic a new age and authority, the later ones—those of Plato’s interpreters—explicitly tied cosmological speculation to magical practice. Proclus, a Neoplatonic philosopher of the fifth century AD, wrote a short work, Sacrifices and Magic. Except for one fragment in Greek, this work now survives only in Ficino’s Latin translation. It began with an evocation of Eros perfectly designed to appeal to Ficino, the commentator on Plato’s Symposium and founder of the Renaissance theory of Platonic love: “Just as lovers progress little by little, using reason, from sensual beauty to divine beauty, so the ancient priests, when they considered a certain relation in natural things, and found that all things are related by feeling and manifest things to occult powers, and found all things in all things, they created their holy science.”43 The divine science included, in Proclus’s version, an explanation of how the celestial bodies allot their own properties to beings according to a hierarchical order: angels, demons, souls, animals, plants, and stones. “Therefore,” Proclus wrote,

the authorities of the ancient priesthood discovered the cult of the higher powers from the obvious things (of this world). While they mixed some, they purified others; but they mixed most of them together, because they saw that simple things have some of the properties of a divinity, but not sufficient to call down that divinity. Therefore, by mixing many things they drew down on us the influxes from on high, and that which by composition out of many they had made to be one they assimilated to that One which is above the many. They constructed statues out of many materials, and also compound incenses, gathering the divine symbols into one and rendering that one such as to be divine in essence, comprehending as many powers as possible.44

Proclus also explained that statues, after the priests drew celestial life and power into them, could offer responses in divine oracles.

Discoveries like these had radical consequences. Ensouled statues were mentioned not only in rare Greek texts like this one but also in the Latin Asclepius, widely read in the Middle Ages. Aquinas leveled a devastating attack on this ancient authority in the Summa contra Gentiles: “When a statue is made, no substantial form is added to it, but the transformation takes place only with respect to its figure, which is an accident. The form of the copper, or any material of this sort, remains. Therefore it is not possible that statues of this sort receive any sort of principle of life.”45 Ficino, however, found authorities who thought it possible that a magus could call the celestial powers down into statues. Reading Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Porphyry with close attention, Ficino worked out a complex vision of the nature and power of prayer. By now Ficino had learned from these writers, as Denis Robichaud has shown, to see the texts ascribed to Hermes as the works of Egyptian priests who saw Hermes as the maker of all discoveries.46 In the climactic chapter of On Calling Life Down from the Stars, a drumbeat of references to Hermes Trismegistus helped to suggest that the practices he had learned from Greek philosophers had descended not from a single Egyptian sage but from sage priests, themselves inspired:

Plotinus uses almost the same examples in that place where, paraphrasing Hermes Trismegistus, he says that the ancient priests or Magi used to capture in statues and material sacrifices something divine and wonderful. He holds, moreover, with Hermes Trismegistus that through these materials they did not, properly speaking, capture divinities wholly separate from matter but deities who are merely cosmic, as I said from the beginning and as Synesius demonstrates—cosmic, I say, that is, a life or something vital from the Anima Mundi and the souls of the spheres and of the stars or even a motion and, as it were, a vital presence from the daemons. Indeed, the same Hermes, whom Plotinus follows, holds that daemons of this kind—airy ones, not celestial, let alone any higher—are themselves present all along in the materials and that Hermes himself put together statues from herbs, trees, stones, and spices, which had within themselves, as he says, a natural force of divinity. He added songs resembling the heavenly bodies; he says the divinities take delight in such songs and so stay a longer time in the statues and help people or harm them. He adds that once the wise men of Egypt, who were also priests, since they were unable to persuade the people by reasoning that there were gods, that is, certain spirits [in the ordinary sense] superior to mankind, thought up this magical lure through which they could allure daemons into the statues and thereby show that divinities exist.47

Ficino immediately added reservations. Iamblichus, he warned, condemned the Egyptian priests, and Thomas argued that the daemons really entered the statues at their own volition in order to deceive their worshippers. But the point was clear, rhetorically if not logically. The ensouled statues of the Egyptians offered a powerful model of how the anima mundi (the soul of the world) generated and changed natural things through seedlike principles known as “seminal reasons” (logoi spermatikoi)—and how the magus could make himself, as the sculptor makes statues, the recipient of heavenly beneficence.48

Ficino was not the first fifteenth-century magician to take an interest in ensouled statues or to treat them ambiguously. Giovanni Fontana, for example, asked, “Do we not know of the spirits, that, once they entered the idols of the pagans, they gave answers, and lured the pagans to idolatry? First the Chaldeans, and then the Romans, thought them to be gods, and worshipped them, and again nowadays many oriental peoples likewise pray to them, in their blindness and confusion.”49 Fontana believed that certain “magi and necromancers” used “holy characters and the names of good angels” to compel these spirits to enter not only statues but also animals and dead bodies. He described these spells as stronger than iron chains. And he also put forth the possibility that the daemons entered the statues of their own volition to fool their worshippers.50 But Ficino, once again, drew a new level of detail and of philosophical support for these speculations from his new sources.

In the fifteenth century, many Christians saw their own religious objects as ensouled. The Host, in particular, could bleed if stabbed or turn into a miraculously invulnerable little boy when Jews tried to boil or burn it. The saints and members of the Holy Family appeared in images. One day in June 1446, as the Benedictine Girolamo Aliotti, a friend of Leon Battista Alberti, traveled to Arezzo, he was confronted by a new “religio.” Men and women and boys and girls followed cruciform banners.51 Joining them, Aliotti learned that the Virgin Mary had just appeared “in the body” to the citizens of a small town. She had converted atheists into believers and reconciled enemies savagely divided by ancient lawsuits and family feuds. When Aliotti asked for details, he learned that four young girls had taken shelter from a rainstorm in the local church. They prayed to the Virgin to stop the rain and flooding and to end the civil strife in their town. Their prayers were answered dramatically when they saw a fresco of the Virgin “transfigured into the true mother of the Lord our Savior, no longer represented, but in the flesh, but breathing, but alive.”52

Once the image became its own prototype, it showed great power. In its presence, mockers “began to feel the immense and terrible power of God” and fell helpless to the ground, like Paul on the road to Damascus. Spectacular visions appeared to them. One saw the Virgin shooting arrows into his heart; another felt agonizing pain. Conversions were frequent and lasting.53 Aliotti did what his professional responsibilities required. If the subject depicted in an icon came to life, that would constitute a miracle. Only experts on the theology of the supernatural could judge whether these happenings were truly miraculous. So he sent a detailed account to a friend in Rome, whom he asked to seek out authoritative opinions. He recommended Cardinal Turrecremata, “the most expert theologian of our time,” and Giovanni Mattiotti, the priest of Santa Maria in Trastevere who had served as confessor to Santa Francesca Romana, “a man characterized by a special aptitude for the precise discernment of spirits.”54 Ficino argued, in effect, that the best of the pagans might have been able to carry out similar miracles by their magic—and provided authoritative textual support for his views even as he backpedaled and hedged. No wonder that this passage attracted the attention of magi for generations to come. It provided magic with a new affective power and renewed religious charisma.

Jews and Magic

Pico did even more to expand the bounds of the magical tradition. The established Latin magical library came from polyglot sources: Jewish and Muslim but also Greek. Some texts, such as the Latin Picatrix, derived their contents from even more exotic quarters. The Greek library, as selected and rendered by Ficino, enlarged the magical tradition further, confirming its Egyptian origins by connecting its practice with a wide range of Neoplatonic texts that nourished Ficino’s complex thoughts on theurgy. But Pico opened up the Jewish library and did so in ways that would prove crucial for the development of Western thought in general and of the magical tradition in particular.

Beginning with Chaim Wirszubski, a series of modern scholars have traced the steps by which Pico explored and tried to assimilate Jewish texts. Wirszubski followed a trail to Pico that few others had traveled since the seventeenth century.55 It had long been known that Pico had received lessons in Hebrew and other languages from a spectacularly colorful figure: Samuel ben Nissim Abulfaraj, a Sicilian Jew who had converted to Christianity in the 1460s and was baptized as Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada. In the best humanist fashion, he gave himself a classical name: that of King Mithridates VI Eupator Dionysus of Pontus, who, according to the Roman polymath Pliny the Elder, could speak all the languages of the twenty-two peoples he governed.

As that period form of self-advertisement suggests, Mithridates was a polyglot. He enjoyed the patronage of Pope Sixtus IV and taught Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic at the University of Rome.56 Early in his career, he decided that the true core of Judaism was in essence Christian. On Good Friday 1481 he gave a long sermon at the papal curia on the Passion of Jesus. Many of the proof texts Flavius used were not genuine Jewish materials but doctored passages, which had been used in thirteenth-century Christian polemics against the Jews. Heaping up these passages from what he called “the old Talmud” and “the old Talmudists,” whose work he set in the years around 370 BCE, Flavius argued powerfully that the Jews had known all the mysteries of Christianity. They had removed them from the Talmud and their other books out of sheer obstinacy and hatred—the emotions that made them refuse to convert.57 Later he traveled north to the Holy Roman Empire, where he earned “a large heap of money” from his lectures on the poetic books of the Hebrew Bible, though he left his audiences completely bewildered. Flavius returned to Italy just when Pico decided he needed access to the mysteries of Jewish and Islamic thought.

It was a match characteristic of its time, characteristic of a complex Mediterranean world set into new forms of motion by the rise of Ottoman power and the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Iberia and southern Italy. Expert translators were involved in diplomacy and scholarship.58 Flavius could open up some of the most complex and thrilling texts that Jews were studying and producing: the densely allegorical and allusive works of the Kabbalists. He translated them into Latin and explicated them for Pico. Flavius had spiced his Good Friday oration with quotations from a fictional “Old Talmud” that underlined the similarities between Judaism (properly understood) and Christianity. After many years as a Christian, he now translated the Kabbalistic texts in subtle ways that made them compatible with Christianity.

Pico’s motives for plunging into the Kabbalah were not philosemitic. Following a tradition long established in Christian controversies with the Jews, he claimed that Jewish texts contained clear proof that the Jews knew that fundamental Christian doctrines such as that of the Trinity were true and only revealed their resistance to the truth when they pretended not to believe them. Yet at the same time, he maintained a fascinatingly unprecedented dialogue with Jewish friends—most notably Johanan Alemanno, to whom he provided accounts of newly discovered Neoplatonic sources, receiving information about Jewish texts in return. In a burst of enthusiasm, he composed the final form of his nine hundred theses and his oration in 1486, while also learning to read and write Hebrew, arguing with Flavius, and ransacking the shelves of the Vatican Library.

The core of Jewish tradition, as Pico came to understand it, was the Jewish tradition of the Kabbalah—the secret tradition, which he regarded as going back to Mount Sinai, where Moses himself had received it as a second, oral revelation. In his Oration, he had planned to announce the existence of the Kabbalah and to describe its origins and nature to the public of scholars he had invited to debate with him in Rome:

Not only famous teachers of the Jews but also our Esdras, Hilary, and Origen write that what God gave Moses on the mountain was not just the Law that he recorded for posterity in five books but also a true and more secret reading of the law. God’s command to Moses was indeed to make the law public to the people but not to divulge the interpretation of the Law or write it down. Moses was to reveal it only to Jesu Nave, and he in turn to the high priests who succeeded him, under a strict rule of silence.59

After the Babylonian Exile, he explained, Esdas or Ezra, who “corrected” the written law of Moses, realized that the second law would not survive if only the memories of the Jews preserved it. Accordingly, he convened the wise men who were still alive and had what they remembered about “the mysteries of the Law” codified in seventy books.60 These books, Pico explained, were the Kabbalah. Pope Sixtus IV had set out to have them translated into Latin. The Jews considered them so vital that they allowed no one under the age of forty to read them.61 And Pico himself, after obtaining them “at no small cost” and reading them “with the greatest attention and unremitting labor,” had discovered “so help me God—a religion not so much Mosaic as Christian. There I have read about the mystery of the Trinity, about the Incarnation of the Word, about the divinity of the Messiah, about original sin, its atonement through Christ, the heavenly Jerusalem, the fall of the demons, the orders of the angels, about purgatory and the pains of hell, reading the same things we read about every day in Paul and of Dionysius, in Jerome and Augustine.”62 So complete was the agreement between the Kabbalah and Christianity that “there is hardly any point of contention between us and the Jews on which these books by Kabbalists cannot defeat and rebut them, leaving them no corner to hide in.” Pico made clear that he had interacted socially, as well as intellectually, with Jews: “I have a most impressive witness to this fact in Antonio Cronico, a man of immense learning. When I was dining at his house, with his own ears he heard Dattilo, a Jew skilled in this science, come over hand and foot to a thoroughly Christian position on the Trinity.”63

The texts that Flavius translated and Pico read were quite diverse. They included the Sefer Yetzirah (Book of creation), written in the second or third century and full of material on the nature of the Hebrew letters and the way God had used them in the creation of the world; the Sefer haBahir (Book of brightness), a mystical commentary on Genesis probably written in the twelfth century, though it is purported to be much older; the mystical commentary on the Torah of the thirteenth-century Italian rabbi Menahem Recanati; the works of the thirteenth-century mystic Abraham Abulafia; and many other texts.64 Following the lead of Abulafia, Pico identified two types of Kabbalah: one that operates through the ten Sephirot or emanations of the Godhead and one that operates through the twenty-two letters of the alphabet and the mysteries of the divine name.65 On the whole, though, he saw the Kabbalah as a single great tradition, stemming in its origins from the revelation to Moses and in its written form from Ezra and the men of the Great Synagogue, who re-created the Jewish state and religion after Cyrus allowed them to return to Palestine.

In taking this view—as in much else—Pico followed Flavius’s lead, and he was wise to do so. As a convert with his way to make in Rome, Flavius had drawn on Christian polemical rewritings of Jewish tradition and had even done some rewriting of his own. Even in his brief period as Pico’s teacher, he could not resist the temptation to play one game with his pupil. Swearing Pico to secrecy, Flavius taught him what he called “Chaldean.” This was not the language of ancient Babylon, as Pico probably thought, but a confection: Aramaic written in Ethiopic script.66 But Flavius, for all his complaints about Pico, felt a genuine love for his patron and a genuine passion to convey the secrets of the Kabbalah to him.67 He emphasized that the Kabbalistic texts, which turned on the mysteries of the Hebrew language and letters, could never be perfectly translated into Latin.68 But he also enthusiastically boasted about the skill with which he had corrected errors in the Hebrew originals, found ways of rendering Kabbalistic ideas, and explained to Pico what no one else, Jew or Christian, could ever have explained: “No one but Mithridates,” he repeated in various different ways, “could have understood this in the Hebrew.”69

Pico not only announced to his audience that he had gained access to these mysteries but also wove them into the fabric of his Oration. As Copenhaver has shown, this became a richly esoteric work, pieced together from sources suddenly available. When in the oration Pico had Job say that God wants peace from the angels, he was actually thinking, as one of his theses shows, of “the Southern Water, the Northern Fire, and their Commanders,” Michael and Gabriel, and their reconciliation on the heights of heaven (“shamayim [heaven] as ’esh [fire] and mayim [water]”), as well as of the angels who appear within the world as “birds of heaven” and give humans wisdom. Here he fused ideas from the sage Gersonides, Rabbi Levi ben Gerson—who was not a Kabbalist—with Kabbalist angel lore. Long tracts of the oration are even more densely allusive, and some are intelligible only when connected to forms of higher magic that manipulate the Hebrew letters, which are also numbers.70

As Pico exhorted his listeners to exploit the freedom granted only to humans and rise to live an angelic life, he used images and themes from Kabbalistic interpretations of the stories of Jacob and Job to draw out their full meaning. For Pico, the Kabbalistic vision of ascent through a hierarchical universe enriched and completed the ancient Christian vision of the angelic hierarchies, so clearly that he did not worry about potential contradictions: such as the fact that the Kabbalists posited ten orders of angels, while Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the great Christian authority on the angels, named only nine. And no wonder: Flavius had already indicated to him in one of his carefully crafted notes that the Kabbalistic account referred to the same “celestial hierarchy” as the Christian one.71

In the nine hundred theses, Pico offered a more explicit account of his new discoveries. In his seventy-two “Cabalistic theses” he made clear that only a knowledge of Hebrew could open up the mysteries of the Hebrew Bible. The Kabbalists’ belief that the letter he had great creative power, for example, explained why God had changed Abram’s name to Abraham and promised that he would be “a father of many nations”: “If Abraham’s name had not had the he added to it [to make it Abraham], Abraam would not have produced children.”72 He expounded Kabbalistic doctrines, such as the principle that night is the source of evil, as human indulgence in pleasure brings forth demons: “One who knows the character of dark and night, which is the secret of darkness, knows why evil demons do more harm by night than by day.”73 He cited Hebrew terms that had technical meanings in the Kabbalah and showed that knowledge of them was crucial to understanding. The very last of his Kabbalistic theses, finally, stated that “Just as true astrology teaches us to read in the book of God, so Cabala teaches us to read in the book of the law.”74 As true astrology opened the secrets of God’s book of nature, so Kabbalah opened those of God’s written book.

Jews as a Magical People

Pico—as these and many other theses suggest—saw the Kabbalah above all as a source of understanding and inspiration: understanding of the Bible, inspiration on how to lead a good life, and cultivation of a pious soul engaged in contemplation. But the Kabbalistic tradition had long been associated in the Jewish world with both mystical practices and magic. Kabbalists used elaborate principles of substitution based on the numerical value of the Hebrew letters to find new meanings in Scripture, which they took as the basis for meditation and, in time, for mystical experiences. Pico also believed, as his analogy to astrology suggested, that true magic was organically connected to the Kabbalah: “There is no science,” he wrote, “that assures us more of the divinity of Christ than magic and Cabala.”75 The magical practices that Pico accepted could not involve the use of characters or signs that communicated with evil beings; nor could they simply invite supernatural beings to inhabit talismans or other material things since that would leave open the possibility that their intent was evil. The Kabbalist, Pico explained, had to bear in mind that the beings he might have to deal with included not only the great angel Metatron, who could protect him, but also the demon Azazel, who would devour him if he made a mistake.76

3.1 Pico, theses on magic, Pico, Opera omnia (Basel, 1557), 104. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. 2 P.lat. 1227 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Hebrew, however, had a special power. God had used the Hebrew language to bring the universe itself into being. Pico ascribed to some words a particular power in natural magic—not because of what they meant “but as natural objects in themselves.” The early Christian writer Origen had pointed out that “certain Hebrew words in holy letters, like Hosanna, Sabaoth, Halleluia and the like were kept as they were, and not changed into another language, in which they would not have kept their original signification, and consequently their power.”77 Pico seems to have believed that amulets fabricated with meticulous care, using the powers of numbers and the Hebrew alphabet and written “with shapes rather than messages,” would give him—and others—the knowledge they sought and at the same time avoid putting them at the mercy of diabolical powers.78 Pico, in other words, pursued both Kabbalah and magic in search of the best way to understand God’s commandments and lead a holy life.

Some of Pico’s contemporaries, once they gained access to his words, seem to have read him in a very different way. Some would have agreed that Jews knew powerful secrets, which they associated with magic—but magic of a very different kind. In 1475, for example, the Bishop of Trent, Johannes IV Hinderbach, encouraged the officials of the city to try to convict the members of the Jewish community for murdering a Christian boy, Simon of Trent, in order to use his blood in making matzo for Passover. At first, the members of the small Jewish community of Trent denied that they had committed any crime. They insisted that blood sacrifice had ceased in Judaism with the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans. Applications of the strappado—a device that hoisted the accused to the ceiling by their arms (tied behind their backs)—and other tortures broke most of them. Their confessions made clear not only that their religion was a diabolical counterpart to Christianity but also that magical practices pervaded their community.79

Anna, one of the Jewish women, explained that Jews ate blood in the Passover matzo and drank it in the Passover wine “in contempt of the hanged one, that is, Jesus the God of the Christians, whom the Jews hate.” Under further questioning, she offered a further, magical gloss: “The Jews use the aforesaid blood for other purposes. They say that it has some powers, and among those powers they say that if someone drinks from the aforesaid wine his stomach is cleansed and his cheeks become ruddy. It also stops the Jews from stinking. She also says that it is very helpful to women who cannot retain a child to term. Questioned, she said she knew this because she had heard it said.”80 Another of the women, Bona, explained under duress that Master Jacob, a Jew who lived in Poland, had told her and another woman that if someone threw the blood of a Christian boy into a clear well, looked down into it so that she could see her face, and said certain words, she would cause “great hail and rain”—one of the canonical crimes that came to be ascribed to witches. Bona actually pronounced the spell, though the podestà (chief city official and magistrate) of Trent refused to allow it to be recorded, explaining that Master Jacob had a book “in which all the uses of the blood of a Christian boy are recorded.”81 Jewish worship, by this account, was not just an obscene parody of Christianity: it was also closely connected to that other parody of Christian ritual, necromancy, and a mysterious Jewish book might contain necromantic formulas.

Bishop Hinderbach would certainly have found these accounts plausible. In a marginal note in one of his books, he later recalled that another of the Jewish women, Bruneta, refused to confess. The podestà had her body aspersed with holy water and shaved, and her hair cut; however, he had been powerless against the evil spells that protected her.82 Fortunately, Hinderbach remembered that the medieval encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais had recorded a remedy against such spells, and he and the podestà read the passage together. “On the next day, wishing to try it out, he took human urine from a virgin boy and poured it all over the aforesaid Bruneta and had her washed with it. At once she began to confess and to tell all the things that she had previously denied, as the aforesaid podestà told us, with no force or fear of torture.”83 For Hinderbach, in other words, Jews were a magical people but also evil. The podestà of Trent and his assistants worked from the same assumptions when they forced the Jews to confess that they had used Christian blood to gain power over nature.

These views appealed to some Christian readers long after Pico’s time—even Christian readers who shared his belief in the power of Jewish magic. The learned medical man Johann Lange, who traveled in Italy in the second decade of the sixteenth century before settling down as court physician in Heidelberg, was fascinated by the details of ancient Egyptian magical medicine.84 In one of his detailed letters on medical history and practice, he recalled a conversation he had had with Pico’s nephew Giovanni Francesco at Bologna. The younger Pico shared his uncle’s admiration for the original Kabbalah and highly esteemed Joannes Reuchlin, whose Kabbalistic studies we will encounter soon. But he held that the Jews had degenerated into an evil race, engaging in the same sorts of demon worship that explorers had encountered in the Americas.85 They had certainly slaughtered Simon of Trent, stabbing his body to give it a replica of the stigmata of Jesus.86 Worse, they had used his blood to gain the help of demons and raise the dead, “for demons are said to love blood.”87

Pico’s own translator, Flavius Mithridates, combined astrology and magic with his Talmudic, biblical, and Kabbalistic studies in a very different way—one that, as we will see, adumbrated the path taken by Renaissance magi in the next generation. Among the works that he proudly translated into Latin for the library of the Court of Urbino, probably at the request of Ottaviano Ubaldini della Cardia, was a tenth-century Arabic work by Ibn al-Hatim, now preserved in the Vatican Library, which dealt with the twenty-eight lunar mansions (sections of the zodiac that the moon passes through in its monthly course, each of which could be represented by an image that could, in turn, be reproduced on an amulet).88 This sort of astrology, Flavius explained in his preface, “is the divine form of knowledge that makes men happy and teaches them how to appear like gods among mortals. It speaks with the stars, and, if one may dare to say something even greater, with God Himself, whose command determines everything that takes place in the world.”89 Though Flavius sounded like a determinist as he explained the power of the stars, he cited great authority to show that amulets with images of properly chosen planets and other celestial bodies could actually avert calamities. The Paduan medical man Pietro d’Abano, for example, had explained how to make an astrological amulet that would cure all illnesses of the kidneys. Flavius’s own father, the erudite Nissim abu l-Faraj of Girgenti, had made a golden amulet with the head of Leo on the obverse and Hebrew characters on the reverse, and wrapped it in perfumed silk: “When bound around the neck of women who were giving birth, it made the childbirth easy for them.”90

More remarkably still, Flavius explained that Moses himself had used such astrological amulets and had left a body of valid astrological doctrine and practice, derived from his experience, to those who came after. At Exodus 13:19, the Bible states that “Moses took the bones of Joseph with him” when he led the Jews out of Egypt. But the Egyptians had constructed a metal coffin for Joseph and sunk it in the Nile. How then could Moses have found Joseph’s grave?91 Rabbi Tanhuma, he explained, gave the answer in his commentary on Exodus. Moses came to the bank of the Nile with an amulet made from a gem. This had the head of Taurus and the Hebrew words עלה שור (“Rise, Ox”) carved on it. As the people prayed, Moses called on Joseph to rise, and the metal coffin came to the surface.92 In this case, both Flavius’s learning and his own taste for magic, astrology, and fantasy seem to have been at work. A number of midrashim (homiletical commentaries on the Bible) are traditionally connected with the fourth-century Rabbi Tanhuma bar Abba. One of them did raise the question Flavius mentioned and answered it with a story that resembled his. According to the Midrash, what Moses threw into the water was a pebble with the words “Ox, Rise” carved on it.93 Flavius, it seems, was determined to see magic, in its active and practical sense, as part of the core of the Jewish tradition. It was the work of a mere moment for him to transform Moses’s pebble into an astrological gem of the sort his father had made.

In his Apology, Pico indignantly denied that his form of Kabbalah had anything to do with these everyday Jewish magical practices. He dismissed them as just another form of low conjuring, like those well known in the Christian world:

But in the olden days, when only Magi were called wise, necromancers and later diabolical men, falsely claiming for themselves the title “wise,” they called themselves Magi, thus also among the Hebrews they polluted divine things with false new superstitions. Indeed, the fact of the matter is that they differed in no important way from necromancers, and said that they had the secret names of god, and powers by which they could bind daemons, and do miracles, and Christ did his miracles in no other way. Similarly, those [Jews] falsely claim for themselves the name of Cabalists, saying that their art is the true Cabala which God revealed to Moses.94

Like Bacon and so many others before him, Pico distinguished between good magic and bad, in the Kabbalistic tradition as elsewhere, and he rejected efforts to connect Kabbalah with practical magic. As Flavia Buzzetta has argued, in a subtle study of magic and Kabbalah in Pico’s thought, the practical side of the tradition could be seen, as Pico saw it, as Kabbalistic magic in two senses: as a body of magical practice that belonged to the tradition, but also as a form of magic that was folded into and understood through the Kabbalah.95

But it was only natural for Pico’s readers to make the connections that he denied and that had seemed so natural to Flavius: to believe that Kabbalah and magic were both seen as powerful ways of acting on self and on the universe. In one of his theses, after all, Pico described the magus as able to actuate the logoi spermatikoi, the seedlike principles by which God brought the universe into being and preserved it: “The miracles of the magical art exist only through the union and actuation of those things that exist seminally and separated in nature.”96 In another he stated that only one form of magic could wed the higher to the lower: “No magical operation can be of any efficacy unless it has annexed to it a work of Cabala, explicit or implicit.”97 This rhetoric was eerily suggestive—especially if taken literally. In Pico’s world, many had contact with supernatural beings or the spirits of the dead. When Alberti’s friend, the Florentine notary and scholar Leonardo Dati, went on a pilgrimage to Pescia in 1451, the spirit of Cipriano Rucellai, a member of a Florentine patrician family closely allied to Alberti, appeared to him. Rucellai explained that the whole space between the earth and the fixed stars “was full of angels and good spirits.” He himself lived a little above the moon—and could come and go as he liked, visiting the earth.98 The knowledge about universal salvation that he revealed to Palmieri became the basis for an epic poem, The City of Life—a work so heretical that it was carefully locked away from all prying eyes, even in the tolerant mid-fifteenth century.

Contacts like these could be sought. More than one magical discipline of the later Middle Ages demanded, as Pico’s Kabbalah did, that practitioners engage in extensive ascetic preparations and elaborate prayers in order to attain meetings with angels or the beatific vision. Giovanni Fontana, for example, explained that the ars notoria attests that good angels appear, when they are called “with fasting, chastity, and purity of heart.”99 Pico, however, drew his techniques not from conventional magical books but from a living magical people—a people seen, by many of his contemporaries, as still carrying out blood sacrifices like those of the ancient pagans and known to live in an exotic world governed by elaborate rituals and observances. He offered as his primary tool for gaining power and knowledge the language in which God himself had created the Scriptures. And he implied that these powers could be frighteningly formidable. Forms of esoteric learning new to the Christian world—above all the Kabbalah—won the passionate interest of scholars in Italy and the North alike. By the 1520s, scholars as diverse as the German lawyer and humanist Johannes Reuchlin; the Venetian friar, Platonist, and engineer Francesco Zorzi; and the papal confessor Petrus Galatinus had laid out in detail the theoretical basis and technical details of what became Christian Kabbalism.

Magic and the Outer World

Both Ficino and Pico, in other words, had given new specific content to the side of the magical tradition that had always appealed to ancient—and often to Eastern—authorities. What they did not do, on the whole, was to connect the forms of power that interested them most with those obtained by natural means. Pico showed little interest in the practical studies of the engineers. But these were matters of lively interest in their circle. His friend the poet and philologist Angelo Poliziano, for example, crafted a detailed and appreciative description of the planetary clock devised by Lorenzo della Volpaia.100 And Ficino’s curiosity extended to such matters. In his Platonic Theology, he used a mechanical invention as the most appropriate model he could find for the way God created and administered the universe: “We saw recently in Florence a small cabinet made by a German craftsman in which statues of different animals were all connected to, and kept in balance by, a single ball. When the ball moved, they moved too, but in different ways: some ran to the right, others to the left, upwards or downwards, some that were sitting stood up, others that were standing fell down, some crowned others, and they in turn wounded others.” One single ball produced all these movements, he reflected, and the sounds of horns and trumpets and the songs of birds at the same time. “Thus God through His own being … has only to nod His head and everything which depends on him trembles.”101 In On Life, Ficino recommended the contemplation of mechanical and visual images as one way of gaining profound knowledge of the universe. He too praised Lorenzo della Volpaia’s planetarium: “It will be useful to look at a sphere equipped with its own motions; Archimedes once constructed one and a Florentine friend of ours named Lorenzo did so just recently. Nor should one simply look at it but reflect upon it in the mind. In like manner, in the very depth of his house, he should construct a chamber, vaulted and marked with these figures and colors, and he should spend most of his waking hours there and also sleep. And when he has emerged from his house, he will not note with so much attention the spectacle of individual things as the figure of the universe and its colors.” Ficino left such concerns, as he wrote, “to those who make images.” 102 These would, as we will see, include a good many practitioners of the high magic, other aspects of which he emphasized more.

Magic Challenges Tradition

On two points, finally, Pico and Ficino were absolutely in accord. As Frances Yates argued long ago, both insisted on bringing the magical tradition out into a larger social and intellectual community.103 True, both believed that only a few adepts could ever understand the deepest secrets about life, the universe, and everything else. But unlike earlier writers, who had said little or nothing about how and where one could actually study magic, Pico and Ficino carried out their work in the open and set out to create what were, in effect, visible colleges composed of their friends and allies. Pico made magic (or at least tried to make it) the object of a formal discussion, of the sort normally carried on in universities. He invited scholars from all over Europe to take part. Ficino published On Life, making his arguments and procedures—hedged with qualifications though they may have been—accessible to readers across Europe as well. Both men, moreover, deliberately crossed intellectual boundaries, joining the methods and questions of the scholastic and Arabo-Latin traditions with the forms of effective persuasion of the literary humanists. By doing so, they made magic not just a study with a long, dark past and a mysterious present but one that belonged in the small but genuinely public sphere of the early modern republic of letters.

The second point on which Pico and Ficino agreed sounds at first like a commonplace: both insisted that Christians could licitly practice some forms of magic. If the argument was traditional, Pico, in particular, supported it with a newly bold argument that would prove very influential. In both his Oration and his Apology, as we have seen, he distinguished between two forms of magic:

I have also proposed theorems about magic, taking the word magic in two senses. One, which relies entirely on the activity and authority of demons, is a monstrous and accursed thing. The other, when well investigated, is nothing more than the final realization of natural philosophy. Although the Greeks mention both, they call the former goeteia, never dignifying it with the word magic, whereas for the latter they use mageia, the special name suited to it as the highest and perfect wisdom.104

True magic, Pico argued, was a wholesome and pious discipline, and one, accordingly, that no ecclesiastical authority ever condemned. The argument seems traditional.

But Pico’s choice of terminology was charged with meaning. He showed that scissors and paste, the humble tools of compilation, could turn into sharp-edged weapons. Augustine devoted several chapters of his great account of history, the City of God, to drawing a contrast between the true Christian religion and false magic. Like Pico, he cited Porphyry. But he denounced the pagans who trusted in “incantations and songs composed with the art of forbidden curiosity [nephariae curiositatis arte].”105 Admittedly, the pagans used multiple names to set virtuous magic apart from its evil twin. They called their practices, Augustine explained, “either mageia, or by the more detestable name of goetia, or by the more honorable one of theurgy, by which they try to distinguish between them.”106 In doing so they tried to carry out a great deception: to deceive the world into believing that some form of magic could be good.

They want to show that of those dedicated to forbidden arts, some, whom the ordinary people call malefici, are damnable (for they say that these belong to goetia), but that others are praiseworthy, to whom they ascribe theurgy. Yet both are bound by the deceptive rites of demons, under the names of angels.107

Augustine’s words inspired Pico’s effort to contrast mageia with goeteia. Yet Augustine rejected this maneuver with contempt.

Pico, in other words, used Augustine’s terms to reverse Augustine’s verdict about them. Where Augustine contrasted the simple faith of the Christians with the pagans’ false distinction between good and evil forms of magic, Pico insisted that the ancients had been right after all: magic was not all of a piece. And where Augustine showed special contempt for theurgy, Pico ignored it, for the moment—since in his system it belonged more to Kabbalah than to magic. He must have known that many readers would notice this rewriting of a great authority. Every learned man had read Augustine, many of them with pen in hand, and everyone who wrote or read about magic knew the tenth book of City of God. Thomas Aquinas had quoted Augustine’s attack on Porphyry in his own discussion of magical amulets in the Summa theologica. Pedro Garsias, a member of the committee charged with examining Pico’s theses, quoted this passage as a key text in his reply to Pico.108 Pico thus made clear, to all who shared his mastery of allusion, that in his view the pagan philosopher Porphyry was right, and the father of the Church was wrong.

Pico’s views were recycled by every learned man who felt the need to defend magic, or his own practice of it—starting with Ficino, who stated in his own Apology of 1489 that “there are two kinds of magic. The first is practiced by those who unite themselves to daemons by a specific religious rite, and, relying on their help, often contrive portents …. But the other kind of magic is practiced by those who seasonably subject natural materials to natural causes to be formed in a wondrous way.”109 The learned Benedictine abbot of Maria Laach, Johannes Butzbach, made his dependence more explicit when he defended the German magus Johannes Trithemius against his accusers: “They do not understand, and do not want to understand, that he is dealing there with natural magic. Pico, that most learned gentleman, showed with great elegance and drawing on many witnesses, some time ago, that this is quite different from the impious and criminal form, and that strong arguments support the distinction between them.”110

Some of these readers, moreover, scented Augustine’s presence in the background of Pico’s text. Giambattista della Porta, in the beginning of his own treatise on magic, distinguished between natural magic and “that infamous sort, created by invocation of unclean spirits, and stated to be the product of wicked curiosity, which the more recondite Greeks call goeteia or theurgy.”111 By inserting bits of Augustine’s terminology—the phrase “illegal curiosity” (nepharia curiositas) and the reference to goeteia and theurgy—della Porta delicately revealed what Pico had done—without ever saying that either Pico or he challenged the preeminent authority of Augustine.

In some cases, orthodox gentlemen took Pico’s distinction on board and made it their own, with no sign of unease. Gabriel du Puy-Herbaut, who drew up a detailed manual on how to censor heretical books, informed his readers that the books Paul had told the Ephesians to burn were “magical.” He also noted that “Augustine says, in the City of God, that magic was created by demons.” And he treated magic as even worse than Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, which he also condemned. Yet even he made an exception for “the Platonic and philosophical magic, which is said to be the absolute consummation of natural philosophy.”112 The Jesuit Benito Pereira came to the study of magic with firm prejudices against it since he had commented at length on the passages in Genesis that portray magic as the weaker opposite of the true religion of Moses. Yet he too accepted that—as he wrote, recycling Pico’s words—the true “mageia” was not just licit but the consummation of natural philosophy. Pico thus provided the central justification for the new learned magic of his time and did so by something more like emulative allusion than like formal argument. In the best humanistic fashion he left it to his readers to interpret the passage in the most varied ways. Even magic allowed for argument in utramque partem.

Other texts as well from the same late antique world that had produced Ficino’s and Pico’s favorites also came into circulation now, as Aldus Manutius and other printers began printing more and more Greek texts and Latin translations of them. Philostratus’s life of the ancient wonder-worker Apollonius of Tyana irritated Pico’s skeptical, witch-hunting nephew Giovanni Francesco—especially when he found that Alamanno Rinuccini had translated it into Latin. He denounced Apollonius as a practitioner of magic “and by magic I mean the art of doing wonders, not with the help of nature or of god, but that of a demon.”113 Aldus disliked the book as well, but in 1501–1504 he brought it out, in Greek and Latin, along with a work by Eusebius of Caesarea meant to refute it. As Philostratus’s world of wonders circulated, it provoked strange thoughts. Conrad Mutian, the erudite canon of Gotha who regularly hinted at strange ideas to the friends whom he then warned to burn his letters, found in it a magical way to rationalize the crucifixion of Jesus: “Ambrose writes that Pilate did not see the true Christ. Here I do not want to speak aloud what should remain secret. It is clear from Philostratus that Apollonius of Tyana, when he was accused before Domitian, suddenly disappeared just as he was being judged, and was not seen again. Lend an ear. I cannot restrain myself from whispering something still more mysterious. Plato and Aristotle and the Manicheans and Ambrose feel that the true man is the soul, which does not appear if we are silent. Apollonius was silent, therefore he was not seen. The true Christ is his soul and spirit.”114 Learned magic might be able to claim something like divine power. Many efforts would be made, in the decades to come, to extirpate the new magic. Thanks to Pico and Ficino, they failed. The new form of magic was nearing what would prove to be its mature form, and it had left the bottle. It would not return.115

CHAPTER FOUR

Johannes Trithemius

Magic and the Book

Johannes Trithemius made his first appearance early in this book, as the first of the many learned observers who condemned the historical Faust as a charlatan. Yet he himself later became the crowd-pleasing object of more than one wild hunt staged by his colleagues, the stately humanists of Renaissance Germany. Trithemius lived from 1462 to 1516. He ruled two Benedictine monasteries with a nicely judged combination of rigor and generosity. He wrote, spoke, and struggled, like Nicholas of Cusa, with the object of reforming the church. And he evolved from a Benedictine abbot who saw copying a text as the only assured way to know it perfectly to a passionate collector of books, manuscript and printed alike, in every language and discipline.1 Trithemius assembled two libraries, one vast and one at least sizeable, that bulged with rare old manuscripts and new printed books on everything from world history to magic. The humanist Rutger Sitcamber, who visited the first of them, wrote to a friend in 1494 that the sheer mass of rare books in Trithemius’s hands at Sponheim had made him ecstatic, in the full meaning of the term, “so that I dreamt of nothing but books, and waking too could think of nothing but them.”2 He wrote numerous treatises on everything from the bibliography of German writers, a field he created, to the Trojan origins of the Franks. Trithemius reconstructed the Franks’ early history, he claimed, as the prophet Ezra reconstructed the Hebrew Bible (in fact, Trithemius invented several centuries’ worth of Frankish history and forged the medieval chronicles that recorded them with skill and abandon).3 Yet his life involved more than one confrontation—including the one that resulted in his expulsion from the Abbey of Sponheim, which he had reformed with much success in 1505.4 He wound up living in a small monastery in Würzburg, discredited and in retreat, and badgered by patrons and colleagues for historical manuscripts that he could not produce because they did not exist. In fact, Trithemius barely managed to die before his philological sins publicly found him out. Conrad Peutinger and Ioannes Stabius were wrong to miss the humor in his historical fantasies, but right to argue that this erudite, irascible, and charming gentleman was as much a charlatan, in his own way, as Faustus.5

Trithemius’s relation to abnormal happenings was complicated. A distinguished regular cleric (member of a religious order), he inhabited a Christian world of wonders—one that swarmed with people and things that claimed to have holy pasts and miraculous powers. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the Holy Roman Empire, were a time of mystics who sought to leave the material world and achieve union with the divine and contemplatives who dedicated themselves to meditation on the Holy Family and the saints.6 But the empire also boasted many material evidences of the presence of the divine, such as the cults that grew up around bleeding hosts: most famously, three of them, found intact and bleeding, with candles miraculously still burning around them, in the ruins of the parish church of the Brandenburg town of Wilsnack (a marauding nobleman, Count Heinrich von Bülow, burned the church down in 1383). Controversy raged around the Wilsnack hosts. More than 150 texts were written about the cult, Nicholas of Cusa and other reformers denounced it, and Pope Pius II assembled Dominicans and Franciscans to debate whether it was possible for Christ’s blood—the blood whose sacrifice had ransomed humanity from the consequences of original sin—to appear and remain on earth. As Caroline Bynum has reflected, the need for “holy matter conflicted with the religious need for divine transcendence.”7 Other material aids to devotion were also immensely popular.8 Wonder-working images and relics had spread rapidly across the sacred landscape of the Holy Roman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.9

Trithemius—who himself forged ancient sources to fill in the gaps in the early history of the Germanic peoples—knew from experience that many of these were fakes. He encountered spurious devotional objects early in his career during his youth in the Valley of the Moselle. “When I was a young student of letters,” he recalled, “in that ancient city of Trier, I saw a crowd converge on a certain image of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the city. Many and varied tales were told, all of them false, invented and mendacious. The Blessed Virgin in the Pietà was made of terra cotta, not large, with a hollow head and, on the very top, a small hole.”10 A greedy man, Trithemius explained, had pretended to be ill, had had himself carried to the wall on which the image stood and announced that he was cured. From then on, the image seemed to weep. However often its eyes were wiped dry, they overflowed again.11 For four months, the image attracted crowds too large to fit into Trier’s open squares, day and night. Everyone who came brought a donation.

In fact, the trickster had filled the head with oil made from nuts, and “poured out its tears by a clever device.”12 Trithemius himself, he wrote, “saw the icon weeping, and if the matter had been mine to decide on, I would have sworn that the tears were real, with no suspicion of evil.”13 Eventually, however, “the industry of the wise” detected the device. The oil was discovered, and “the manifest truth rapidly destroyed this enterprise, which began with a lie.”14 The case was far from unique. Trithemius knew of liars who invented miracles and nighttime visions of angels, hucksters who had sent salesmen for spurious wonder-working images to gin up peasant interest in pilgrimages, and con men who hid in recesses in statues and gave advice to those who prayed to the holy person represented.15

How then could Trithemius be certain—as he himself asked, later in life—that the miracles attributed to a statue of the Virgin now held in a Carmelite monastery, Our Lady of the Nettle, outside Heilbronn, south of Würzburg, were genuine? The monastery had been founded in 1447–1448 on the spot where the statue, known as “Maria of the Nettles” or “Maria of the Nettle-Bush,” originally stood. In 1442 it had begun to attract pilgrims, for some of whom it worked wonders.16 “I saw none of them,” Trithemius admitted, “up to now I have never been in ‘the nettle bush,’ and I was never present at the miracles that I am about to record.”17 He imagined an opponent asking, “How could you dare to record so many great miracles, not one of which, from all of them, you deserved to see?”18 But then he gave the imagined opponent the retort scriptural: “To the carper I reply, it is written: ‘In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established.’”19

He went on to identify his witnesses, starting with Petrus Wirt, professor of theology at Heidelberg and prior of the convent: “He is the first witness to the truth of the miracles. He recently showed me a manuscript in German in which many of them were recorded, and asked me very insistently to translate them into Latin in honor of the most blessed Virgin. He is a man of good reputation, of reformed life, of much learning, and a teacher of the truth, who does not know how to lie. He states that all the miracles that I will record were truly done and not at all faked.”20 Wirt’s testimony was confirmed, moreover, by all the inmates of the Carmelite house, men of piety and virtue who could neither have been deceived by fake miracles nor have believed in revelations that rested on inadequate evidence.21 Up to this point, Trithemius followed old paths. Ancient rhetoricians like Quintilian had argued that a lawyer should concentrate on the character of each witness rather than the content of their testimony. Those who had the purest reputations deserved credence.22 Trithemius too based his approval of the testimony of Wirt and the rest on their virtues rather than their proven opportunities to observe.

Yet he also recognized that this traditional form of validation would not convince all of his readers. Accordingly, he also pointed out that his witnesses came from widely different regions and included “nobles and plebeians, clergy and lay people, great and honorable men.”23 It was rational, as well as traditional, to trust these men’s accounts of what they had seen at the shrine. Moreover, as Trithemius pointed out, he testified as a recorder and not a judge in this matter since he could not claim direct knowledge. In this case assertion was qualified. In another, that of a wonder-working image of the Virgin at Dettelbach, near Würzburg, Trithemius used a new consideration to prove that his account was true. The statue, a pietà, was now placed over the altar of a church. But it had stood in the same place before it began to work the miracles that the church was built to commemorate. The citizens of Dettelbach, almost all of whom earned their living making wine, regularly prayed as they passed it. And for many years before the miracles began, some of these locals had expected miracles to take place and attract crowds. A smaller number, given foreknowledge by God, had even heard the “ringing and clamor” of church bells, and told their grandchildren about this astonishing experience.24 In this case, what made the stories credible was not so much the social position of the witnesses who told them as the fact that they had been part of a powerful local tradition—one that revealed its true meaning only in retrospect. Trithemius found this narrative entirely credible: after all, there was a very similar account in the life of the Carolingian saint Ermenold.25 In this case at least, multiple, distinct ways of validating both old and recent accounts of miracles came into play at the same time. Trithemius saw himself as an expert on the channels by which material objects could give access to the supernatural.

From 1500 until his death in 1516, Trithemius established himself as a major player in the world of demonology and magic. He knew that it was not easy to adjudicate between true and false wonders. But he also knew the devil. His career as abbot and spiritual counselor forced him to investigate Satan’s ways of insinuating himself into close relationships with priests and monks. Becoming an expert on this ugly subject, Trithemius warned the monks and nuns who sought his counsel to be as active as possible and to devote themselves to reading, prayer, and work: “Read the holy scriptures, write books, dedicate yourself to prayer or make something appropriate to your position with your hands.”26 Holy men must avoid idleness above all, he warned, since sloth and acedia, the monastic sins par excellence, could take advantage of the stray thoughts that bred in slack periods to make good thoughts seem unattractive and open space for evil ones.27 The external threats to purity, moreover, were equally serious. Priests, Trithemius sternly warned, must avoid the company of women, even the female servants many of them claimed to need: “I have known some priests set in charge of the people in cities and in the country who have ruled their parish and their households without women being present for more than thirty years. Why do you pretend that what others manage to do is so difficult?”28 And they must never frequent taverns with peasants since doing so could corrupt their speech and bring them into disrepute.29 Trithemius wielded just as sharp a nib when he condemned the sort of ordinary messy conduct that he thought just as likely as acedia to breach the priest’s armor and let in the devil: “The company of women ruins priests. Just as sparks leap from coals, thus familiarity and conversation with women spreads the infection of concupiscence, the gate of the devil, the doorway to Hell, the path of iniquity and the terrible bite of the scorpion.”30 In Trithemius’s treatises of spiritual counsel as in a woodcut by Hans Baldung Gruen, grimacing women and powerful demons lurked outside the small rooms in which light and order ruled.

For all Trithemius’s indulgence in the language of clerical misogyny, he cared about women, especially when they too adopted the clerical life and tried to protect them from demons as well. He expended a good bit of energy warning friendly abbesses not to let their nuns approach the barred window that opened on the outside world alone. The devil menaced women just as much as men: “Let none of the sisters be permitted to approach the interview window alone, or to speak without a prudent and suitable witness with anyone, whether it be her father or brother or mother or sister, or one sent by any given person on some pretext or other. The dangers others undergo make us prudent. We know the tricks of the evil spirit, and recognize his wicked imitators. They claimed to be the brothers and relatives of the virgins with whom they gained permission to speak alone. But a little while later they were found to be their sacrilegious corrupters.” Only a total prohibition on such encounters could prevent “the works of the demons” from being put into play.31

Many recognized Trithemius’s expertise and tried to draw upon it. Worried Christians regularly called upon him to explain apparently supernatural phenomena. “The greatest miracle I have seen in all my days,” wrote Albrecht Dürer in his diary, “happened in the year 1503, when crosses fell on many people, more often on children than others. Among these I saw one in the form that I have made after it here, and it fell on the linen shirt of Eyrer’s maid, who sat in the house in back of [Willibald] Pirckheimer’s. And she wept aloud, fearing that it meant she must die.”32 The bishop of Mainz asked Trithemius for his opinion on this event, which he duly provided.33 And in 1515, when the erudite Nuremberg patrician Willibald Pirckheimer, into whose own house the cross fell, found himself confronted by “certain heretics, freed from prison here, who, after being accused of various heresies against the Catholic faith, have often called up very evil demons to help them,” he naturally wrote to Trithemius for help. “I have heard that you have written a book against the demons and those condemned, superstitious, vain and devilish arts. Please, let me have it on loan for a while, so that I may learn how to extirpate, abolish and remove these people—not to call them men—from our home. Please, pretty please, I ask, I pray, I beseech you to let me have it as soon as possible.”34 Like many others in this period, Trithemius began to write treatises, some of them quite short, in which he examined the devil—and the magic that many associated with him—from many standpoints.

The Public Critique of Magic

Trithemius was a master impresario of one new technology: print. In the first decades of the sixteenth century, new elites could use print to form groups, publicly admitting some to membership while rejecting others. Erasmus showed great skill (but poor timing) when he arranged for the publication of the third edition of Thomas More’s Utopia in Basel. This event was accompanied by prefatory letters by Guillaume Budé, Jerome Busleyden, and others, all of which established the author as a major figure in the Republic of Letters—ironically, just as More began to withdraw from it into more local concerns.35 Trithemius rode the new wave of printing as expertly as far better-known authors did. He had his text on the virtues of scribes printed by Peter von Friedberg of Mainz and in a handsome roman font—relatively unusual in Germany—that clearly reflected his own humanistic tastes. In fact, Trithemius wrote no fewer than thirteen of the twenty-four incunabula printed by Friedberg, whose list amounted to one big advertisement for the abbot’s work as a monastic reformer and scholar—and that at a time when, as Erasmus wrote to Aldus Manutius, a properly designed edition (in this case, a small-format edition in Aldus’s “consummately refined” italic type) could make an author’s name immortal.36 Trithemius fervently praised the art of printing more than once. And his mastery of print helped him to become the preferred informant of the good and the great on all matters magical. Emperor Maximilian knew that when he wanted to know all about devils, angels, witches, and enchanters, he need only ask Trithemius, to whom he addressed eight formal questions when they met at the Castle of Boppard. The abbot answered in a formal treatise. Paola Zambelli showed in a classic study that two versions of this work exist—the first draft, which Trithemius submitted to Maximilian himself for criticism, and the revised one that appeared in print in 1515.37 As she revealed, Trithemius toned down a good many passages. But his central arguments remained the same. In pages brimming with vivid detail Trithemius charted the orders of the devils. Many of them, he explained, were earth spirits or daemons, confined to this world and too weak to determine what forms they assumed (that explained why they so often appeared as monsters). Framed as part of a conversation with the emperor, edited for consumption by a wide public, his thoughts were as respectable as they were fascinating.

Not only the emperor but later and more expert readers as well treasured these authoritative words. The English magus and bibliophile John Dee read the abbot’s elaborate descriptions of spirits and their relations with humans with fascination and a little fear. Trithemius compared the ordinary daemons that lived on and near the earth and took pleasure in frightening humans by taking on monstrous forms to boys that enjoyed leaping out from hiding places or wearing masks to terrify their friends.38 Dee showed the emotions that this reassuring passage inspired as he noted: “A good comparison. You may direct your thoughts by reference to this, and compare it with note * on the next page. We should thus be ashamed to be frightened by either the tricks or the snares of demons.”39 Dee felt he had his reasons to be nervous, after all. At the point where Trithemius described the way that devils “have led some of the simpler ones among men into their mountain lairs, showing them spectacles as they gaped in wonder,” Dee commented, “Note that I too found this in 1561.”40 His emotions came out even more strongly at another passage on the topic, where he wrote only: “nota//nota.”41 And when Trithemius denounced those who deny their faith and baptism and offer themselves to demons, Dee could only agree: “Note this terrible crime.”42

When Trithemius set out, as an expert on demonology, to answer Maximilian’s anxious questions about why God allowed demons and witches to ensnare human souls, he wrote as a demonologist by conviction, drawing his evidence from Johannes Nider’s Formicarius and Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus maleficarum. “Witches,” he wrote in the first draft, “deny the Catholic faith and offer demons their homage, in a wicked sense. With God’s permission, the demons, always summoned for evil purposes, make their appearance, sometimes in visible form and sometimes in invisible. They disturb the air, they raise storms, they cause lightning and hailstorms, they spoil the harvests, and they ruin with their spells everything that grows on the earth. Finally, they harm men and beasts, and eagerly carry out whatever evil plans they can spin against the human race. They have disgusting relations with demons.” Here Trithemius offered a quick but detailed summary of the charges brought against witches in the Malleus, which he abridged but did not radically alter in the final, published version of his work.43 Both here and in his Antipalus maleficiorum, the more formal treatise in which he described the evils of magic and its practitioners, he devoted substantial attention to the question of whether witches could really remove a man’s penis or only delude him into thinking they had done so. Trithemius followed the standard line when he accepted the second position. He also did so when he insisted, as passionately as Kramer, that witches had infected the entire Holy Roman Empire with their diabolical plots to destroy mankind. Trithemius regularly condemned witches for crimes specific to their gender—for example, using their eyes to “fascinate” and then destroy men, ever vulnerable to women’s charged sexuality.44

Yet male magicians offended Trithemius just as deeply as female witches. In the first draft of his replies to Maximilian’s queries, he described the male practitioners of magic immediately after the female ones, and sharply condemned them: “There is also another sort of person that openly invoke demons. These vicious men are commonly and improperly called necromancers, and show by this name alone that they are the enemies of God. Their crimes are numberless.”45 Trithemius pulled no punches: “Many among them have denied the Christian faith, they are enchanters and evil magicians who have made manifest pacts with demons.”46 As Zambelli has shown, in the published version of this passage Trithemius softened these comments too, apparently as Maximilian instructed him to. Now he noted that “necromancers submit to demons not by an open profession of faith, but by an implicit acceptance of their condition, when they promise to make them materialize in circles not only through spells and the display of magical signs, but also by sacrifices, fumigations, and prayers.”47

Elsewhere in the same text, however, Trithemius continued to condemn the magicians as dedicated followers of the devil, who performed a wide range of complex rituals, using objects evidently charged with power. In his most detailed review of the necromancers’ techniques for summoning demons, Trithemius described their use of “rings, pentagrams, images, and exorcisms and conjurings to confine evil demons, so that they must materialize in a circle, crystal, or other receptacle, and answer questions”—a description strikingly like the one that Johannes Hartlieb had given half a century before. He left no doubt in the final, printed version of his text that those who used these devices had gone over to the other side in a cosmic war: “All those whom evil spirits obey when summoned by the spells of necromancers have certainly passed into their company by an explicit or implicit pact.”48 Male magicians, like female ones, were enemies of the human race. They were also credulous and superficial. Their “miracles,” like those of the witches, represented not real changes in the order of nature—or so, at least, he maintained in the first draft of his responses to Maximilian. “All the miracles of demons,” he wrote, “are phantasms, devoid of any truth, since they desire and are eager to imitate the true and manifest signs of the holy spirits—just as curious apes imitate, but only to imitate, all the acts of men that they have witnessed.”49 Even the apparently authoritative books that magicians brandished, blazoned with the names of famous authors like Hermes Trismegistus, were fakes, written later than they claimed by wicked men, and useless. Demons (not texts) provided the power to carry out any given magical act and did so strictly ad hoc. As to the miracles described in Philostratus’s adventure-filled life of the pagan wise man Apollonius of Tyana, which filled ten riveting books, they were inventions crafted by Apollonius’s followers, “who, though they did not believe in the deeds attributed to the Savior, invented similar things and ascribed them to their teacher after his death, so that they could persuade stupid men that one whom they had known as a philosopher was more than human, and therefore not inferior to Christ.”50 Bacon could not have made the case against the supposed authority of magic more cogently.

Letters—often written to be read not only by their stated recipient but by wider circles—also provided Trithemius with an effective way to publicize his virtue.51 In a set-piece letter written in 1507 and addressed to Iodocus Beiselius, Trithemius admitted that his geniture, as interpreted by “king Philip’s astronomer” and Trithemius himself, apparently foretold the troubles he would experience with his monks. Nonetheless, he wrote, “persuaded by Saint Augustine’s arguments, I ridiculed the predictions of the stars.” Even when “what they seemed to promise me came to pass, and this experience made me more cautious,” he saw that Augustine had been right. Diabolic agency gave genitures their apparent correspondence with future events: “The ill-will of my rivals produced the prophecy: unquestionably, some evil demon stirred them up so that the astrological prediction would seem certain.”52 A little later, between 1507 and 1514, Trithemius sketched out a massive denunciation of demons and all their works, which he now treated as pervasive and rejected without question. All magicians, necromancers, and diviners, he wrote in the preface, were “the sons and disciples” of the devil: “Look closely at the work of the devil, who is the teacher, and his disciple’s imitation of him will be obvious.”53 The table of contents—preserved, like the preface, in a single manuscript—makes clear that Trithemius planned to cover, and to reject as diabolical, every imaginable form of learned magic and divination, although he would presumably have made the normal exception for natural magic based on occult properties.54

The Practicing Magician?

Like Bacon, though, Trithemius also wrote on subjects and adopted styles that shocked readers who expected him to behave consistently as a pious abbot, erudite humanist, and dedicated demonologist should. In some cases, he encountered storms in the circles of letter writing and print that he usually navigated with characteristic ease. In 1504 the French philosopher and mathematician Charles Bovelles stayed with Trithemius at Sponheim. Years later he could hardly express the horror with which he had read Trithemius’s first work on cryptography, the Steganographia. Trithemius had boasted in a widely circulated letter to a Carthusian named Arnold Bostius that “I am at work on a great project, which will fill the whole world with wonder if it is ever published.” Not only did Bovelles see this letter: he also had the chance to see the book, which Trithemius gave him to read when he visited. A couple of hours spent leafing through the horrific text convinced Bovelles that it should be suppressed, not printed, and its author denounced rather than praised. On every page of the Steganographia he encountered “barbarous and unheard-of names of spirits (not to say demons),” whose help the reader had to invoke in order to send his secret messages. Though the book contained many texts presented as prayers to be sent to friends, these were in fact so many “crocodile’s tears.” For the reader of Trithemius’s book learned to invoke the help of twelve spiritual “emperors of the world,” choosing the one that presided over the direction in which he had to send his message. This emperor, in turn, would send a familiar spirit that materialized “like a cloud or spot, hanging in the air” to learn the message in question and then to repeat it to the reader’s correspondent.55

Trithemius himself warned that using these methods could imperil the soul: “These spirits are very wicked and evil. They absolutely hate the light. They love the shadows. You need a strong formula to make them do your will. If you hesitate slightly, being fearful, in conjuring them to do your will, or make a small mistake in the formula you use to conjure them, by leaving out a word or getting them out of order, they will kill you at once.”56 Yet Trithemius did more than call spirits from the vasty deep. Unlike Owen Glendower, who summoned spirits to make music, Trithemius called them for what seemed clearly evil purposes: for example, to “make girls fall in love with men,” and to learn facts about Bovelles’s traveling companions that he could not possibly have guessed or known by natural means.57 Worst of all, Trithemius himself claimed that he had carried out superhuman feats: “He also told me that once upon a time he taught a certain German, a man who had previously lacked all knowledge of letters, to read, write and speak Latin, in one hour, and well enough that he could dictate letters in Latin. But before he left, Trithemius took away all those powers, and left him as ignorant as before.” “How,” Bovelles demanded, “could he possibly achieve this without the help of spirits?”58 In the first age of northern humanism, when Erasmus fought the barbarians in the name of Latinity, it seemed obvious that only diabolic aid could enable one to master the language of letters so rapidly. Only a decision to join forces with the devil, moreover, could possibly explain Trithemius’s declarations that he had taught himself Latin, music, and all the other arts he knew—or his monks’ passion for alchemy.59

4.1 The title page of the Steganographia, with a reader’s remark that the book is dangerous and should be suppressed. Trithemius, Steganographia (Darmstadt, 1621), title page. Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, 652M T735.5.

Bovelles seems to have circulated his letter to patrons of learning by around 1505, though it did not appear in print until 1509.60 It infuriated Trithemius, who did his best to refute the canard that he was an evil wizard—someone whom, as he bitterly complained, others described as “dedicated to wicked arts, a magus and a necromancer.” Over and over again, he told the story of Bovelles’s betrayal of his hospitality, and announced his plan to refute what Bovelles had written. No controversy in the long, bitter history of modern learned journals like Notes and Queries went through more iterations than this one. Magic, like early Frankish history, was apparently one of those areas where the learned abbot lost his cherished Benedictine “heart disengaged from the passions.” As late as 1515, near the end of Trithemius’s life, his friend Pirckheimer was still trying to persuade him to let the matter go.61

It is not hard to see why Trithemius’s conversation and writing upset Bovelles and others. Consider, for example, his specialty field: cryptography. Here he seems to have actively courted the reputation of practicing diabolic magic. Bovelles’s accusations look fairly plausible, at first and even at second sight. Trithemius wrote eloquently and at length about the value of celibacy and the joys of the monastic life. He became a valued spiritual counselor to nuns.62 But some of the enciphered letters that crop up in the treatise he referred to, the Steganographia, suggest a different point of view toward earthly delights in general and young women in confinement in particular: “Let’s imagine your secret this way. You have a girlfriend that you’re dying for, and she for you, but you can’t reach or speak to her because she is strictly watched. You have found a way to take her, but you also have to explain it to her in advance. You can’t do it yourself, you don’t dare write her a letter, which might fall into the hands of others, and you don’t think it prudent to trust the matter to messengers or old ladies, who could inform on you afterwards. You therefore try to do the deed by an art that will be secret for a time, since you do not trust that it can be done openly. You call the invisible servants of the art, you write a letter that doesn’t seem suspicious in any way, and you send it to the girl through her own guards. They praise it and give it to her to read. She recognizes your plan, calls the secret messenger, hears the plan, and sends back her agreement. You arrive, you get in, you take her.”63 Decode the learned abbot’s true thoughts—so Bovelles must have reflected—and you turn up a Tartuffe.

Trithemius described in alluring detail the powers of each group of spirits that his secret writer had to conjure, and in doing so he touched again and again on the powers that magicians had long claimed (and that their enemies had long ascribed to them). Aseliel and his forces, for example, could “announce everything that has to do with the love of women”; Maseriel and his supporters “are established to announce and relate the secrets of the human arts of philosophy, magic and necromancy”; Vsiel and his forces “announce hidden and buried treasures.”64 Ofiriel resembled nothing more than the abbot himself. Trithemius suggested more than once in his cryptographic works that he owed at least some of his knowledge to the thousands of lower spirits who inhabited this world and spoke to him. No wonder then that Dee, who regularly conversed with angels who bore the same names as those invoked in the Steganographia, saw the book as offering profound secrets; Dee begged William Cecil for permission to stay longer than he had expected on the Continent so he could finish copying a manuscript of “a boke for your honor … so meet, so nedefull and comodius, as in humayne knowledg, none can be meeter, or more behofefull [useful].”65 A second copy of what Dee called, on its first page, “this admirable and invaluable work” was “excavated now at last from the shadows and dust in which it lay buried” in 1591 by an Italian Protestant, Giacomo Castelvetro.66

Angelic cryptography and steganography of the form Trithemius practiced immediately suggest at least one obvious parallel that some contemporaries would have seen as scandalous: the techniques of Christian Cabalists. Following—and modifying—ancient Jewish traditions, men like Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin argued that one could find the secret meanings of biblical verses either by substituting one letter for another, or, since Hebrew letters are also numbers, by resolving words into their numerical values. God himself, so it seemed, had used a form of cryptography. When he promulgated his Law, he made a ciphertext available to all mankind. But he reserved the plaintext, the higher meaning, for those who could re-create it. Men who used similar devices in their correspondence and elsewhere were emulating Him. Reuchlin himself suggested this connection when he confessed in On the Art of the Cabala that he had used cabalistic techniques to communicate safely on dangerous matters with friends in Italy. No wonder then that Umberto Eco, in his wonderful, Joycean retracing of The Search for the Perfect Language, wrote of Trithemius as “relying … on kabbalistic tradition, advising his followers, for instance, that before attempting to decipher a passage in secret writing they should invoke the names of angels such as Pamersiel, Padiel, Camuel and Aseltel.”67

In fact, however, as Jim Reeds and Thomas Ernst have shown, Trithemius’s methods required no diabolic or angelic aid.68 When he named individual spirits, he referred simply to the cipher method that the writer and his correspondent were to use. The eager lover who invoked the angel Aseliel, for example, was really telling his girlfriend that the first letters of the words in his message spelled out its actual content—if you skipped one word and read the next two, skipped one and read two. The notorious third book of the Steganographia, in which Trithemius gave detailed instructions for invoking the aid of planetary spirits, using waxen images of them, fooled even the greatest expert on Renaissance magic, D. P. Walker, who saw it as a deliberately unlawful effort to work magic with the help of demons.69 In fact it offered nothing more than another set of ciphers, disguised—not very effectively—as tables of planetary motion. The long instructions about following the time and the motions of the planets, making talismans, conjuring spirits, and giving them messages are only coded instructions on which tables will reduce the enciphered message to cleartext. Sadly, the only scholar to become aware of this fact before relatively recent times enciphered his decoding—thereby ensuring that no one else would claim credit for his achievement until he had actually duplicated it.70

Trithemius put forward another fearful boast in his Polygraphia: that he could teach someone to speak, read, and write Latin in an hour. Bovelles cited this claim as clear evidence of diabolic help, and Trithemius himself repeated it: not once but many times in passages in which he clearly flirted with the claim to practice magic in a dangerous or diabolic way. In fact, it referred to a recognizable, practical method for enciphering messages. In the first book of the Polygraphia, his second and supposedly less controversial work on cryptography, Trithemius drew up a set of 383 tables, each of them 24 words long; all of them were keyed to the letters of the Latin alphabet. The first column contained nouns for God, in the nominative singular. The second listed adjectives, also in the nominative singular; the third, participles, also in the singular; the fourth, nouns in the accusative; the fifth, transitive verbs in the third-person singular; and so on. Occasional connecting verbs—such as prepositions, or amen—appeared between the columns. Anyone who chose single words from these columns in sequence and strung them together would produce grammatically correct Latin prayers—texts that made complete sense as they stood and should not, at least in theory, attract the attention of the “mice-eyed decipherers” whom all sixteenth-century correspondents feared. Similarly, anyone who collated these so-called prayers, word by word, with Trithemius’s own tables, could immediately find the letters that each word stood for and resolve the prayers, not only into Latin words and sentences but also into a plaintext in any other language that used the Roman alphabet.71 One need only take the cyphertext and one’s copy of the Polygraphia into a secluded room, and all would become clear. Trithemius bloomed with self-satisfaction as he promised readers that “this method can be extended to all the affairs and dealings in the world.”72

4.2 Trithemius presents his Polygraphia (and a key) to the Emperor Maximilian I; Polygraphiae libri sex (Reichenau, 1518), title page. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, 2014-0879Q.

Trithemius’s method was not so novel as he claimed. Half a century before Michele Zopello had offered rules for encrypting letters in Italian, substituting innocent words for the vital ones in the plain text (e.g., “merchandise” for “peace”).73 But Trithemius’s method worked for Latin and produced a coherent cipher text. Inexpert readers like Bovelles were shocked by what they read in the Polygraphia and by the claims Trithemius made for his book. As Richard Oosterhoff has discovered, one of Bovelles’s close allies pursued these blasphemies in print.74 The Parisian theologian Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples dedicated a set-piece denunciation to Trithemius in his commentary on the Latin versions of the Psalter, which appeared in 1509: “In our time—which is all the more regrettable—there are some who are so clouded of mind that they dare to call themselves magi openly …. You are totally ignorant of letters. If you entrust yourself to their methods, in one twenty-fourth of a day, that is the little space of one hour, he will send you back knowing Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and indeed every language—unless their insanely bold claim is false.”75 Reading the copy of this book that Lefèvre had sent him, the French humanist’s former student Beatus Rhenanus commented: “That audacious little man the Abbot Trithemius dared to promise this. He is sharply handled here, though his name is kept secret”—a clear indication that Lefèvre had succeeded in chastising Trithemius in a way that would be clear to the knowledgeable but did not violate the rules of decorum.76 Publication could cause other ills as well. At least one later expert reader insisted that Trithemius’s invention was neither dangerous nor useful. Girolamo Cardano noted that Trithemius had filled “a whole book, and quite a long one, with this dream, and yet didn’t complete it—and to make his fable credible he pretended that he had practiced necromancy, when he should rather have been accused of stupidity.”77 To show how polygraphy worked Cardano enciphered an example of his own—one that read, when deciphered, “I am surprised that a man of high standing wrote an explanation of Trithemius’s very stupid device.”78

4.3 Trithemius’s method for producing an enciphered text in grammatically correct and coherent Latin. Above the text a reader has copied a remark of the sixteenth-century magus, astrologer, and medical man Girolamo Cardano, who noted that Trithemius had pretended to practice necromancy but was really practicing his stupidity. Polygraphiae libri sex (Reichenau, 1518), sig. A recto. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, 2014-0879Q.

Most of the specialists, however, not only read and admired Trithemius’s work but also emulated it. The natural magician Giambattista della Porta boasted that his skills at cryptography had repeatedly enabled him to decrypt “treacherous letters” directed against his friends, saving them from attacks. He considered the Trithemian method “one of by no means despicable subtlety” and inserted a similar cipher, one designed to produce texts that resembled private letters, into his own cryptographic manual, the De furtivis literarum notis. Della Porta improved on his model—so he maintained—not only by showing how to produce more varied and less suspicious plaintexts, but also by incorporating even marks of punctuation into the cipher. In principle, however, he simply followed the German abbot’s lead. Whether or not cryptography, as Dee’s admired model practiced it, had anything to do with magic, it was evidently a practical art in period terms.79

Trithemius, moreover, left fairly open hints about the sources on which he drew. Late in the Polygraphia, he offers what modern cryptographers have seen as his most elegant single device: a set of square transposition tables. Here the letters of the alphabet, at the top, each headed a vertical alphabet, the letters in which appeared in a different order in each column (the first vertical alphabet starts with a, the second with b, and so on; in later tables, letters were inverted and substituted for one another). By using each column in turn for the letters in a given word, one ensured that it was enciphered differently than the ones before and after it. Further variations in the order and arrangement of the vertical alphabets could make decipherment almost impossible. Even obviously patterned words, like “papa” (pope) or “abbas” (abbot), would not reveal their true identities to readers who lacked a square of their own to use as a key. As Trithemius explained, “The transposition of letters can be varied in so many ways” that no human mind, caught in a mortal body, could even count them, much less crack them. The possibilities were as numerous as the types of demons that swarmed throughout the world.80 This device—like others in Trithemius’s work—reveals not an exegetical imagination burning with the desire to render texts down into words of power but a practical coder calmly attacking his task, devising a mechanical way to produce and decipher messages made secret by a vast number of arbitrary variations in encipherment. Later still, Trithemius offered rules for good cipher practice. His suggestions were simple: for example, the “clever operator” should never reproduce double letters in a cipher. Instead one should spell Trithemius’s own name, “Ioannes abbas,” as “Ioanes abas.”81 Here and elsewhere Trithemius’s counsels reflected close and highly practical observation of the ways of language. His cryptography was informed by a humanistic sensibility and cast in a strikingly practical form. Gerhard Strasser has suggested that Trithemius, a passionate admirer of Carolingian scholarship and literature, found the model for his method in an old, if not ancient, text: the figural poems of the ninth-century writer Hrabanus Maurus, who set out his encrypted poems in squares composed of letters, thirty-six to a line and thirty-six lines long.82

4.4 Zopello, word substitution cypher that lines up the word to be enciphered with one of two words that both begin with the same letter and that differs from the first letter of the word in the plaintext. Words in the first column, representing the plaintext, begin with a, words in the second and third with c. The new text will be grammatical and coherent. Literarum simulationis liber, fol. 5 verso. Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, MS LJS 225.

The method of the Polygraphia certainly derived, in practice, from the realm where humanism and engineering met. This was the world of Alberti, whose interest in automatic text production and passion for language in all its variety Trithemius shared. Even the new ingredients Trithemius employed when he began to rework Alberti’s ciphers for his own particular readership, a northern European one, reflected the similarity in their approaches. Like Alberti, Trithemius looked above all for practical models. And like Alberti, he found part of his inspiration in the normal methods of language teaching. North Europeans like Trithemius and his readers faced, after all, a special problem: they were not Italians, and could not—in most cases—deploy Latin words and phrases with the silken Ciceronian fluency of a Pietro Bembo or a Jacopo Sadoleto. They needed special aids, which a host of eager educators supplied. Erasmus, for example, drew up dazzlingly practical—and dazzlingly successful—instructions for attaining fluency. He explained how to make notebooks, divided into elaborate series of headings, in which one could record striking phrases, historical examples, and myths for later deployment in one’s own prose. He also compiled series after series of aphorisms, drawn from ancient writers, that any modern could employ to give the impression that he possessed a far richer classical culture than he really did. Any reader of the Adages knew how to express the ideals of Christian pacifism by noting that “war is very sweet to those who have not tried it,” to caution rash students that one should “hasten slowly,” and to counsel moderation toward those in power by remarking that “you shouldn’t poke the fire with a sword.” At his most flamboyantly practical, Erasmus provided devices as mechanical as anything in Alberti or Trithemius—for example, lists of hundreds of ways to say “Thank you for the letter” and “As long as I live, I shall remember you” in perfect Latin. His highly pragmatic works, unclassical in form but endlessly useful in pedagogical practice, became best-sellers everywhere in northern Europe and helped to define the intellectual as well as the literary style of at least two generations. They also crisply reflected Erasmus’s moral and pedagogical program. Erasmus chose the two sentences on which he produced endless variants, for example, because, as Kathy Eden has shown, they literally epitomized his basic beliefs that scholars must form a loving community and that sincere personal letters were the principal means to foster loving friendship over time.83 Like Erasmus, as we have seen, Trithemius took a deep interest in letters. He collected and studied those of earlier scholars and used his own to weave an impressively broad and strong web of religious, scholarly, and intellectual contacts.84

Trithemius’s ciphers clearly represented, in his view, an Erasmian—or at least a period—updating of Alberti’s methods. When he taught the ignorant to write grammatical Latin sentences, he systematized a notion that Erasmus had suggested and exemplified: that a mechanical device could enable its possessor to write grammatically correct Latin. Erasmus himself was unimpressed. Advising a friend on the proper study of Latin, he warned him to keep his rules clear and few and learn by reading the best authors or from conversation with the learned: “If anyone doesn’t like this method, I don’t see what he can do, except to take refuge in magical foolery and absurd polygraphies, which, so far as I can see, have never helped anyone.”85 But other readers criticized Erasmus’s own textbooks in rather similar terms: “Others,” wrote the German scholar Mutianus Rufus in November 1513, “may consider proverb collections very valuable, and may select sentences, phrases and aphorisms from the best writers. Though I do not disapprove of Erasmus, who is an elegant and lucid writer, I find him less to my taste, because even someone moderately learned can gather flowers and various scattered things by reading intently, and then arrange them under headings.”86 The form of magic that Erasmus ridiculed looked uncomfortably like his own textbooks. True, Trithemius admitted that he composed most of his letters “using my familiar vein, not seeking eloquence to instill admiration of me, since I have never had it, but in the scholastic form of writing in which I can most easily make myself understood.”87 Yet he too found himself from time to time groping for a formula with which to assure a friend of his esteem. It was probably no coincidence that when he did, he neatly joined Erasmus’s two favorite sentences into one of his own: “Your letter will be an eternal memento for me, so long as I live.”88

Alberti’s cryptography took shape where applied mathematics and humanism met, and he distinguished it from magical uses of language and forms of writing. Trithemius also drew on these two traditions; and while he made vast, magical claims for his ciphers, he probably saw them as belonging to a larger realm of magic that included engineering and applied mathematics. Magic, as Trithemius understood it, was even more capacious than most scholars have suspected. And it was the practical components of magic—components that emerged from outside the tradition as it had been practiced in antiquity or the Middle Ages—that made it most functional and attractive and that helped persuade practical men to see his methods as of interest to them. Maximilian—to whom Trithemius dedicated the Polygraphia in 1508—made clear in his Latin autobiography that he saw the pursuit of magic as one among many practical interests. He described magic as only one of “the worldly arts that are learned outside the schools” that he had mastered in order to be a successful ruler. He had devoted himself at the same time to the study of “arms and minerals, so that he could make use of them in military affairs; also the art of machines and all instruments of war, and no one in his time could match him at this,” as well as architecture, the evaluation of gemstones—themselves often connected with magical practices—stone- and woodcutting, carpentry, painting, and the making of arrows.89 Trithemius’s magic, which offered clear practical applications and derived in part from the engineering tradition, was made to order for his patron. In this regard, Trithemius set a vital precedent, one that would be central to the form in which learned magic crystallized in the generation after his.

Magic as Camouflage

At the same time, Trithemius drew on the magical tradition in another way: to provide further camouflage for his enciphered texts. The more he emphasized their diabolic connections and qualities, the more he distracted decipherers from their actual methods and content. In order for this form of camouflage to work, Trithemius and his readers had to take it seriously: they had to believe that he really could communicate with powers greater than human, that the strange names they met in his pages really belonged to strange beings who could materialize or dematerialize, and that a message could be carried invisibly and delivered inaudibly on command. The practice of cryptography as Trithemius carried it out required someone willing to flirt—as Faustus flirted—with darker powers. To that extent, his critics were right to howl with indignation. Even the most adept impresario of letter writing and print might find it difficult to work out the exact points where boasts of occult knowledge endangered his reputation instead of enhancing it.

In letters to his friends and patrons, Trithemius admitted that he pursued magic in this particular sense: “I cannot say that I am completely ignorant of that form of natural magic, which makes it possible to work those wonders that take place naturally”—though, as he took care to insist, “I possess nothing supernatural except the Christian faith, which grace, not nature, gave me.”90 Still, natural magic did more than reveal secrets to its true practitioners: “Natural magic not only brings about visible effects, but also marvelously illuminates the intellect of any man who is skilled in it in knowledge of the divinity, and endows his soul with invisible benefits.”91 And that explained why “the most learned and, among all the saints, most saintly Albertus Magnus” had studied natural magic as part of the efforts that had made him an expert on the most profound and marvelous secrets of nature.92 Unfortunately, as Trithemius admitted in a late autobigraphical text, Albertus had “pursued natural magic—that is, the wisdom of nature—so intensively that his marvelous knowledge of occult natural powers brought upon him the suspicion of the ordinary people, down to the present day.” Though Trithemius refused to follow the Dominicans who did their best to write Albertus’s magical interests out of his life, he clearly saw why they were worried.93 Albertus’s interest in determining the true nature of magic, he admitted, had led him, as it had led Trithemius, to read many magical books of the wrong kind and that unfairly had brought him—as it had Trithemius—into suspicion. After Albertus’s time, moreover, magic degenerated. The wise philosophers and kings of ancient times, perfectly imbued with the knowledge of natural magic, hid their secrets to prevent them from being profaned. Later thinkers either tried to “operate according to the literal sense” of the ancient texts, which did not work, or substituted for the profound techniques they did not understand magical characters with which they sought diabolic aid.94 Only by returning to the ancients and reading their texts as they were meant to be read could one learn to carry out magical operations.

Trithemius, in other words, viewed magic as part of the same heritage as Greek literature or philosophy and plotted its restoration just as systematically. But the revival of magic posed special problems. The fact that Trithemius’s Benedictine confreres viewed magic as evil depressed him, and he confided to Joachim of Brandenburg, the Prussian ruler with whom he spent some time as a courtly service provider specializing in magic: “The crowd, which is quick to believe in vice, rages as usual against the innocent. Since it does not know the principles of nature, it ascribes to evil operations whatever it does not understand. The ignorant never realize that the marvelous is possible, and they measure the power of nature by the capacity of their own minds. Hence they are fooled, as completely as if they were blind.”95 The learned magus embarked on a riskier path than the learned humanist whose interest lay in grammar and rhetoric. But his journey was eminently worthwhile.

Even in Trithemius’s own degenerate, ungrateful age, powerful magi appeared here and there. Just before 1500, for example, an Italian whose given name was Giovanni but who called himself Mercurius “because of the universal wisdom of the ancients, which he professed” had appeared at Lyons. This grave and reverend prophet of the Hermetic tradition had amazed Christians and Jews alike, some years before, when he strode to the high altar of St. Peter’s in Rome wearing a strange headdress inscribed with a name drawn from the Hermetic corpus: “This is my son Pimander, in whom I am well pleased.”96 In Lyons he emulated Apollonius of Tyana. He and his wife and sons dressed in linen, and his dependents wore iron chains around their necks. And he claimed that his mastery of “the art of natural magic, which was highly esteemed by the ancient kings and sages,” made him a far deeper interpreter of natural phenomena and all secret matters than any of the Greeks and Romans. After holding a disputation with him, the doctors proclaimed that, though he seemed to know hardly any Latin, he had an astonishingly profound intellect—a verdict he confirmed by giving the French king a sword “crafted with marvelous ingenuity” and a shield that contained “some sort of occult virtue.”97 For all his ambivalence toward this strange figure, Trithemius seemed to accept the testimony of a number of friends who saw him as powerful.

Even as a book collector and bibliographer—one of his favorite activities, and one he pursued with at least as much gusto as discrimination—Trithemius treated magic with the same striking ambivalence. In a letter to his friend Jean Chapelier, in which he described what he had done while staying with Joachim of Brandenburg, Trithemius insisted that he had read works on magic but never put this knowledge into practice: “I have read, I admit, a lot of books by magi. I did this not to imitate them, but so that I could someday confound their superstitions by refuting them.”98 And in the formal treatise on the literature of magic that he dedicated to Joachim, Trithemius took exactly the same position. He condemned typical magical practices, such as the use of talismans engraved with special characters and suffumigation. He also attacked the magical tradition at its textual root. Drawing on the bibliographical arguments of Albertus and Roger Bacon, he noted that corrupt magicians had often ascribed their works to ancient sages, from Hermes Trismegistus to more doubtful types like Simon Magus. All of these necromantic books, Trithemius told his noble patron, were mad, bad, and dangerous to own, since they could easily tempt anyone who read them without sufficient preparation into evil practices. Trithemius, the laudatory bibliographer par excellence of great churchmen, also became the censorious bibliographer par excellence of bad magicians, and these turned out to include venerable characters like Hermes as well as the authors of such frightening treatises as the Clavicula Salomonis.99

Trithemius the Magus

Yet Trithemius, as was widely known, included in his great libraries books that he described as “rare, and hidden, and secret, and marvelous, the sort hardly to be found elsewhere.” He filled the pages of his Steganographia with model letters that looked like genuine efforts to obtain magical books and make them available to others: “Please send me back my manuscript on magical experiments as quickly as you can …. I recently saw a number of Latin translations by Ficino, and read a good many pyrotechnic books by Pico della Mirandola.”100 Trithemius’s real library at Sponheim, he admitted to a friend, had in fact contained “certain little books about the mystical secrets of nature, reading which would not be good for everyone. I have brought these books, which never belonged to Sponheim, with me to Würzburg.”101 And he intensively studied some of the most esoteric forms of magical knowledge. In Trithemius’s time, as we have seen, Jews in some German cities were undergoing persecution as savage as that directed against witches and for some rather similar crimes. Forced confessions underpinned ritual murder trials. The emperor’s sister Kunigunde lent her name and authority to a campaign to suppress Jewish books. And from 1507 on the well-informed convert Johann Pfefferkorn published vividly illustrated pamphlets in which he used Jewish rituals to portray his former coreligionists, in Ronnie Hsia’s term, as “a magical race.”102 Yet Pico and Reuchlin, whom Trithemius admired, pursued the study of the Kabbalah. Reuchlin, for all his belief that the Jews should and would ultimately convert, staunchly defended their right to have and use their own books when that became a public juridical issue after 1510.103

Reuchlin even went so far in the defense of the Jews as to violate the norms of legal practice. When Pfefferkorn attacked him for defending the Jews and their books in a legal opinion, Reuchlin published the text he had written, though such formal briefs were normally not allowed to circulate.104 In the course of the next decade, the contest between Pfefferkorn and his allies on the Faculty of Theology at the University of Cologne on one side and Reuchlin and his allies on the other turned into a lengthy and bitter lawsuit that was eventually decided, after appeals, in Rome. Reuchlin lost in the end, but by then Trithemius was dead. In the meantime he stood with the Hebraists. Trithemius had no special liking for Jews. He assured Maximilian that they were just as certainly condemned to damnation for their lack of faith in Christ as the Muslims and “those who inhabit the islands recently discovered in the great ocean, whom the ancient geographers do not mention, and have never heard anything at all, as I am informed, about the Christian faith.”105 Though Moses and other Jews had worked miracles in God’s name before the birth of Jesus, he explained, they could now work wonders only with diabolic help.106 Still Trithemius’s actions belied the tone—and perhaps the content—of his words. He collected Hebrew books, including a fascinating manuscript treatise on machines.107 He visited Reuchlin’s library and took lessons in the Hebrew language. And, as we will see, he very likely helped convince Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa to add large dollops of the Christian Cabala to the final version of his great manual of the occult philosophy. Certainly he devised the names of angels that he sprinkled over the Steganographia by imitating Reuchlin’s comprehensive lists and drew on the Kabbalah when he described his works on cryptography and the book of nature itself as codes meant by God to be deciphered. Conrad Mutian, the erudite canon who closely observed humanists and magicians from his perch in Gotha, made the connection between Trithemius’s pursuits clear when he wrote of a young man he was recommending: “He loves Hebrew learning and therefore he has decided to visit your piety and Janus Reuchlin or Capnion …. He also delights in the more honorable mysteries of the magi, which you have mastered so thoroughly.”108

At the same time, Trithemius drew on more familiar texts and disciplines. He followed the fourteenth-century medical man Pietro d’Abano, for example, when he became the biographer of angels—the seven angels, from Orifiel onward, who ruled world history in periods of 354 days and 4 months.109 In the end, Trithemius’s references to the magical tradition crystallized into two formal positions, assembled around opposite intellectual poles. Like the poet he was, he managed to function even though he acted and argued in contradictory ways.

In Trithemius’s original responses to Maximilian’s questions, for example, he dismissed the wonders apparently worked by demons: “All the miracles of demons are phantasms, which contain no truth at all.”110 In the revised version he seemed to accept the possibility that demons—and the magicians they helped—could sometimes use their special knowledge of nature to manipulate it: “After all,” he now wrote, “men who are steeped in the more hidden mysteries of nature can apply matter to form in a way impenetrable to others, and produce unusual and marvelous effects. For example, they can form living eels from the dew of heaven, bees from the flesh of calves, serpents from the roots of certain herbs, and many things like this—not to say even more impressive. Trial has given us knowledge of this in many cases. No one can deny that daemons who have a subtler nature and more experience can use natural powers to bring about many other wonders, which are not evident to any human.”111 Here Trithemius drew on the tradition of natural magic, as reshaped in Laurentian Florence. Ficino, in Three Books on Life, cited the Picatrix to support his claim that magi “by seasonably preparing certain materials, … procreate animals even without any eggs or perceivable seeds, for example, the scorpion from basil, bees from an ox, a bird like a blackbird from sage, that is, they supply them with life from the universe by particular materials at the right time.”112 By connecting these practices with the work of demons, he also adumbrated the argument Melanchthon used to explain Faustus’s special powers: that devils could use their occult knowledge to do a superior sort of natural magic.

In fact, in the same years in which Trithemius established his presence as a demonologist, he also set himself up, with sovereign inconsistency, as a magus of exactly the sort he condemned. In the Nepiachus, a short spiritual and intellectual autobiography that he drew up for private use in 1508, he admitted, in terms that a modern reader might well see as Faustian, that his passion for knowledge knew no bounds: “I always wanted to know everything in the world, and I thought it my chief delight to own and read all the books, that I had ever seen or heard of in print.”113 In the same text he noted frankly—as he also did in a letter to Jean Chapelier written at about the same time—that many accused him of doing “wonders” with his magical powers. In the Nepiachus he admitted that he had some special forms of power and knowledge. But he insisted that these were purely human and natural: “If I have come to know anything, or if I know anything, that those who do not understand find miraculous, this is not the work of demons, but of nature, of effort, of philosophical speculation.” And he promised to provide the “reason” that would make his achievements less marvelous.114

Magic, Trithemius argued in the context of this sustained effort at self-scrutiny, took a variety of forms. Like Albertus and Roger Bacon before him, he sharply condemned necromancy of all kinds, which he then duly listed. “All these demonic arts,” he concluded, “are condemned by the holy Catholic church, and all Christians are forbidden to use them—though many think that geomancy and chiromancy deserve partial, not entire, tolerance.”115 Feats or tricks—“praestigia”—also came in various forms. Diabolic ones Trithemius denounced, as he did the tricks of charlatans. But, he insisted that “there is also a natural form of trick, which belongs only to natural magic. This takes place when the secret application of a natural power by experts produces marvelous effects, and those who marvel at them do not know their causes.”116 And this kind of magic, he now argued, was not only licit but praiseworthy. Florentine Neoplatonism, which in other contexts he treated with reserve, now supplied a positive definition and evaluation of magic, which Trithemius linked with the older views of Albertus in what amounted to a genealogical and philosophical transvaluation of the values he elsewhere seemed to accept:

Many learned churchmen have approved of and followed natural magic, which Pico writes was never condemned by the church, and never could be. Among them our great Albert, the most famous and learned man of his time, studied natural magic with such zeal that his marvelous knowledge of the secret virtues of nature brought him into suspicion among the common folk that has lasted down to the present day. And yet he was clearly an honorable, pious and holy man, who regularly attacked, denounced and despised that magic which the church condemns as a plague to the human soul.117

Suiting his actions to his words, Trithemius occasionally offered his friends astrological advice on his and their health, a prime service of the learned magus, just as magi he respected offered it to him.118 Reading his own situation back into the history of the magical tradition, Trithemius represented the true and good form of natural magic as a powerful knowledge of nature, one that the most learned men had always pursued and defended and that had never been officially condemned—even if its practitioners came under suspicion from time to time of practicing diabolic magic.

The inconsistent way in which Trithemius used key terms is very revealing. When writing against magic, he used the term “magus” in a purely negative sense. Evaluating Apollonius of Tyana, for example, Trithemius wrote: “To deal summarily with all the miracles of the man from Tyana: if he did those marvelous things that those who praise him have recorded, he was clearly a magus and a summoner of demons and infernal spooks.”119 In this context, as in the writing of Roger Bacon, “magus” served as a term of condemnation. Yet in his Nepiachus, Trithemius made clear that he considered the magic of the ancient Near East—the set of wonder-working practices that the Florentine thinkers had connected to Zoroaster and the Kabbalists—as honorable a profession as Ficino or Pico had, or as Reuchlin did:

This word “magic” is Persian, and the Latin term for it is wisdom. Magi is the term for wise men, like those three who, as the gospel tells us, came from the East to adore the newborn son of God in the flesh in his cradle. I am not ashamed to be called a “philomagus” with them, since I love divine, human, and natural learning. This is my magic, which I follow. No member of the faithful may traffic with the other, which is superstitious, diabolical and justly condemned by the holy church. I despise, loathe, and condemn it, with its authors.120

Trithemius the demonologist usually treated magic, female and male, simple and sophisticated, as all of a piece, and condemned it all as demonic. But occasionally even in his demonological treatises, and more often in other writings, he took a radically different position. Then he followed Pico and Ficino, and cleared a substantial intellectual space in which a legitimate magus could practice his craft without fear. Trithemius identified one set of practices in particular—the mysterious forms of secret writing that he described in the Steganographia and Polygraphia—as “miraculous,” and he noted that the former work had led some to suspect him of demonic powers: “These books teach marvels that have never been heard of before, and that are all entirely natural and entirely without any element of superstitious aid. But I have reason to fear that those who have no understanding of such great mysteries may draw me into suspicion of practicing some evil art.” Accordingly, he noted, it might prove “expedient for my marvelous inventions to die and be buried with me.”121 By portraying his steganography in these terms, Trithemius made two things clear. First, he acknowledged that others saw him as flirting with exactly the kind of magic he condemned as sharply as anyone. Second, he himself saw his cryptography as the proof that men of understanding could do wonders—could practice magic—without drawing on diabolic assistance in any form.

From time to time, Trithemius claimed that he possessed a still more powerful set of magical keys—ones that could unlock the central secrets of the universe itself. In letters to his friends and patrons, he admitted that he pursued magic in this particular higher sense.122 That form of magic, in fact, did more than reveal secrets to its true practitioners: it illuminated their minds.123 In passages like these, Trithemius sounds very much like Pico and Ficino and portrays himself as one whose pursuit of magic represents the culmination of a philosophical inquiry into the cosmos.

The Magical Community

Pico and Ficino made clear in many ways that they saw their magic as a rare and incredibly valuable body of knowledge—one that was, and had to be, the property of the tiny group who had the intellectual and financial resources to master it. Trithemius used every rhetorical trick in the book to confirm that he and his friends enjoyed a similar fellowship and possessed comparably arcane knowledge. In one letter he told his brother Jacob, writing in a mixture of Latin and Greek, to “see to it that you look after my books and the things entrusted to you, especially the ones on secret matters: and the ones about the mysteries of our studies.”124 Soon after, a second letter repeated these injunctions. “I follow a hidden divinity,” Trithemius explained.125 Other letters in his collection, not all of them by Trithemius, added complementary highlights and nuances. In one he himself described the learned mathematicians and poets with whom he took his meals.126 In others he and his correspondents agreed on the need for extreme discretion—for example, in transmitting what was evidently a very interesting oral message from Joachim of Brandenburg to the Bishop of Cologne.127 In still others Trithemius and his friends referred with alluringly mysterious code names to third parties, like the evil Melancius (“Melancius and his allies have stirred up all this evil against me, but I do not doubt that he will fall into the pit that he has dug”) and, even more artfully, the credulous Narciscus, that “most diligent student of all the good disciplines,” who nourished vain hopes of power and spread grossly exaggerated reports of Trithemius’s powers to well-wishers elsewhere.128

Trithemius’s letter to Germain de Ganay gives a good idea of how he tried to seduce others with glimpses of revelations and injunctions to wait for further installments that could not be put in writing: “As to the answers to your other inquiries,” he wrote to Ganay, “I have enclosed them in a holier chest that Narciscus will show to you alone. I have entrusted him with the key, which he will bring you, since you do not know enough: for I would not want you to have a chest full of secrets of no use. But I cannot come to you myself at this point, since I have been summoned elsewhere. But you will learn more about my intentions as to how and when I may have the chance to visit you from Narciscus. In other letters I have written everything that I thought I should write you.”129 Clearly, membership in Trithemius’s inner circle had something of the kaleidoscopic charm that would later be associated with membership in the Freemasons: behind every mystery a new mystery lay concealed, and after every ritual and initiation came another, open only to the very wise and very pure. No wonder then that nineteenth-century scholars often treated Trithemius as the founder of a literal secret brotherhood.

The Practice of Magic

As to the positive core of his magical cosmology, Trithemius described it in letters to Joachim of Brandenburg and others that seem to confirm this interpretation. Like Ficino, he explained that magic rested on a sort of higher numerology. The magus must understand “the division of the whole universe of superior and inferior beings, from one up to the quaternary resting in the ternary, and he must know that the order of descent and ascent, the degree, the number, the influx and reflux are and are not into one and three. And it is very hard to know this, for the whole root of miraculous effects, however they are carried out in natural or supernatural magic, rests on this principle.”130 In his original responses to Maximilian he offered a similar account of how the learned man could take advantage of the “subtle and difficult” principles of unity: the binary, the ternary, and the quaternary. These he described as “the center of the wisdom of the Chaldeans, who were famous for their miracles.”131 Trithemius applied this scheme, most reminiscent of the Pythagoreans, in many different ways.132 He used it, for example, to rationalize alchemy, a discipline in which he found many readers even though he did not speak well of it.133 Though couched in the form of lengthy letters rather than formal treatises, Trithemius’s ideas found widespread attention.134

Even as Trithemius set out to establish himself as both demonologist and magus, moreover, he embarked on related enterprises, which he saw as central to his work and that both encompassed and transcended the details of his natural magic. In the flood of letters and treatises that poured from his pen after his expulsion from Sponheim and the scandal of the Steganographia, he claimed to practice another sort of magical contact with higher powers. Again and again he emphasized that certain men, if they led a sufficiently austere and rigorous life and dedicated themselves intensively enough to contemplation, could perform miracles—“so long as their mind or spirit withdrew from all chance encounters into itself, beyond the senses, into unity”—and, he admitted, so long as a good spirit aided them since no human could attain knowledge except through the senses or through the help of a supernatural being. He had witnessed this sort of miracle, he told Maximilian, as a young man: “When I was studying letters as a boy, four of us were sleeping in the same bed one night. One of my comrades rose from my side asleep, as he regularly did when he slept, eyes closed, and walked about the house, as the full moon shone in. He climbed the walls more agilely than a cat. He also crossed the bed, still asleep, a second and a third time. He stepped on us, but we didn’t feel any more weight than if he had been a little mouse. Wherever his sleeping body moved, suddenly all the doors opened for him. With great speed, he passed to the highest garrets in the house, and perched on the roof like a sparrow. I am describing things that I have seen,” he assured the emperor, “not things that I heard vaguely described.”135 Though Trithemius warned that the enterprise was painfully difficult, he also encouraged ambitious readers to think that they too might achieve this form of enlightenment. No wonder that Dee filled his copies of Trithemius’s books with marginalia that revealed his incandescent enthusiasm for these notions: “May god grant this to me too,” he wrote longingly by one of Trithemius’s angelogical flights.136 He saw himself as a sage who spoke with angels. As Stephen Clucas has shown, he used the language of devotion to describe his conversations with higher beings and applied techniques similar to those of the ars notoria. He was not wrong, as will become clear, to envision Trithemius as his colleague.137

Trithemius gave precise instructions for making miracles of this kind happen, many of them more or less in the form of an exorcism. It is hardly surprising that he recommended such practices. As a churchman, he showed a special love for prayers and masses—many of which he composed—and for the sorts of objects that were tinged with holiness. In his little treatise In Praise of Scribes, for example, he told the story of a particularly pious brother in a Benedictine house he knew: “After performing his choir duties he regularly retired to the solitude of his cell and gave himself to this sacred labor. With boundless devotion he copied a great number of books of the saints. When many years after his death his remains were exhumed, it was discovered that the three fingers of his right hand, with which he had written so many books, were as preserved and fresh as if buried the day before. Of the rest of his body nothing remained but the bones. This proves how sacred the task of the scribe is in the eyes of God.”138 The magic that Trithemius recommended aimed at holy goals and was cast in a clerical style. Just as strange characters were the sign—and sacrament—of the devil, so the Christian symbols—the Eucharist and the cross—were those of Christ.139 They could enable a priest to save a victim of witchcraft from attack. The priest must be strictly pure and pious. He should begin by removing himself and his patient from public view for several days to prevent the witch from gaining access to them. Then he must search the house for the instruments of witchcraft—the bones of cats, dogs, and people, for example, which he must look for, like a character in a children’s book, “in the earth, in the bed, in the latrines, above the bed, in the canopy, in the clothing, in the dirt around the fire.” Only after carrying out these preparations could he make a perfect cross and hang it, with a nut meat and a little wax, on the neck of his patient. Above all, Trithemius says, one must remember the “dust of Pelagius the hermit,” which Pelagius had described in his “book of natural experiments.” When the priest has assembled all these ingredients and established that his patient really suffers from possession, he may go to work. His prayers and conjuring will immediately drive out the demons that afflict his patient—a work as powerful, Trithemius explained, as the magic that had allowed them in.140

Magic as Mentorship, Mentors as Magi

Trithemius also drew up a human pedigree for the form of magic that he practiced and carefully defined the central tenets that he had learned from his particular teachers. In doing so he followed the traditional paths of magic, at least to some extent. Renaissance magicians were often bookish. Everyone who wrote about magic knew this. When Prospero ceases to be a sorcerer, he marks the occasion by drowning his book and staff. Marlowe’s Faustus, as he begs Lucifer not to take him, cries: “I’ll burn my books—Ah Mephistopheles.”141 Trithemius, like others before him, regularly complained that necromancers brandished books spuriously assigned to great ancient writers. In the Renaissance, as in antiquity, grammar and glamor somehow went together. But everyone also knew that bookishness was not enough. Humanists, as Lisa Jardine showed, worked hard, even bending the truth at times, to show that they had benefited in person from the teaching of particularly eminent mentors.142 Magicians and playwrights understood the magic of genealogy as well as humanists. They all knew that no one could possibly learn and apply the practices of magic without being initiated into them by a teacher. Maximilian followed tradition when he had his young self portrayed in the Weisskunig debating with an older magus, who wanted to initiate him into the deepest secrets of his art. Even Trithemius once claimed—admittedly after he had just lost his library at Sponheim—that he rejoiced in his new ability “to practice philosophy for the most part without it.”143 The true magician, he told Joachim, must have a “supply of books in this science, and those that have been corrected, few of which are to be found today”; but he must also have “a learned and expert teacher in this art, since this form of knowledge is so wrapped in mysteries that it cannot be learned without a skillful teacher.”144

In the autobiography that Trithemius drew up in 1508, he identified his own teacher and described the circumstances of their meeting. It took place at a memorably dramatic moment, when Maximilian I staged a meeting of the Imperial Estates, choreographed with minute precision to establish his authority.145 “At the time when Maximilian the King of the Romans assembled that very large and protracted Diet in Worms [18 March–13 August 1495], Libanius the Gaul came to me in Sponheim from France. This man, celebrated for his encyclopedic learning and as venerable for his Christian piety as for his erudition, seeing my disposition, spoke to me joyfully.” Libanius had had a teacher in his turn: one Pelagius, the hermit of Majorca, whose books he had inherited. From Pelagius, and then from Pico, as Trithemius told the story, Libanius had learned many secrets, all of which he wanted Trithemius to know. It was, in fact, Libanius who made Trithemius see that “the natural magic, which teaches how to do wonderful works, as Pico says, through the mediation of natural powers” differed radically from the demonic magic that the church condemned.146

A slew of other documents, letters, and treatises that evidently circulated in manuscript form during Trithemius’s lifetime confirmed and embroidered on this intellectual genealogy. In a scattering of letters, Libanius repeated his expressions of high esteem for Trithemius, who returned them with interest. One of Libanius’s letters, Trithemius assured his teacher, is “just full to bursting with great and marvelous secrets of philosophy. In my view, no mortal intellect that has not first been steeped in your teaching can possibly grasp these.”147 In a particularly long letter to a friend, Libanius told the picaresque story of his teacher Pelagius’s life. Pelagius, it seemed, came originally from Genoa. As a young man he aroused the suspicion of theologians in France, where he had carried out marvels of natural magic; so he left for Africa, where he knocked about for some seven years. Eventually he wound up in Majorca, where he settled down and pursued wisdom—and where, Libanius claimed, he had studied with this master.

In 1506 and 1507—so Trithemius let it be known—he gathered more than a hundred of what he called his Epistolae familiares into a single manuscript.148 Furious at his expulsion from Sponheim, still mourning the loss of his library, Trithemius made this collection into something like a symphony in epistolary form. Again and again, he developed and then temporarily dropped vital themes, only to revive them again after a time: his own virtue and diligence and the malevolence and viciousness of his enemies, his deep concern for the monks and nuns committed to his care, and his passion for the highest forms of learning. At the same time, he told a coherent story: that of how the learned young Joachim of Brandenburg had invited him to stay at his court at Berlin, where the two men could study Trithemius’s “triple philosophy.” He included letters from Joachim in which the margrave worried that Libanius might have died and expressed his hope that he could gain control over the sage’s books, and replies from Trithemius, who first promised to find out the truth and then assured his patron that Libanius was still alive.149

At times, Trithemius took opportunities in these letters to insist that he was no magus: “I admit it, I have read plenty of the books of the magi, not in order to imitate them but so that, if Christ grants it, I could at some point refute their vile superstitions.”150 Far more often, however, he portrayed himself as a sought-after service provider to clever young princes, a master of esoteric wisdom. Trithemius made it clear that he had taken special care to preserve his secret magical books from the prying eyes of the uninitiated. Though he had left the vast majority of his collection in Sponheim, he stated, “I took with me to Würzburg certain works on the mystical secrets of nature, works that never belonged to Sponheim, and reading which would not be good for everybody.”151 In a more dramatic exchange, he boasted of how he had cured a Berliner of his chronic headache. In a set-piece letter addressed to the astrologer Johannes Virdung, he denounced Faustus—as we have seen—as a charlatan. In a letter to Libanius himself, he described himself as ecstatically rapt by a letter from the master: “I was so struck with wonder and joy that I almost seemed to depart from myself, and to be, not with my body in France, but in Spain or in Majorca with you.”152 With his autobiography and his works on demonology and necromancy, Trithemius’s collected letters amounted to a massive effort to portray their author as a Christian holy man, to set bounds between illicit and licit magic, and to prove that Trithemius himself—as wise patrons already realized—was the one accessible master of the latter.

Trithemius, as we have seen, suggested that the magic he inherited from Pelagius and Libanius resembled that of Pico. In fact, Pelagius wrote learned and subtle treatises on astrology, magic, and many other subjects—notably angel magic. One of these Libanius described in some detail as “a really nice little book on his guardian angel, and how it appears in his dreams, predicts the future and warns of dangers, and how it can be induced to obey one who invokes it—it’s a really nice book.” In fact, just this kind of angel magic formed the core of Trithemius’s own efforts in the field. The angel magic that Trithemius practiced belonged to one of the most popular forms of medieval magic, the ars notoria. Its practitioners held that by undergoing a regime of prayer and self-abnegation and by contemplating diagrams full of complex shapes and curious names, they could put themselves in the position to see the heavenly mansions—as well as to master, by direct angelic revelation, the arts of grammar, rhetoric, and the rest.153 When Trithemius adopted it as his own, he made what had begun as an effort to appropriate learning magically into a part of the world of learning in its own right. His friends seem to have appreciated his effort: Pirckheimer, at least, was as interested in his “particular prayer to the correct angel” as in his advice on ridding Nuremberg of demons.154

The Mentor’s Magic

A number of Pelagius’s treatises survive in manuscript form, in Vienna, Paris, and London. Those on angel magic preach exactly the sort of regime that Trithemius hinted at in his little book for Maximilian: they teach the ways in which genuinely spiritual men can gain access to direct revelation. “All good and knowable things in this world,” one of Pelagius’s works begins, “miraculously offer themselves to the intellect of a man who operates correctly through the mystery of this art, and he is suddenly transformed from an ignoramus, incompetent in any formal brand of knowledge, into a very learned man.”155 Though Pelagius declined to explain in this context how one should use angel magic to master the seven liberal arts and theology, or how to wield the crucifix to gain certain knowledge on any doubtful point, he did offer his readers something of high value. He told them how one could gain knowledge directly from the crucified Jesus, in one’s sleep, through an angelic intermediary.156 The operator must begin by having the proper symbolic object crafted by a skillful artisan: “Then have a sculptor make you with his hands an image of our Lord on the cross, with his arms outstretched, in the manner of one hanging. It should be made on a Saturday, of new and clean wood, oak or olive or laurel, which no one has used for anything else before, and has not been thrown in a dirty and disgusting place. And the more beautiful the image of the crucified one, and the more closely it resembles one suffering, the more efficacious it will be for operations.”157 Then the operator must make a box of red leather large enough to hold the cross, wrapped in a transparent cloth. Here he should store the cross whenever he was not using it.158 Every Saturday for a year, finally, he should say mass with the assistance of a faithful priest, presenting this image as a crucifix, and thus consecrating it.159

When the operator needs to know something difficult and important—not something small and trivial—he may put the cross into operation.160 To do so he must—exactly like Trithemius’s exorcist—submit himself to an austere regime to ensure both his purity and the balance of his temperament: “Be free from original sin, and not polluted by women, or by any other sort of pollution; be sober, not too full of food and drink, without disturbance of mind, without pollution for a period of three days, without melancholy or any fixed object of other thoughts.”161 Like a good reader of an encrypted message, he should then withdraw into a carefully prepared “secret room, bright, clean from the dirt of spiders and dust, and firmly shut.”162 There, after preparing to sleep alone on a bed with a clean cover, before a small altarlike table bearing candelabra with wax candles, the operator should at last take his consecrated cross out of its box and say a series of prayers.163 After aspersing the bed, the cross, and the room (and himself as well) with holy water in a circular pattern, the operator may go to bed. Before falling sleep he should meditate on the words “Jesus, eternal truth, show the truth.”164 If he does all this purely then “the truth itself will appear to you in your dreams as you sleep, in person, and will answer all of your questions that do not go against the divine majesty; sometimes in a clear and open way, sometimes in the similitude of an enigma.”165 If the operator has carried out this long series of rituals in the proper way, the crucified Jesus himself may appear to him unasked “and speak to you face to face, as friend to friend,” answering many questions.166

Pelagius’s treatises promised the same high results that Trithemius claimed. He offered his readers knowledge of hidden thoughts, secret events and buried treasure, alchemy, medicine, theology and all the other sciences, powerful words, and “the characters of good and evil”—in short, knowledge of everything in nature and the power over it.167 Pelagius also resembled Trithemius in his emphasis on the high craftsmanship that should go into effective magical objects. Trithemius, like many other German humanists, was a connoisseur of erudite objects as well as rare books. He showed his antiquarian credentials when he advised a friend in Ghent, Christian Masseeu, on the Greek inscriptions on a gold cross, and reconstructed the route by which the object must have reached western Europe after the First Crusade. Many fine relics, crosses, gold, and silver tablets, he noted, had reached the Latin West in the same way.168 A letter to Wilhelm Veldicus shows that his expertise, like that of other early sixteenth-century collectors like Hartmann Schedel and Hieronymus Münzer, extended into the realm of contemporary scientific objects as well: “You tell me that there is a handsomely painted globe with land, seas, and islands for sale in Worms. I wish I could grab it: but it will be hard for anyone to persuade me to spend forty florins on it. Just a few days ago I bought for a modest price a very pretty sphere, recently printed at Strasbourg in a small edition, and at the same time I also bought a sphere laid out in one dimension on the grand scale, with the islands and regions recently discovered by Amerigo Vespucci in the western ocean and towards the tenth parallel to the south.”169 In a letter of thanks to yet another friend, finally, he mentioned that his own working collection had included “books and instruments for the disciplines and for secret things”—clear evidence that he too used material devices, very likely fine ones, in his efforts to control the natural world.170

Pelagius cast his general explanation of the way the universe works, moreover, in terms that strikingly resemble Trithemius’s most general efforts to sum up the sort of magic that he practiced. Trithemius, as we have seen, used the power of numbers to explain the most powerful magical transactions: everything had to do with unity, the binary, the ternary, and so on. This was the high form of knowledge that he explained with characteristic brevity in the final version of his responses to Maximilian: “There are those who say that the mind and spirit of man can naturally do miracles, so long as it knows how to recall itself away from distraction and into itself, above the senses, into unity.”171 No doubt Trithemius—following his own precept—reserved a fuller explanation of these terms for a face-to-face encounter with the emperor—though Dee was inspired to write “NOTA” in large letters by what Trithemius found it acceptable to say in his text. He described the spiritual achievements of Hrabanus Maurus in the same way.172 And in the treatments of the life of Hildegard of Bingen that he inserted into his manuscript of her letters and his Cathalogus of German writers, he made clear that she had made herself ready for the divine revelations she received by her intensely pious, spiritual life.173 Fortunately, Pelagius, in one manuscript now in Paris, glossed the abbot’s somewhat cryptic terminology. His comments make clear that what Trithemius had in mind, in his natural magic as in his highest form of spiritual practice, was a union between the human and the divine:

The binary sometimes stands for the angelic intellect, sometimes for the human mind—especially when the ternary does not follow.

The ternary is always taken for the human soul or mind, except when the subject is the holy Trinity.

The quaternary is used in this book for the operation of the mind, though elsewhere philosophy may often take it for the human body, as: God, Angel, Soul, Body.174

If we apply this glossary to Trithemius’s discussions of high natural magic, the core of his beliefs becomes clear at once. In the end, he saw natural and supernatural magic as a single enterprise. The operations and combinations of the elements that Trithemius identified as the true core of all natural magic reflected a higher effort to unite the soul with God—a view reflected in his understanding of the alchemical Emerald Table, which he explained as an account of how all things flow out from unity and bear fruit when joined to it. This literal interpretation of the cryptic allegories of the Table, as William Newman has shown, proved highly influential.175 No wonder, then, that Trithemius’s descriptions of the successful magician sound so much like descriptions of a successful mystic. Trithemius, after all, translated the works of the late antique mystic Pseudo-Dionysius word for word from the Greek.176 He must have believed that the similarities between magic and contemplation were quite evident. When we began this inquiry into the magic of Trithemius, we saw that he was well acquainted with period forms of Christian practice, many of them connected to material objects. Later writers, from Protestant reformers to modern historians, have seen these as connected to or infected by magic. As we approach its end, we see the vital ways he envisioned the practice of magic in forms derived, in part, from Christian meditative practices.

Perhaps Trithemius really learned from his friend Libanius to practice Pelagius’s angel magic, as Libanius had learned from Pelagius, and then simply recorded what the spirits told him. Perhaps he went to bed in a clean, lonely room with a beautiful cross on the wall and dreamt of wonderful things. But it seems more likely that Trithemius conjured one or both of his necessary informants about magic, like his necessary witnesses to the early history of the Franks, out of the depths of his capacious imagination. Considerable evidence suggests that what Libanius and Trithemius himself related about Pelagius, their common source, rested squarely on foundations of sand. Libanius, as we saw, described Pelagius as a wonder-worker of Italian origin. And Trithemius, in the first version of his chronicle of the Abbey of Hirsau, did not mention Pelagius. But he did describe two other Renaissance prodigies, Giovanni Mercurio and Fernando of Cordoba—the latter of whom astonished even the skeptical Lorenzo Valla when he appeared at Naples as a teenager in 1444, speaking Hebrew and Aramaic as well as Latin; he was able to stand up to anyone in disputation since he knew the whole Bible, Nicholas of Lyra, and much more by heart. In the second version of the Hirsau chronicle, however, Trithemius identified Fernando with Pelagius and said that he had left for his hermitage in Majorca after a few years of triumph because he despised the science of this world. In reality, Fernando did not go to Majorca. He stayed in Italy, worked for Cardinal Bessarion and hunted benefices, as John Monfasani has shown. It seems, then, that Trithemius invented vital details about the life of his teacher’s teacher.177

Pelagius stated the principles of natural magic, as we have seen, in terms that closely resemble Trithemius’s—so closely as to make clear that one must be the source of the other. And a number of features of Pelagius’s work, which would be unusual in the writings of a genuine hermit of the mid-fifteenth century, match Trithemius’s practices to the letter. Like Trithemius, Pelagius loved to stuff his Latin texts with Greek inkhorn terms. Like Trithemius too, he carefully dated the completion of every text he wrote. And like Trithemius, he combined a zeal for Christian self-discipline with a Faustian desire for power. As to Libanius, the case is less clear-cut. The letter in which he describes Pelagius’s discipline is directed to a “certain friend and disciple,” whom the writer describes as his teacher, lord, and friend and “worthy of a triple dignity.” A note on the letter itself identifies this gentleman: “I think the one he called worthy of a triple dignity here was Trithemius; it’s an allusion to his name.” These phrases sound suspiciously like the devices regularly used by forgers, in this period as before and after, in the hope of making their inventions seem genuine: clicks echo around the room as too many locks spring shut simultaneously.

More important, Trithemius may not have compiled his correspondence from actual letters, but created it out of whole cloth. His holograph letter book in the Vatican Library includes texts addressed to him by any number of historical individuals. But the manuscript—as opposed to the printed texts edited later by Jacob Spiegel and Marquard Freher—reveals under scrutiny a considerable amount of what looks like pure imagination at play. When Trithemius titled a letter from Libanius giving astrological advice “Letter of Libanius the Gaul, the most learned of all men of his time,” or noted that another letter came to him from a “Gymnosophist”—normally the term for the naked wise men of ancient and contemporary India—in Cologne, he was already pushing the boundaries of credibility. The corrector who edited these letters for their appearance in print, Jacob Spiegel, tacitly admitted as much when he moved these statements to less prominent positions in the printed text than they occupied in the manuscript, and rephrased the letter headings in less hyperbolic language.178 Sometimes, whole letters have a tactical look—especially those in which distant friends and patrons retell the story of Trithemius’s sufferings in his own exact terms, or extravagantly praise his learning and occult power.179 So does the careful ordering of the letters. Remarkably, Trithemius often managed to insert letters on magical and other dangerous topics into larger bouquets that also offered spiritual advice of the most orthodox sort. It seems entirely possible that his tales of magical prowess—and perhaps even the warm contextualizing letters to him from his patron Joachim of Brandenburg (with their curious echoes of Trithemius’s Latin style and vocabulary)—were wholly or partly fictional. After all, there is no proof that Trithemius actually meant to publish these letters: he could simply have circulated them in manuscript, thereby dramatizing his prowess in the magical arts for a chosen few without risking contradiction in the public realm of print. And it is certain that Trithemius regularly rewrote his texts, changing significant details even in stories that he claimed to have witnessed himself.180 At the very least, then, it seems clear that the letter book is not a neutral record of texts whose historicity is certain but an epistolary narrative crafted to produce certain effects—Trithemius’s most systematic effort to insert himself into learned circles, if necessary by inventing them.

If Trithemius’s teachers gave considerable space to magic in their personal histories, the history of the Franks gave the art an even more prominent role. Just as in his cryptography and in his fabrication of a magnificent esoteric past for the Franks, Trithemius here made a standard humanistic practice of his day—bold invention—serve the needs of magic.181 But if this was his general enterprise, it seems likely that his particular inspiration lay in the works of a fellow member of a religious order: the Dominican theologian Giovanni Nanni of Viterbo, who in 1498 published a set of twenty-four forged texts by Berosus the Chaldean, Manetho the Egyptian, Metasthenes the Persian, and other gentlemen unknown to fame. The texts were very short, so Nanni described them as a “defloratio” or compendium of a larger work. He also embedded them in a dense commentary. In it he showed that these texts—written by priests on the basis of documents in the public archives—refuted the mendacious histories of the world drawn up by Greeks like Herodotus and Diodorus. From these materials he wove a genealogical web that connected antiquity to modernity and the Bible and Egypt to Greece and Rome. Medieval tradition had long identified the Gianicolo in Rome as the final resting place of Noah’s ark, and Noah himself as Janus. Nanni’s ingenuity—and his inspired impudence—enabled him to trace the genealogy of his patrons, the Borgia, back to Isis and Osiris, and to prove, along the way, that his native Viterbo had been the center of ancient civilization.182

Even the sharpest critics—like Beatus Rhenanus—were amused by Nanni’s presumption: “one milks the she-goat,” Beatus wrote of the intertwined text and commentary, aptly quoting Erasmus, “while the other holds out the sieve.”183 His work fascinated the obsessive genealogists at Maximilian’s court and many others.184 And in at least one crucial way, he offered the model that Trithemius followed. For Nanni took care to ground his forgeries in scholarly argument. Priests, he maintained, deserved credence over lay writers and public documents over private narratives. But Berosus, Manetho, and Metasthenes were priests who wrote on public authority. Hence, the rules of historical credibility supported his texts against their Greek opponents. Like Nanni, Trithemius decked his forgeries out in at least seven veils of camouflage, and like Nanni, he used the techniques of scholarship to make his fakes seem reliable. More than once, after retailing some especially miraculous tale from Hunibald, Trithemius noted that “these things seem remarkable to me, and are perhaps in part fabulous.”185 Thus he commented that Hunibald must have invented the remarkable deeds of Heligast—unless, perhaps, the priest had carried them out through the arts of demons. Every expression of doubt served to legitimate the rest of the account—in which Trithemius gleefully portrayed the ancient rulers of the Franks and their priests as mirror images of his imperial and princely patrons and himself. In his account of Basanus, king of the Sicambrians, Trithemius quoted what his imaginary source Hunibald had to say about Heligast, son of the priest Theocalus: “He predicted many future events to the Sicambrians. He showed the priests a visible Jove. He made the secret plans of men public, and he laid bare the secrets of the enemy in affairs and enterprises for King Basanus. None of the things that the enemies of the Sicambrians planned even in the most secret way seemed to escape him. This brought his friends safety and his enemies desperation.”186 Heligast was an ancient Trithemius, who used his knowledge of the future and the machinations of enemies to protect and serve his patrons.

4.5 Trithemius presents his history of the Franks and their priests, who were also magi and used their arts to lead their people, to Prince-Bishop Lorenz of Würzburg. Trithemius, Compendium sive breviarium primi voluminis Annalium sive historiarum de origine regum et gentis Francorum (Mainz, 1515), title page. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Q-000274.

Nanni seems to have believed, quite sincerely, that his imagined histories were true—truer than the transmitted Greek and Roman ones—and that he had not invented but recovered them from hints in the textual record. Trithemius seems to have regarded his own efforts to recover the Frankish past in much the same light. More than once he evoked the feat of Ezra, the Jewish priest who recovered the books of the Bible, after the Babylonian exile, not by copying but by an extraordinary feat of memory and inspiration.187 Very likely he believed that he—like Nanni—had gained access through inspiration to the barbarian histories that the Greeks and Romans had forgotten or suppressed. The angelic visitors whose presence he invoked through self-denial and ritual—and who perhaps included the two imaginary friends whose teaching had formed him—revealed the hidden truth, both about the larger past of the Germans and about his personal history. If Trithemius’s magic had a massive humanistic component, then his humanism had an equally large dollop of magic at its core.

Indeed, the core of magic may help to explain exactly why Trithemius fictionalized his correspondence as he did. Philostratus’s life of Apollonius of Tyana, a newly printed portrait of a wonder-worker, included a number of what were apparently genuine letters from Apollonius to important men—including the emperors Vespasian, Titus, and Nerva—along with their replies.188 In the 1502 edition of Zenobio Acciaiuoli’s Latin translation, printed marginal notes called attention to these. Apollonius, moreover, framed at least one letter (the one to Nerva) as an “enigma” and fooled his friend Damis into taking the letter personally to the emperor so that Apollonius could depart from life, as he had always recommended, secretly and discreetly.189 Philostratus, in other words, appeared in the best sources not only as a pagan holy man and a powerful magus but also as a clever steganographer.190 As Annius modeled his own texts of Berosus and others on the passages quoted by Josephus and Eusebius, so Trithemius may have modeled his own letters—and the wonder-working career as magical adviser to princes that they portrayed—on the impressive documents in Philostratus. If so, his correspondence marks a stunning set piece of speculative philology.

Trithemius achieved a great deal. He attained a powerful position as an adviser and authority on things magical to the Holy Roman emperor. He became a recognized expert on magic, good and evil alike. He used his abilities as a historian and forger to give his own sort of magic an appealing genealogy, and he created a history of magic that fused ancient and medieval ways of pursuing and practicing it into a single, reputable whole. He brought a vast range of magical names, magical objects, and magical prayers before the wide public to which he offered his surveys of the literature of the field and his textbooks on cryptography and related subjects. He proved that one, especially practical form of magic could achieve precise and miraculous effects, uniting forms of powerful knowledge that had often been separate in the past. And he showed how a single magus could, as occasion demanded, play the part of a diabolic sinner and that of a saintly prophet—how magic could serve both as a challenge to, and as a reinforcement of, the religious order he claimed to defend. It was natural for Trithemius to find Faustus so infuriating, or to portray himself as doing so: here was a rival whose claims looked like a precise and elegant parody of his own. Finally, and most important of all, he devised—as no one before him had—what looked like an irresistibly useful form of magic, one that had all the charms of mystery and diabolism but could also potentially benefit any ruler in Europe. No wonder that Agrippa, who gave erudite magic its definitive form, looked up to Trithemius as il migglior fabbro. Yet Agrippa would reconfigure the magical and humanistic heritage he received from Trithemius in crucial ways. We turn to him now.

CHAPTER FIVE

Occult Philosophy in Theory and Practice

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

A Benedictine Reads an Uncanny Book

In 1550 Heinrich Duden started to read his copy of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia.1 A monk of the East Prussian abbey of Werden, he would eventually become cellarer and then, for the last quarter of the sixteenth century, abbot. His contemporaries made fun of him for failing to understand the gravity of Werden’s economic situation and criticized the Lutheran tendencies that led him to introduce German hymns into the liturgy. Some thought him a trimmer, and he certainly took criticism of his priestly order with equanimity.2 Late medieval monks, as we have seen, were often aficionados and practitioners of magic. Werden carried this tradition on into the new world of print and a new kind of learned magic.

Agrippa’s book made bold claims for its originality and importance from the start: a title page adorned by a vivid portrait of the author. He not only taught all manner of magical practices and treated magic as the key to the secrets of the cosmos, but baldly stated that “meeting monks is generally considered an evil omen, and all the more if it takes place in the morning. For that sort of man lives mostly from the charnel house, as vultures live off corpses.”3 A marginal note at this passage simply states: “Note well, that monks are always ill-omened, especially Franciscans, and the explanation of this matter”—a remark all the more striking in that Duden, a Benedictine, described Franciscan mendicant friars as fellow monks.4 Another of Duden’s notes cites a major Protestant divine, Heinrich Bullinger.5 To some extent, indeed, the book may even have appealed to Duden’s religious sensibility. Like Trithemius, he was a Reformed Benedictine of the Bursfelde congregation, a group of German abbeys whose members, male and female alike, took a serious interest in monastic reform. But no one seems to have accused him of an interest in magic.6

Nonetheless, Duden plunged into the work with great energy, came back to it again and again, and recorded the results of his reading with Benedictine care and precision.7 A bold note on the title page, inside the border of the woodcut portrait of Agrippa, makes clear Duden’s sense that he was seeking out hidden treasures as he read the book: “O Heinrich, you knew more than you wrote.”8 A second note proudly recorded his taking possession of the work and made clear his sense that in reading it, he was joining a mysterious confraternity of savants who saw magic as the key to life, the universe, and everything: “I belong to D. Heinrich Duden, monk of Werden, and I now recognize him as my sole owner, since I have left the earlier one, N., that unrivaled expert on this philosophy. AD 1550.”9 At the end of Agrippa’s prefatory letter Duden added: “Read with care and precision, dear reader, and you will marvel and will not be sorry.” Both statements reveal the awe with which he approached what he saw as a richly informative but sometimes troubling book.10 A final prefatory note, added before the book’s printed index, underlined the pains that Duden took as he elaborated the long, winding trail of annotations that he left as he worked his way through the book: “Read with care and close attention and with marginal notes entered by me, Heinrich Duden, monk of Werden.”11 Like so many Renaissance readers, in other words, Duden transformed the printed text in front of him into a richly individualized autobiographical record, one that embraced not only the text and its sources but also his own interests and experiences.

Duden did not exaggerate the fascination with which he examined every exhibit in Agrippa’s printed cabinet of wonders. As a well-trained monk in the age of Trithemius, Duden took a keen interest in bibliography, hermeneutics, exegesis, and bibliography. At many points he wrote that he had seen books like those Agrippa cited: for example, the works of Bede and others on manual arithmetic, which Agrippa took as a form of profound numerological magic: “On this art of counting by hand gestures I once saw in the Monastery of Liesborn, in a certain ancient manuscript, a wonderful and artful illustration on the art of counting by gestures of the hand and fingers.”12 Duden admitted that some passages of Agrippa’s work might seem obscure to the hasty reader, but he found others genuinely difficult.13 Yet Agrippa’s skillful use of Revelation 13:18 wrung a high compliment from the Benedictine: “good citation.”14

5.1 Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa claims authorship of his book with this bold portrait. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres (Cologne, 1533), title page. Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, E.F. Smith Collection Folio 540.1 Ag84.2 1533.

Over and over again, Duden remarked that he had seen miraculous “experimenta” exactly like those that Agrippa and his sources described. When Agrippa described how one could use a mirror to project letters onto the face of the moon so that someone else who understood the system could read them, Duden wrote: “In 1546 I saw a certain professor of this art do this in the shadow of the moon and with a lead plate.”15 Where Agrippa cited William of Auvergne’s story that a certain man found merely the sight of a purge sufficient to set him on his way to the toilet, as often as he wanted, Duden recalled: “Something like this happened to me too when I had a fever in 1554.”16 And after he read Agrippa’s description of the preparations that could preserve a piece of wood from being burned by fire, or a human hand from being scorched even when its owner used it to carry red-hot iron or thrust it into molten metal, Duden entered two notes at different times. These made clear both that he had seen such tricks carried out and that they offered an ingenious explanation why the church, centuries before, had prohibited trial by ordeal: “I saw this done by someone who stuck his hand into molten copper and suffered no harm”; “That is why Christians are forbidden to use the ordeal by red-hot iron. For it is written, you shall not tempt the lord your god.”17 All Benedictines in the empire were trained to believe that they inhabited a world of wonders. They saw relic collections in their abbey churches as celestial power stations that drew the holy down into daily life on earth. Duden stood out not because he believed that strange powers worked around him but because he found Agrippa, of all people, a reliable guide to them and their operation.

The Career of Occult Philosophy

Yet the very book that Duden read with such respect, and treated so palpably as a work of erudition and eloquence, provoked very different reactions from other authorities. Agrippa set out to be provocative, and he usually succeeded. Sharp attacks on traditional theology and jokes at the expense of ignorant priests and friars earned condemnations for a number of his books in the same years when he was trying to put his work on magic through the press, and contributed much to his bitterness.18 But the De occulta philosophia proved especially problematic for Agrippa and his publishers—more so, in some ways, then the Steganographia had for Trithemius. Agrippa’s astute appeals to the Bishop of Cologne, Hermann von Wied, and the city council enabled his publisher, Gottfried Hittorp, to steer the book into publication in the teeth of efforts to censor it. Once on the market, it immediately passed through three printings, clear evidence of high demand. Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the book served as a desk reference for all learned magicians, a single well-organized and well-indexed compilation of theories, techniques, and references to sources. Yet it also appeared on every index. In the later sixteenth century and after, its possession sufficed to make the owner suspect in the eyes of the Inquisition. The Jesuit demonologist Martín Del Rio called Agrippa the “Archimagus.”19 In his Disquisitiones magicae, a richly tessellated “mosaic” of quotations and anecdotes drawn from a vast range of sources, Agrippa appeared as both an authority on and a practitioner of diabolic magic.20 When he and Faustus traveled together, Del Rio claimed, they paid their bills in inns with coins that seemed genuine but turned into bits of horn after a few days.21 On his own, Agrippa practiced the most frightful forms of diabolic magic, a clear sign that he had sold his soul:

Thanks to the pact, magi can use higher daemons to force lesser ones to enter a corpse and make it move about and do everything necessary to give it the appearance of life. Cornelius Agrippa did this at Louvain. He had a companion who was too curious. Once when Agrippa took a trip, he gave the keys of his museum to his wife, whom he afterwards divorced. He forbade her to let anyone go in. But that rash young man took advantage of his opportunity and did not stop begging the poor little woman to let him in until he got what he wanted. He entered the museum, and happened on a Book of Spells, which he read. Suddenly there came a knock at the door, which disturbed him. He went on reading. Someone knocked again. And when the young man, who was ignorant of these matters, did not answer, a daemon came in, asking ‘Why did you call me? What is your command?’ Fear silenced the young man, the daemon [opened] his gullet, and the poor creature paid the penalty for his wicked curiosity. In the meantime, the archimagus came home. He saw the daemons rejoicing above his house, and summoned them, using his usual arts. They told him what had happened, and he ordered them to enter the body of the victim and to go on walks through the town square, where the other students often met, and then to leave the body. He went on three or four walks and then the body collapsed as the one that controlled it fled. For a long time it was believed that he had simply died suddenly. But the signs of suffocation began to raise suspicions about the affair, and in the end time revealed everything. Agrippa fled to the Rhineland, where he began to spew out the heresies that he had hidden in his bosom.22

Agrippa emerged from Del Rio’s sharply etched anecdotes as a compleat necromancer, with a study full of dangerous books and devils sitting on the rooftree of his house, and a heretic to boot. No publisher could have bought better advertising, but nothing could have been deadlier to the reputation of the author himself.

Learned magicians from Naples to London used multiple forms of subterfuge to obtain copies of Agrippa’s work from compliant printers and peddlers. These they wielded in attempts to find treasure or become invisible, while inquisitors did their best to confiscate and burn the copies that booksellers claimed they had not known were prohibited and that turned up all too frequently in the libraries of priests. A spurious fourth book, stuffed with practical recipes, soon joined the three genuine ones on the market and helped to spread and maintain Agrippa’s reputation as the master of all necromancers.23 Agrippa’s own career, moreover, basically came to an end once the book appeared, and the sharp criticisms it provoked seem to have induced his printer, Johannes Soter, who had sympathized with a number of forms of new learning, to find another vocation making paper.24

This was by no means the only paradox in the career of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. An adventurous figure, he combined experience on the battlefield with a controversial career as student and teacher in universities in both northern Europe and Italy. Even more than Trithemius, moreover, he lived in interesting times, which fostered his intellectual interests but hampered his efforts to establish a career. Born at Cologne in 1486, he studied there and took a degree as master of arts. By his mid-twenties, he was already fascinated by Reuchlin’s new approach to biblical studies, and he lectured on Reuchlin’s first book on Kabbalah, On the Wonder-Working Word, at the university of Dôle in Burgundy in 1509. He would continue to pursue these interests for decades, inside and outside the universities where he occasionally taught. But Agrippa’s active career fell in the first decades of the sixteenth century. His external life was dominated by war: the wars between the Valois and Habsburg for control of Italy, and lesser wars that flared up in and around them. Where Trithemius had to reckon with raids on his monastery’s properties and efforts to hold him for ransom, Agrippa fought. As a young soldier he helped put down rebellious peasants in the Kingdom of Navarre or Aragon and barely escaped with his life. Later he served the Emperor Maximilian as secretary and as soldier. Theology, moreover—Agrippa’s chosen study—was almost as dangerous as battle. Trithemius died before the Reformation broke out. Agrippa, by contrast, came to maturity as Erasmus and Lefèvre d’Etaples mounted a powerful challenge to scholastic theology and philosophy. Instead of writing treatises on the saints, he wrote philological notes on the Bible, and then found himself on the firing line as scholastics and inquisitors condemned his work.25

The Holy Roman Empire, finally, proved a labile and precarious environment in which to pursue a scholarly career. There was good reason for this, as we have already seen. By law and tradition, the empire was a collection of states, and each of these portrayed itself as a Ständestaat—a state of orders, in which every man or woman had a particular place, defined by birth and occupation, identified by costume and titles, and imbedded on a hierarchy that stretched upward from common laborers and housewives to the pope and emperor. Though these theories remained solid, social realities were melting and changing. Masters turned their guilds from organizations of workers into cartels of producers, and journeymen found that their positions, once seen as stepping-stones toward the status of master craftsman, had suddenly become permanent. Meanwhile, humanists like Erasmus and Reformers like Luther claimed new rights—the right, for example, to correct and interpret the Bible and to intervene in theological debates. Yet if the emperor encouraged humanists and artists to assert themselves, members of his family and court encouraged theological faculties to impose a new, harsh censorship on writers and printers.

Agrippa’s two callings—as practical man and courtier on the one hand and as scholar on the other—both proved hard to pursue, and they were even harder to combine in these conditions. In 1512 and again in 1515, the collapse and later revival of French power in Lombardy radically interrupted Agrippa’s efforts to study and teach at Pavia. After failing to find an adequate position at the court of Savoy, accordingly, Agrippa moved back to his native Rhineland. His multiple skills and broad experience won him positions as an ambassador and legal consultant to the city of Metz, as a town physician in Freiburg, and as court physician to Louise of Savoy, the French Queen Mother, in Lyons. At each station in his journey Agrippa won friends, often very impressive ones like the young Basel humanist and jurist Claude Chansonnette, who Latinized his name to Cantiuncula. But he never found a satisfactory long-term position—partly because, in Metz and elsewhere, he deliberately challenged the religious authorities when he believed that their doctrines or actions lacked a scriptural foundation, and they responded in kind. In 1528, Agrippa moved on to the court of Margaret of Austria in the Netherlands. At first his affairs prospered, but this Antwerp period also ended in misery, as Agrippa lost his wife to the plague and his writings—especially his polemical treatise On the Vanity and Uncertainty of the Arts and Sciences—infuriated the censors in Louvain and elsewhere. When he obtained permission to publish On Occult Philosophy, as Charles Zika has shown, he was caught up in permanently unresolved struggles to find a place and a patron, and these left a profound mark on his work.26 He was also at least tempted—and perhaps infected—by some of the doctrines of the radical reformers.27 And yet it seems he never tried to leave the Catholic faith.

A consistent critic of what he saw as the ignorance and superstition of the mendicant friars, Agrippa took one striking stance. In 1519, a “little friar” at Metz, the Dominican Inquisitor Nicolas Savini insisted that a poor old woman from the village of Woippy, whose fellow villagers accused her of witchcraft, was clearly guilty and brought her to trial in a way that clearly violated legal norms and procedures. Drawing—as Agrippa haughtily noted—“on the bowels of the Malleus maleficarum and scholastic theology”—he argued that such women sacrificed their children to demons and that they even conceived them by receiving semen from an incubus so that their offspring were evil by birth. In making these arguments, the friar seemed to have authority firmly in his corner. The Malleus explained that devils have only the appearance of humans but lack all of their internal organs. They obtain semen from men by taking female form as succubae and inserting it in women after taking on the male form as incubi.28 Agrippa, who had been appointed legal adviser to the magistrate of Metz, attacked Savini with an Erasmian sense of irony. “Is this,” he demanded, “how theology is done nowadays, using nonsense of this sort to put innocent little women to the rack?” After all, he pointed out, all babies were born with the curse of original sin: that was why priests exorcised them in the course of the baptism. If the devil had not left the baby, then the exorcism must have failed. Human semen was always evil; it could not become more so even if it passed through the body of a devil. Agrippa denounced the inquisitor himself with sovereign assurance: “Expel this blasphemous little friar like the plague, or flee him.”29 Though the accused witch suffered humiliation and time in prison, Agrippa won her release and convinced at least a few friends, like the pastor Jean Rogier or Brennonius, to share his views. In this instance at least, the greatest magus of the sixteenth century showed no tolerance at all for the juridical practices of witch-finders.30

A Survey of Magic

Agrippa’s manual of learned magic explicated the ways in which magicians understood and manipulated the cosmos more systematically than Ficino or any other of his predecessors. In On Occult Philosophy he mapped the entire network of forces that passed from angels and demons, stars and planets downward into the world of matter. Agrippa laid his work out in three books, on the elementary, astrological, and celestial worlds. But he saw all of them as connected and wove complex spiderwebs of influence that passed from high to low and low to high. With the zeal and learning of an encyclopedist imagined by Borges, Agrippa catalogued the parts of the soul and body, animals, minerals, and plants that came under the influence of any given planet or daemon. He then offered his readers a plethora of ways for averting evil influences and enhancing good ones.31 Some of these were originally simple remedies, many of them passed down from Roman times in the great encyclopedic work of Pliny the Younger and less respectable sources, and lacked any deep connection to learned magic. Magic—as we have seen—usually required the use of objects charged with power, and Agrippa’s book also offered a massive taxonomy of magical animals, plants, and stones, with ample instructions for their preparation and use. Sufferers from sore throat read in Agrippa that they could cure themselves by touching their necks to the hand of someone who had died prematurely. Those plagued by coughs learned to put spit in the mouths of green frogs and then let them escape.32 Reading the book resembled walking through a vast princely chamber of wonders or a grand apothecary’s shop, ceiling, walls, and shelves hung with strange and thrilling creatures.

Chapter after chapter of Agrippa’s work, accordingly, turned into a magnificently encyclopedic if associatively organized mountain of material, partly drawn from written sources and partly from oral tradition and current practice, as the author applied his scissors and paste to the fruits of his vast reading and vaster curiosity. Open the book at random, as many readers did, and they would find themselves stumbling into a vast cabinet of curiosities, whose contents Agrippa described with energy and economy:

They say also that a stone bitten by a mad dog has the power to cause discord, if it is put in a drink, and that one who puts a dog’s tongue in his shoe, under his big toe, will not be barked at by dogs, especially if it is added to the herb of the same name, cynoglossa [dog’s tongue]. And a membrane from the afterbirth of a dog has the same effect, and dogs will shun one who has a dog’s heart. And Pliny reports that there are red toads that make their home in briars, and are full of sorcery and do wonderful things. For the small bone that is in its left side, when cast into cold water, makes it immediately become hot. It restrains the attacks of dogs. Added to a drink, it arouses love and quarrels. When tied to someone, it arouses lust. On the other hand, the little bone that is in the right side cools hot water, and it will not become hot again unless the bone is taken out. It cures quartan fevers, when tied in a fresh lamb’s skin, and prevents other fevers and love and lust. And the spleen and heart of these toads make an effective remedy against the poisons that are drawn from those animals. All this Pliny narrates.33

Any reader could find something of interest in this paroxysm of parataxis, a good bit of it taken directly from Pliny and none of it explicitly verified by anything resembling a test. Some of the time, at least, Agrippa served his readers as little more than a source of the homeliest of anecdotes and practices—which they both appreciated and, presumably, recycled in their turn. But sometimes readers indicated that they had tested the claims made by Agrippa and his ancient sources, or seen them tested, by practitioners who knew how to manipulate powerful things. Duden, for example, liked Pliny’s story, which he read in Agrippa, about how the bone from the left side of a toad could make water hot or inspire love. He treated it, unexpectedly, not as a factoid that had already made an illustrious career passing from notebook to notebook but as a description of a familiar process. After underlining the two relevant bits of the sentence, he wrote: “I saw this done once.”34

Even the little toads and their littler bones, moreover, were framed in a larger explanatory system, one that led the reader upward and outward. In classificatory chapters that dealt with the elements, the temperaments, the planets, and the zodiac, Agrippa made clear that celestial influences shaped each being and object on earth, endowing it both with its powers and with the external marks that revealed these to the skilled eye of the magus. No one could hope to master the occult philosophy, in other words, without mastering the higher studies of astronomy and astrology. The magus also had to have the personal gifts and formal training that would enable him to interpret dreams and prophecies and the knowledge of mathematics required to detect the Pythagorean number patterns that gave the universe structure. In the end, moreover, he needed asceticism and self-discipline since the consummation of his art involved communication with angels. The most graphic parts of Agrippa’s work, the sections most densely involved with the powers of particular bones and plants, provided him with opportunities to introduce larger and more abstract themes that he could then pursue in the second and third books, as he moved on to describe in detail the powers of planets, angels, and daemons.

Agrippa, moreover, interspersed the homely segments of his work with materials of very different kinds, also drawn from diverse provinces of the country of magic. When he evoked the terrifying images of horses’ heads that certain special lamps and candles, made from the liquid exuded by copulating mares, could project, he was once again quoting Pliny (28.49), and Pliny in turn was quoting older sources. To judge from Duden’s note, however, he also described a contemporary magical practice: “I myself have experienced this, with great terror.”35 When Agrippa described how witches could catch the eyes of their victim and, by projecting “darts or strokes,” induce fear, love, or misery in them, he recalled the descriptions of witches’ behavior in the book he loathed, the Malleus maleficarum, and the normal beliefs of contemporary churchmen—as Duden noted when he wrote “a certain witch did this to the executioner at Hamburg in my time.”36

The therapies on offer in Agrippa’s book often required the invocation of celestial or angelic powers, either to awake the slumbering, hidden forces of the magical things he wished to manipulate or to protect magus and clients against the more frightening sorts of supernatural powers. Agrippan magic, accordingly, regularly involved direct efforts to invoke the intervention of planetary daemons and other spirits. Talismans, carved from particular substances and engraved with particular signs; magic squares, which revealed the marvelous properties of numbers; and the names of angels, obtained by Christian Cabalistic methods of substitution and recombination—these, among other means too numerous to mention, would enable Agrippa’s readers to change themselves and the world for the better.37

Many of the practices Agrippa described came directly from the magic that unfrocked clerics had practiced for generations. Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I has made one case in point famous. In this engraving, a magic square—the series of numbers from one to sixteen, arranged in the proper order in a square with sixteen cells—invokes the power of Jupiter, a beneficent planet, against the devastating influence of Saturn. Magic squares like this originated in the Arabic world, long before Agrippa’s time. Often they had their top row of cells filled with the letters of a divine name or with the first letters of a verse from the Koran, and the lower rows with permutations on them. Since Arabic letters, like Hebrew, have numerical values, each magic square automatically forms a mathematical figure, and it was in this form that they became most popular in the West.

The square in Melencolia I starts in the inverse way, with numbers that could turn into letters. If you take a square and enter the numbers from one to sixteen, you obtain the series that follows:

4 3 2 1

8 7 6 5

12 11 10 9

16 15 14 13

If you then leave half the numbers in place and rotate the other half by 180º, the magic square of Jupiter falls into shape:

4 14 15 1

9 7 6 12

5 11 10 8

16 2 3 13.

“They say,” Agrippa explained, “that if this magic square is stamped on a silver plate at a time when Jupiter rules, it provides profit and wealth, grace and love, peace and concord with men, and placates enemies, confirms honors and dignities and counsels. And if it is inscribed on coral, it destroys evil spells.”38 He illustrated the magic squares of the other planets, explained the “characters” that each of them could generate, and described their functions. The great Warburgian scholars Erwin Panofsky, Raymond Klibansky, and Fritz Saxl noted the correspondence between Agrippa’s text and Dürer’s print in the 1920s, and made it one of the foundations of their massive study of Saturn and melancholy.39

5.2 Albrecht Dürer. Melencolia I (1514). Metropolitan Museum.

Dürer, however, did not find his magic square in Agrippa’s book, which would not be published until twenty years after he made his print. It came, rather, from one of the medieval magical texts that, centuries before Agrippa, explained the magic squares and connected each of them to one of the seven planets. The Book of Angels, preserved in a fifteenth-century manuscript now in Cambridge, gives instructions on how to draw down the power of Jupiter that resemble Agrippa’s, though they are even more precise: “When you wish to practice magic with this figure, take a thin piece of silver made on its day (Thursday) and hour, and let Jupiter be in a favorable position. And on the piece sculpt this figure, and suffumigate it with aloe wood and ambrosia, and carry it with you. All who see you will love you, and you will succeed in whatever you ask of them. And if you put this figure between the feet of merchants, their business will grow. And if you put it in a dove-cote or in a place where bees are gathered, they will thrive.”40 Like this particular set of rules and numbers, much of the concrete material Agrippa assembled could be, and often was, found elsewhere. When he explained how to charge rings with power that could defend their owners against illness—by inscribing them with images, names, and characters, suffumigating them, and choosing astrologically propitious times for doing so—he named practices that were described in detail by numerous texts and objects that were familiar to the many consumers of magical objects, from the Holy Roman emperor on down.41

But few of the dozens of manuscript compilations that transmitted magic through the Middle Ages reflected any effort to impose a system on the whole range of magical practices, as Agrippa’s book did.42 He made clear that each of the separate arts of magic, from the simplest form of herbal remedy to the highest forms of communication with angels, fitted into a single, lucid structure with three levels: the elementary or terrestrial realm, ruled by medicine and natural magic; the celestial realm, ruled by astrology; and the intellectual realm, ruled by angelic magic.43 Long tendrils of celestial and magical influence stitched these disparate realms into something like a single great being:

For inferiors are joined to their superiors in such a way that an influence proceeds from their head, the first cause, like a string stretched taut, down to the lowest things of all. If one end of this string is touched, the whole immediately shakes, and a touch of this kind resounds all the way to the other end. The motion of the inferior makes the superior move as well, to which the other corresponds, like the strings in a well-tuned lute.44

Characteristically, Agrippa developed this passage over time, adding the last clause as he polished his work for publication. Duden savored its eloquence, and wrote appreciatively in his margin about this “beautiful and apt comparison.”45 But it was more than that. The magician, Agrippa showed, uses his knowledge of the powers of natural things to master and ascend from the elementary world. He draws on mathematics and astrology to pass through the celestial spheres. And he finally achieves full and true knowledge of God by carrying out ceremonial magic.

The magus could trace lines of influence upward along the great celestial power grid of the universe and downward into every order of being on earth: “All the stars have their own natures, properties, and conditions, and through their rays, they also produce signs and characters in inferior beings as well, in the elements, in stones, in plants, in animals and their members. Therefore each thing receives from its harmonic disposition and its star that irradiates it a certain special sign or character, which is stamped on it, which refers distinctively to that star or harmony, and has a power differing from all the rest either in genus, or species, or number of the preexisting material. Thus each thing has its mark, for some special effect, stamped on it by its star.”46 Agrippa offered, in other words, both a grand, schematic plan of the cosmos, rather like that of the London Underground, which laid out its structure as a whole, and a clutch of minutely detailed local Ordinance Survey maps, which made it possible to navigate through any specific part of the cosmos. Readers rapidly saw what Agrippa had to offer. The owner of a copy of On Occult Philosophy, now in Munich, made clear in his only annotation that he appreciated Agrippa’s systematic presentation of a universe in which physical forms revealed the natures of beings and their relations to one another: “Physiognomy, metoposcopy [the interpretation of faces], and chiromancy, and the arts of divination from the appearance and gestures of the human body work through signs.”47 Agrippa’s book not only became the manual of magical practice, but it also made the formal claim that magic was a kind of philosophy in its own right.

The more Agrippa’s readers knew, moreover, the more they could find in his work. Alchemy does not play a prominent role in the De occulta philosophia, and Agrippa expressed his disapproval of it in On the Vanity and Uncertainty of the Arts and Sciences. But informed readers—Simon Forman and Thomas Vaughan, for example—saw him not only as a sympathizer but as a practitioner.48 In a bravura work of interpretation, William Newman, following Vaughan, showed that Agrippa’s vision of the cosmos was deeply alchemical as well as astrological: he identified the spiritus mundi with the quintessence of the alchemists, which conveyed the “occult properties” to elemental earth, bringing forth the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.49 In this case as in so many others, it seems likely that he drew at least part of his inspiration from Trithemius.

Clearly, Agrippa and others saw his brand of magic as more than an assembly of traditional charms and magical substances. The book appeared, after all, with the approbation of no less an authority than Trithemius. Agrippa, a well-trained humanist, knew as well as Trithemius did that he needed to provide himself with a mentor and chose a real person. In a prefatory letter that appeared with the book, Agrippa stated that he had written On Occult Philosophy after spending some time with the abbot in 1509, in his great library at Würzburg. The two men agreed that the best ancient philosophers had once “venerated” magic, but more recent professors of the art had tragically corrupted it. After he completed a full treatment of the subject, Agrippa asked for Trithemius’s response to his work and for correction of any mistakes.50 In a reply dated April 8, 1510, Trithemius expressed his full approval.51 The learned abbot accepted Agrippa as the master of a truly erudite and valid form of magic, like that practiced by the magi in the ancient world. Agrippa thus presented On Occult Philosophy as not only an authoritative summary of learned magic but also a decisive statement about the form that the discipline should take.

Problems of Interpretation

Yet for all its reach and coherence, the book also posed numerous puzzles, as a feature of Agrippa’s curriculum vitae and in the form in which it first appeared. In 1530, only a year before Agrippa published a preliminary edition of the new text of On Occult Philosophy, he brought out a powerful satirical work, On the Vanity and Uncertainty of the Arts and Sciences. Here Agrippa subjected a great many well-funded disciplines to savage criticism, arguing that each of them in turn, from grammar, poetry, and history to the art of the inquisitors and all forms of scholastic theology, was riven with contradictions and studded with absurdities.52 Magic did not escape his desperate hook. In a series of sharp chapters, Agrippa discussed natural magic, mathematical magic, witchcraft, necromancy, theurgy, Cabala, and magical illusions.53 Though he continued to praise some of these pursuits, as we will see, for the most part he denounced them. Agrippa criticized natural magic, whose power he believed in, for the superstitions with which its practitioners had infected it. He argued briefly but cogently that theurgy could not lead its practitioner to God, that Cabala amounted to little more than an especially superstitious form of allegorical interpretation, and that practitioners of illusion would be damned with Simon Magus and other figures who had used tricks to combat God’s true prophets. Agrippa reprinted these mordantly antimagical chapters at the end of the first full printed edition of On Occult Philosophy. Some contemporary readers inferred that he had executed an intellectual about-face: “The art of occult philosophy,” wrote Duden in his copy, “is refuted and rejected by its own inventor. Well, then, farewell to it, in the name of the devils. You, Christ, save us, defend us, justify us, who trust in you alone. Amen.”54 Some historians, like Charles Nauert, have read Agrippa more or less as Duden did, and have inferred from On the Vanity and Uncertainty of the Arts and Sciences and other evidence that Agrippa abandoned his belief in most forms of magic before or while he readied On Occult Philosophy for publication. Others have argued the reverse, treating On the Vanity as a rhetorical set piece not meant to be taken seriously.55 And still others—above all Michael Keefer—have treated Agrippa as a man divided, rather like Faustus: one who believed both that the true form of magic practiced by the ancients could indeed yield knowledge, power, and sanctity and that the evil magic of Simon Magus could only lead to damnation; he was uncertain as to which forms of theory and practice belonged in which category.56

One way to solve these problems has been to take refuge in biography: to argue, that is, that the vast bulk of On Occult Philosophy reflects not a single, coherent body of thought but rather decades of thinking and revising, shot through with contradictions. Vittoria Perrone Compagni has shown in her masterly edition how steadily this vast book, like so many encyclopedic treatises of the period, grew over time. Many revisions were fundamental: Agrippa added not only hundreds of new ornaments to his great lurid Christmas tree of a text but also new branches, some of which he grafted so solidly to the trunk that they were invisible before Perrone Compagni’s analysis.57 But it proves surprisingly hard to trace the precise lines of Agrippa’s intellectual development, or to tie them to the evolution of his puzzling masterpiece. His letters, though richly informative in many ways, offer relatively little information about his early years. And his books—especially On Occult Philosophy—took shape over decades, as he encountered new informants and read new texts. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most learned books were as much compiled as written. Reading then meant something different from reading now: it was an active, highly directed process, governed by precise protocols. The reader worked through each new text, marked its salient contents, and excerpted the relevant passages in notebooks that were often arranged by topic. When composing a new work of his own, he went back to these and combined whatever he found in them in new ways—much as a modern student may conflate diverse materials from digital sources. Agrippa himself, writing in 1529 or 1530, explained that he had begun to write a work on minerals, “which I still am working on, continually enlarging and correcting it as I gain more knowledge.”58 Each substantial book became a palimpsest, a tissue of many layers, added at different times; massive works of reference like On Occult Philosophy more than the rest.59

Agrippa’s magical interests, moreover, were floridly encyclopedic in scope. Correspondents consulted him on every imaginable issue, as they had Pico and Ficino before him: what did it mean, they asked, when a nimbus of flame appeared around a child, or a plague of locusts devoured crops in Italy? It was only natural that over the course of time, some forms of magic came to seem more rewarding and others less so. Many friends and patrons asked Agrippa for astrological advice or exchanged horoscopes with him. In 1520 he noted that Charles V, being “completely Saturnian,” could hardly hope to exercise great authority—a strikingly accurate prediction, in the long run.60 But in 1524 he lived through the crisis of Renaissance astrology. Before 1500, astrologers like Johannes Stoeffler had noticed that many conjunctions would take place in February 1524, sixteen of them in a watery sign. Predictions spread that a second Flood would take place. In 1524 people in some regions abandoned their cities and fled to high ground. Though heavy rain fell in Italy, in Germany—as the historian Johannes Aventinus drily noted in his own copy of Stoeffler’s almanac—the year proved unusually dry, and the rivers remained shallow.61 By 1526, Agrippa was complaining bitterly every time he had to work out astrological revolutions for his patron, Louise of Savoy—so bitterly, in fact, that she became very annoyed when an officious third party showed her his comments about the art, and he eventually had to leave his post in her court.62 In his 1530 denunciation of The Vanity of the Arts and Sciences, Agrippa denounced astrology as false and superstitious.63 Yet in 1531 he devised new rules for the interpretation of comets, and On Occult Philosophy is suffused with astrological ideas and techniques.64 Agrippa’s letters reveal that he spent several years in the late 1520s and early 1530s reworking On Occult Philosophy. But they shed little light on the details of his reading and revision.

The manuscript in which Agrippa presented Trithemius with the first draft of his work survives in Würzburg.65 Already organized in three books and already profusely learned, Agrippa’s work concentrated, in its discussion of practices, on relatively traditional forms of natural magic. With its short chapters and comprehensive scope, its effort to classify all the forms of magic and divination, the book at first resembled a late medieval compendium like Johannes Hartlieb’s survey of the seven evil arts. The work’s title reflected its contents: it offered instruction to the magus on various techniques, from sympathetic magic and astrology to dream interpretation and prophecy, that could allow the reader to unlock the “occult powers,” the occultae vires, of minerals, plants, animals, and men. All this was relatively traditional, and even the many quotations from classical poetry and prose that enlivened the first form of their book had their counterparts in the Malleus maleficarum and other resolutely antimodern writings. In its final form, by contrast, the published On Occult Philosophy of 1533 teemed with descriptions of practices drawn from magical realms of erudition newly opened up in the decades just after 1500. Yet even the most systematic comparisons between the manuscript and the final version have not unlocked the secrets of Agrippa’s thought.

Consider just one of the streams of contemporary thought that flowed into the great and turbid textual Mississippi of On Occult Philosophy. The Cabala—not the Jewish Kabbalah, to be sure, but the Christian version of it created by Pico, Reuchlin, and Francesco Zorzi, with the aid of informants, Jewish and converted—mattered deeply to Agrippa, who used it in his own highly pragmatic way. What Reuchlin and Zorzi discussed as matters of theory, Agrippa transformed into practical instructions. In On the Art of the Cabala Reuchlin described, in two separate passages, three instances of the power of symbols. One was Jewish: the four Hebrew letters מכבי, standing for Mi Camocha baelim Adonai (“Who is like unto thee among the mighty o Lord”), which Judah Maccabee, who led the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids in 167–60 BCE, had given his army as a watchword. Reuchlin carefully explained that “the yod” in Judah’s watchword “clearly stood for the tetragrammaton,” the unpronounceable name of God, יהוה. At the same time, the numerical value of the four letters as a whole, seventy-two, “offered a memorable symbol, through the equality of numbers, for the divine name of 72 letters.” Its power enabled the Jews to kill no fewer than fourteen thousand of their enemies and a great many elephants, along with their riders, in Antiochus’s camp. Once Judas had explained it, their enthusiasm inspired them to kill some thirty-five thousand more.66 Reuchlin’s second symbol was pagan, as his speaker Philolaus the Pythagorean, made clear. “Not only the Hebrew Cabalists,” he explained, “but the most reputable Greeks also placed a great deal of faith in symbols and seals.” For example, the Seleucid King Antiochus Soter, when near despair over an upcoming battle, dreamed that Alexander the Great appeared to him. Alexander ordered Antiochus to use the sign of a triple triangle made into a pentagon, which stood for the Greek word for health, ὑγίεια. In the manner of Judah Maccabee, Antiochus was to give it to his soldiers as a recognition symbol before they fought. He won the battle, and Philolaus, confirming a written narrative with a solid piece of material evidence in the best antiquarian manner, noted that he had seen silver coins of Antiochus that bore the symbol in question.67 A third speaker replied with what he saw as a Christian parallel: the sign of the cross, composed of the Greek chi and rho with which Christ’s name began, which appeared to Constantine the Great and his army.68 Though the three sets of signs differed radically in form and origin, Reuchlin treated all of them as evidence that “signs and symbols,” which he described as the core of the Kabbalah, had shown themselves to be immensely powerful.69 Reuchlin, in other words, had already assimilated the one Jewish symbol he described to pagan and Christian ones, identified all of them as consistent with the Kabbalah, and explained them.

5.3 Agrippa presents “mysterious seals” that could give the pious power. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres (Cologne, 1533), 277. Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, E.F. Smith Collection Folio 540.1 Ag84.2 1533.

Agrippa, typically, went one step further, and drew up diagrams that represented all three symbols as actual talismans. He described them eloquently as “mysterious seals that breathe the harmony of a certain divine being”—amulets that the pious could wield not only without concern but with confidence, since their markings came directly from divine revelation—and even as the pledges of an angelic pact, one between humans and divine beings.70 At the same time, he radically abbreviated Reuchlin’s explanations—for example, his explication of the verse from Exodus from which the term Maccabee came. In Reuchlin’s account, Judah solemnly explained to his men that the ineffable God inhabited the letters מכבי, and, filled with enthusiasm by his words, they destroyed their enemies, praying in their own holy language as they did so.71 In Agrippa’s account, the Jews killed forty-nine thousand of their enemies (and also many elephants) thanks to the “virtus” or power of the seal.72 Where Reuchlin described a holy war, Agrippa envisioned a magical one. By reworking his source as he did, Agrippa configured On Occult Philosophy to become the practical work of reference from which later magi generally drew much, if not all, of their information—not only when they composed texts but also when they crafted magical jewels like the talisman of Catherine de Medici, which Pierre Béhar has shrewdly decoded in a virtuoso feat of scholarly detective work. Catherine hoped that a talisman would assure her of the king’s love and painless childbirth by taking advantage of the power of the planets and the angels, and the jewel’s maker used for the most part the symbolic languages and protocols laid down by Agrippa.73 By reading Agrippa closely, one could see these exercises as pious.

A number of historians—notably Frances Yates and Charles Zika—have argued that the Kabbalah dominated Agrippa’s magic in its final form.74 At the beginning of his letter to Trithemius, Agrippa stated that the two men had discussed the Kabbalah and alchemy, as well as other forms of magic.75 He prized Hebrew as “the holiest of all languages, existing in the forms of its letters, the points of its vowels and the marks of its accents, as if in matter, form, and spirit.”76 Modeled on the form of the heavens at the Creation, full of numerical mysteries, the Hebrew letters shimmered with power. “Therefore the most secret Hebrew Mecubalim, using the form, writing, simplicity, combination, separation, twisting, direction, omission, excess, larger or smaller number, crowning, opening, closing, order, transformation, joining, and revolution of the letters and points and punctuation marks, and by computation of the numbers signified by the letters, promise to explain everything.”77 Agrippa treated the Kabbalah as sublime, reserved treatment of it for his third book on the intellectual world, and noted, as Reuchlin had, that if Christians pronounced the ineffable name of Jesus correctly as JHSVH (Jehoshuah), they could produce far stronger effects than Hebrew Kabbalists. It seems plausible to argue that access to the treasures of Kabbalah inspired Agrippa to frame his work as he did and to crown it with religious and ceremonial magic, which promised self-transformation as well as power.

Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke and Pierre Béhar, however, have raised chronological problems.78 The original manuscript of On Occult Philosophy, as Agrippa wrote it in 1509–1510, survives in Würzburg. His prefatory letter to Trithemius, in the version found there, does not mention the Kabbalah: evidently Agrippa added the reference later on.79 The text as a whole includes few Hebrew words or references to Jewish practices and doctrines and uses a great many more terms and practices drawn from Greek and Roman sources or from the Latin-Arabic tradition, such as the magic squares that we have already examined. Even in the finished work, most of Agrippa’s references to Hebrew terms came from two standard Christian authorities: Reuchlin’s On the Art of the Cabala, which appeared in 1517, and Francesco Zorzi’s On the Harmony of the World, which appeared in 1525. Accordingly, some recent writers have argued that Agrippa had already constructed his basic magical theory and practice when he began to steep himself in the Christian Cabala. Reuchlin and other Cabalists provided him with one of the basic resources from which he compiled On Occult Philosophy. But he began with other Oriental sages in mind as his models: above all the magi, whose ability to predict the birth of Christ Agrippa cited as a prime piece of evidence for the validity and virtue of the ancient magical tradition, and the Egyptian Hermes or Mercurius, whose name he cited over and over again.

From an early stage in his career, Agrippa was clearly fascinated by the Hebrew language. In 1509, as we have seen, he gave a formal lecture course on Reuchlin’s On the Wonder-Working Word at the college of Dôle.80 He prefaced this with a now-famous oration, “The Nobility and Excellence of the Female Sex,” which he dedicated to Margaret of Austria, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian.81 Here he argued that God, “the creator of the universe, knew all things before he named them, and since He could not be fooled, He fashioned the names in such a way as to express the nature, quality and usage of things.”82 Agrippa thus accepted the general theory that Hebrew words expressed the nature of things. “Woman,” he explained, “was created as much superior to man as the name she has received is superior to his. For Adam means earth, but Eve is translated as life.”83 Later, referring to the “mystical symbols of the Cabalists,” he pointed out that Eve’s name shares letters with the “ineffable name of the all-powerful divine tetragrammaton,” while Adam’s does not.84 This analysis was not specifically Cabalistic, and Agrippa went on to very different arguments. But its presence shows that Agrippa attributed special powers to the Hebrew language and the divine name. When the head of the Franciscans in Burgundy, Jean Catilinet, denounced Agrippa as “a Judaizing heretic, who has introduced into Christian schools the criminal, condemned and prohibited art of Kabbala” and who has “bent sacred letters to heretical arts and the Talmud of the Jews,” he showed an ungenerous but accurate appreciation for Agrippa’s views. For while Agrippa insisted that he was a faithful Christian and did not intend either to Judaize or to indulge in heresy, he also professed his faith in the value of Jewish scholarship: “I do not despise the Rabbis.” Many of his contemporaries did not believe that a true Christian could say as much.85

The Power of the Word

True, little Hebrew material, Cabalistic or otherwise, appears in the 1510 manuscript of On Occult Philosophy. But the work began with a direct and highly visible borrowing from Reuchlin. And some of the Cabalistic material Agrippa did use proved crucial, even in the revised form of the work, for later readers. In an age of compilations and recyclings, the intermediary often played as crucial a role as the originator of a doctrine. John Dee, for example, followed Agrippa’s guidance as he prepared himself for his solemn conversations with angels. In this connection he ascribed great importance to the Hebrew word פלא (pele), even going so far as to inscribe it on his ceremonial ring.86 He took his information on the meaning of the word—as he recalled in a note in his angel diaries—from Agrippa, who wrote:

There is a great and divine force in certain holy words and names, which is the power that produces miraculous effects, according to Zoroaster, Orpheus, Iamblichus, Synesius and Alkindi and all other splendid philosophers … and the Lord says in the book of Judges, “My name which is pele,” which we translate as “creator of miracles” or “worker of wonders.”87

Here, without saying so, Agrippa quoted Reuchlin’s first book on the Kabbalah, On the Wonder-Working Word (1496)—the very text on which he lectured in 1509. Reuchlin wrote there that God had set his name, the tetragrammaton, “on the summit, above all other names, as marvelous, as great, as terrible, as known from the miracles that God works through men.” After citing from the Latin Bible, among many other texts, Judges 13.18, “nomen meum, quod est mirabile,” “my name, which is wonderful,” Reuchlin explained that the word “mirabile,” “wonderful,” stood for the Hebrew word “פלא peli, which means ‘worker of wonders.’”88 Agrippa quoted this passage, word for word, in the first manuscript version of On Occult Philosophy—clear evidence that Reuchlin’s thought stimulated him from the start of his speculation about the magical powers of names and things.89

Celestial Knowledge

Agrippa made extensive use of Hebrew words, especially names for God and the angels. In doing so, he followed Reuchlin’s lead and emphasized the nonsemantic meanings of the Hebrew text of the Bible. But he did not treat the Kabbalah as a fundamentally religious exercise and did not recognize the full radicalism of the Cabalistic approach to exegesis—the way in which its interpretative methods could derive an infinite number of meanings from any given word or biblical verse.90 Moreover, he did not see Cabalistic techniques as definitive. In fact, he offered his own new methods for—for example—creating or divining the names of more angels than the mere seventy-two or so that Reuchlin had identified by name. Sometimes, instead of divining the numerical meaning of the Hebrew names of angels, he generated the names from numbers—a reversal of normal Cabalistic procedure, which looks closer to the ciphers devised by Trithemius than to actual Kabbalah.91 If Pico, Reuchlin, and Zorzi distilled the techniques used by later magi from a whole “third library” of Jewish treatises and commentaries, Agrippa decanted what they produced into a well-organized and attractive textbook that could easily be drawn upon in practice or for reference. In doing so he provided later magi with an essential resource, which laid out what they thought of as Cabalistic techniques. Yet he made clear that he saw the Kabbalah, powerful though it was, as only one form of celestial knowledge among others. That helps to explain why a faithful and intelligent reader of Agrippa, like Dee, hoped to discover higher forms of celestial communication than anything to be found in Pico or Reuchlin.

In one sense, as Yates showed, Agrippa’s book led the reader steadily upward from the most common magical pursuits—those of the Arabo-Latin tradition—through the practice of mathematics and the Kabbalah, to a third and highest form of magic: a celestial magic, practiced with angels, that amounted to an updated form of Trithemius’s angelic arts. Like Trithemius, he told the magus to retire into solitude and asceticism: “The magical operator, if he wishes to attain results, must be secret, and reveal his work, its place, its time, his own desire and will to no one, except to his teacher or helper, or a partner who must be faithful, a believer, and silent, and made worthy by nature or training.”92 “This,” wrote an obviously impressed Duden, “is what a Magus should be like.”93 Agrippa went on to instruct the reader at length on the divine names and how to use them to achieve knowledge of, and contact with, higher beings. Duden was shocked by some of Agrippa’s speculations—like the Cabalistic notion that some daemons might attain salvation.94 Like Trithemius, Agrippa convincingly evoked a world haunted by spirits at every level, from the fauns, lemurs, and hamadryads to be found in the terrestrial world to the angels whose names and seals he listed in vast, hallucinatory charts. Duden laid in the proper landscape to serve as background for such sights when he noted that “we see similar things in ruined, ancient castles and buildings.”95 More eloquently than his onetime master, moreover, Agrippa made clear that man was created in the image of this divine order, in a chapter that filled Duden with respect: “This chapter,” he noted, “deserves to be read with careful attention.”96

As his third book moved toward its conclusion, Agrippa plunged into even more controversial realms. In the 1520s and early 1530s, Agrippa, as Paola Zambelli has shown, was in contact with radical religious circles in which he found men who shared his own distaste for central practices of the Church.97 Solemn chapters of On the Vanity and Uncertainty of the Arts and Sciences denounced standard, central practices like the assignment of particular habits to each monastic order and the use of images. A nice parody of antiquarian research served to show that the devil had invented the former. At the same time, Agrippa urged readers to imitate the early Christians, who—in his philologically prescient view—had used the same sorts of magical practices as their pagan contemporaries:

The primitive church also used certain sacred incantations against illnesses and storms, and by praying these as we venerate a certain divine being, or in speaking, or bearing them in written form, attached or tied on, we often obtain a certain power from that divinity, which fills men with wonder. This category includes the sacred names, figures, characters and seals, which men of contemplation offered and consecrated with a pure mind to the veneration of God, to obtain their secret prayers. If someone pronounces these in later times with the same purity of mind with which they were originally established, he will bring about miracles in the same way, to the extent that he follows the method and rule established by the one who first instituted them. For those who do not know this waste their effort and labor in vain. In this way we sometimes do marvelous things not only with barbarous words, but also with Hebrew, Egyptian, Greek, Latin and nouns from other languages dedicated to God and his essence or power or operation.98

In Agrippa’s skillful hands, forms of magic that had long been rejected in theory and sneaked into practice underwent a strange form of baptism.

Like Trithemius, Agrippa instructed his readers to approach the culminating enterprise of contact with the angels only after taking the most exquisite precautions. They must school themselves to will only the good and never to take the divine names in vain: “You who wish to operate with this discipline, first of all pray to God the one father piously that you be one worthy of His clemency; be cleanly inside and out …. Further, wash regularly and on the allotted days, in accordance with the mysteries of numbers; put on clean clothing and abstain from all uncleanliness, pollution and lust.” Trithemius addressed what he saw as a readership of priests and urged them to feats of asceticism. Agrippa, by contrast, made clear that he expected only virtuous conduct, not absolute chastity: “Have no congress with a polluted or menstruating woman, or with one who suffers from a flux,” he warned, following Leviticus 19–22.99 In passages like these, Agrippa gave the strong impression that he hoped to see a magical priesthood of believers and practitioners come into being.100

Agrippa hinted strongly, at the very end of On Occult Philosophy, that the careful reader should not read the book for its surface meaning only. Revising his work, he drew on a popular and influential treatise on alchemy attributed to Geber for the language in which he couched his retrospective instructions for readers: “We have taught this art in such a way that it cannot elude men of prudence and intelligence, but it will not give wicked and incredulous men access to these secrets, but will leave them stupefied and dazed in the shadow of their own ignorance and despair. You, then, sons of learning and wisdom, work your way through this book. Collect our scattered intentions, which we set out in various places. What we have hidden in one passage, we have made manifest in another, so that it may be made clear to you men of wisdom.”101 As the logoi spermatikoi scattered occult virtues through the physical world, leaving the magus the task of recognizing hidden powers and sympathies, so Agrippa scattered arguments and allusions throughout his book, which rather resembled the world in its fullness, complexity, and endless webs of connections. In some sense, as Charles Zika has ingeniously suggested, Agrippa patterned his book on his larger social environment.102 He described the cosmos, like the empire, as a mass of overlapping jurisdictions and powers connected to one another in complex ways, their boundaries labile and their positions sometimes uncertain. In this vast game of Snakes and Ladders, Agrippa’s own status, like that of his book and those of the authorities who might support or repress it, was necessarily uncertain and vulnerable. To that extent, it made sense to produce something like an open text—a book that one could interpret in a vast number of ways; and the very process of composition, which added strata to the book without eliminating older ones, reinforced the impression of complexity and occasional contradiction. The religious ambiguities of those who feared or refused to leave the old order, though they rejected some of its ways, fused here with the deliberate technical ambiguities of the magical tradition.

The Power of Craft and Engineering

Yet a number of passages hint that Agrippa came to see at least one Ariadne thread as vital to those who hoped to enter and leave the labyrinths of nature. He set particular store by craftsmen and engineers, men who obtained their powers not by reading the cosmos sympathetically or addressing higher powers in the right words but by forcing nature to obey their mathematical devices. These passages formed one—if not the only—central, uniformly positive thread in Agrippa’s great fabric. In them, Agrippa offered a radically different model of how to attain power over nature—one that came not from the vertically oriented world of magic, attuned to cosmic sympathies and correspondences, but from the horizontal world of the engineers focused on the application of calculable force to material objects.

Agrippa—as he himself acknowledged more than once—was nobody’s image of a model Renaissance philosopher. When he began to teach at Pavia in 1515, he apologized to his audience on a number of grounds. Though a “barbarous” German, he ventured to lecture in Italy. He did so, moreover, not as a lifelong devotee of scholarship and philosophy but as a former professional soldier. Agrippa revealed another side of his practical activities in On the Vanity and Uncertainty of the Arts and Sciences. Very few writers, he complained there, “have perfectly taught the manner to melt pure metals with the clear flames of the fire from stones dug out of mines, and when they are mixed together, to know how to divide them again.” He speculated that the arts of mining and metallurgy had received little attention because they were “handicrafts and servile occupations” and thus not highly esteemed by men of learning and high social status. And he explained that he himself had begun to compile a work on the subject some years before, when he “was in charge of some of the imperial majesty’s mines”—in charge, that is, of the mines that underpinned the power and authority of the Habsburgs and whose technology would be explicated in dazzling, minute detail by Georg Agricola in 1543.103 Agrippa, in other words, practiced as both a military and a mining engineer—and felt some irritation that these pursuits had not achieved the social and cultural recognition that he saw as their due.

Like the Italian engineers before him, Agrippa knew and liked craftsmen. His friends included a clockmaker and alchemist named Tyrius, whose drunkenness caused him concern—and whose chemical recipes he read with deep interest. The services that Agrippa offered princes who might employ him extended well beyond drawing up horoscopes. In 1526, for example, he was “not so much writing as showing by experience a work on using fire in battle, and I now have in my house models of buildings and war machines of my own invention, obtained at no little expense, and of a form that, so far as I know, our time has not seen before.” Two months later he claimed to have invented “a machine for projecting fiery globes, which has no rival for speed, ease or simplicity, and many other things like it.”104 Others recognized Agrippa’s expertise in these areas. The learned Theodore Count of Manderscheyt heard in 1520 that the city of Metz had “mills constructed by a mathematical device.” He had a third party ask if Agrippa knew a mathematician who could build them for the count as well.105 Another friend remarked that Agrippa had shown him a mirror that made it possible “to tell the dead part from the living one in a painting”—a description that stimulates but does not satisfy the imagination.106

Often Agrippa spoke the normal language of natural magic, emphasizing the “secret powers” on which the magus could draw: “They hold that natural magic is precisely the highest power of the natural sciences, which they therefore call the peak and culmination of natural philosophy. It is the operative segment of natural philosophy, which with the help of natural virtues, brings forth works, from their mutual and helpful interaction, which are beyond all wonder.” Natural magic, he explained, “brings into the open the hidden and latent powers of nature … not so much because of the art as of nature, which brings these operations about while magic serves her.”107 The voices of Pico and Ficino rang through passages like these, which portray the magus as an engaged reader of the book of nature, who by that process gained power over it.

But Agrippa also put together materials that remained apart in Ficino and Pico. Ficino described, in texts that Agrippa quoted, how men could be pulled away by supernatural inspiration from their normal occupations and turned into philosophers, poets, priests, and prophets.108 In the original manuscript of On Occult Philosophy Agrippa evoked the power of Saturn to call the mind from external things and make it ascend to the highest, gaining knowledge of the future and of secrets. Unlike Ficino, however, Agrippa wedded the idea of Saturnian inspiration to the belief that craft practice in its higher form could be a sublime, inspired pursuit: “They say,” he wrote, “that when the soul is impelled by the melancholic humor and nothing holds it back, it passes beyond the reins of the body and the chains of its members, and is moved totally into the realm of imagination. Then it suddenly becomes the residence of lesser daemons, and they often give it extraordinary instruction in the manual arts. So we will see some completely uncultured man suddenly become an outstanding painter or architect or the master of some other art.”109 Agrippa did not describe poets as the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. But even before he ever went to Italy, he singled out artists and engineers as the unacknowledged possessors of a particular form of powerful knowledge, one that provided not only insight into the world but mastery over it.

By the early 1530s, however, Agrippa had come to a far more radical view about the power of artificers. In two closely parallel passages, one in On the Vanity and Uncertainty of the Arts and Sciences and the other newly added to On Occult Philosophy, he described the powers of what he called both “architecture” and “mathematical magic” in the second. In the latter passage he took a largely optimistic tone:

The mathematical disciples are so necessary and so organically connected to magic that one who practices magic without them will go completely astray, and his work will be in vain …. But even without the aid of natural powers, works like natural ones can be produced from the mathematical disciplines alone, as Plato says: not things that take part in truth and divinity, but certain simulacra related to them, like bodies that walk and speak even though they lack any animal virtue, like the statues and automata of Daedalus among the ancients, which Aristotle mentions, the self-moving tripods of Vulcan and Daedalus, about which we read in Homer, which went into battle of their own will …. One also reads of the statues of Mercury that spoke and the dove of Archytas, made of wood, that flew …. To this category belong all the miracles of simulacra that are produced by geometry and optics …. That is how mirrors are made, concave or convex, which make images of things appear in the air at a great distance …. Hence the magus, who is a master of natural philosophy and mathematics, and knows the middle sciences that consist of both of these, arithmetic, music, geometry, optics, astronomy, and the sciences of weights, measures, proportions and joints, and knows the mechanical arts that derive from these, can also, not surprisingly, work many wonders, which may astonish even the most prudent of men.110

“All of these things,” Agrippa admitted, seemed repugnant to the natural order. Hence the ignorant ascribed them to the work of devils. In fact, however, these transformations in—or violations of—the natural order resulted from the application of natural and mathematical disciplines, and they had brought the human race enormous gains. Where earlier magi had written of bringing out nature’s occult powers and subtly combining and enhancing them, Agrippa evoked the possibility of building machines that rivaled natural organisms and using them to transform the natural world. In Agrippa, magic found a voice that spoke as aggressively as the voices of Manetti and Valla had when they praised the technologists of their day.

True, this newly powerful magic posed enormous risks. In On the Vanity and Uncertainty of the Arts and Sciences Agrippa acknowledged that those in the past who had pushed these pursuits the farthest “did so with the support of that strong and ancient serpent that promises knowledge, so that, like him, they might try, like apes, to emulate god and nature.” The magi, “those boldest of men,” had been inspired and aided by the devil to discover the secret power of mathematics—a view very similar to Nicholas of Cusa’s condemnation of natural magic, as it was to Melanchthon’s evaluation of the powers of Faust.111 Even as he celebrated the power of humanity to change the face of the world, moreover, Agrippa expressed regret that the urge to build “fascinates [a technical term for bewitching] the minds of men: to such an extent that almost no one can be found, who, if he can, does not desire to enlarge his houses with an addition, even though it is already well built. This insatiable demand and desire for building has made matters reach such a state, that there are no longer any limits.” He denounced ostentatious churches and pointed out that “fortified castles, war machines, guns, artillery, missile weapons, and other instruments for killing men, and the peoples they have conquered, bear witness to the destruction that this art sometimes causes humanity.”112 Even engineering, then, could have diabolical results. Still, Agrippa never suggested that the promise of power made by mathematical magic was false, even when he denounced its diabolic inspiration and rejected all other forms of magic as superstitious and useless.

From the start, much of what Agrippa said seemed convincing to his readers—especially those who came to his book, as many did, with interests and skills like his. Henrich Duden, for example, had a keen eye for a fine altarpiece and a handsome decorative scheme for his monastery’s library. He especially admired the organ maker Goswin Stappervenne, who not only built a large organ for his monastery’s church but also, at Duden’s suggestion, used the leftover lead and other materials to build a second, smaller one.113 Though Duden did not accept Agrippa’s view that men built the pillars of Hercules, or indeed that they existed, he noted that he had seen massive structures like the English stone circles Agrippa described—and that, like Agrippa, he had been told by the “common folk” that these were the work of demons.114 And when Agrippa noted that the loss of ancient arts and crafts contributed to the general failure to see how powerful human beings were, Duden registered his agreement by citing an example: “for example, the mosaic work on pavements and ancient walls.”115 Agrippa was not eccentric when he described the objects, old and new, that he most admired as wonders. In a world of splendid objects and their celebrated makers, of humanists and connoisseurs, it was easy to see art as a form of magic: a public show, like the rituals performed at Florence on St John’s Day, June 24.

Human effort, Agrippa held, could transform the face of the world itself:

Cliffs are cut through, valleys are filled in, mountains are leveled, rocks are tunneled through and promontories opened to the sea, the bowels of the earth are excavated, rivers are moved into new paths, seas are joined to seas, lakes are emptied, swamps are drained, the oceans have limits set, the depths of the ocean are explored, new islands are made and others are restored to the continents. All these things and still greater ones, though they conflict with nature itself, nonetheless have often been of the greatest value to the world.116

In this case, as in so many others, Agrippa did not coin his own metaphors when he set out to speak in the language of the new technology. Instead, he appropriated a prominent passage from one of the most forceful and famous spokesmen of the engineering tradition, Alberti, who, as we have seen, evoked the powers of architects to transform the world in the prologue to On the Art of Building:

By cutting through cliffs, by tunneling through mountains and filling in valleys, by restraining the waters of the sea and lakes, and by draining marshes, through the building of ships, by altering the course and dredging the mouths of rivers, and through the construction of harbors and bridges, the architect has not only met the temporary needs of man, but also opened up new gateways to all the provinces of the world.117

He went on to praise the ingenious war machines that architects had devised, which had been essential in every recorded siege. This passage attracted the attention of many readers. The Augsburg humanist Conrad Peutinger annotated the passage about sieges enthusiastically in his copy.118 In On Vanity Agrippa cited Alberti and Dürer as two of the basic modern authorities on architecture.119 Evidently, he found more than technical information in them: they expressed what he saw as fundamental truths about his calling. At the core of Agrippa’s most eloquent evocation of human power, he drew on Italian engineers as well as late antique magi and astrologers and their modern admirers. Like Roger Bacon, and perhaps even more consistently, he saw the techniques that had made such wonders possible as ancient: what assured him of their existence was a rich stew made up of medieval legends, the testimony of Alberti (whom he described as “trustworthy historians”) and his own antiquarian travels:

Traces of these ancient works, after all, survive, do they not, even to the present? Take for example the pillars of Hercules and Alexander, the Caspian gates made of bronze and bolted with iron beams so that they cannot be forced by any device or art. And there is the pyramid [obelisk] of Julius Caesar, erected next to the Vatican, and the mountains constructed in the middle of the ocean, and the fortresses, and masses of stones, such as those I saw in Britain, heaped up by some barely believable art.120

Like Alberti, Agrippa complained that ignorant people saw the Vatican obelisk (and the English stone circles) as the work of devils. In fact, they were making a categorical error since they did not grasp the power of “natural or mathematical disciplines.”121 The “mathematical arts” were a particular, powerful form of natural magic.

The Automaton

It was, however, a particular form of engineering that Agrippa emphasized most heavily. As proof that mathematical magic could work wonders of its own, he listed a number of devices. But he put special weight on automata and discussed a number of them, most being the “medieval robots” whose earlier incarnations E. R. Truitt has traced with great skill: the moving tripods built by Vulcan and Daedalus; the flying dove, made from wood by Archytas of Tarentum; the tripods that served food and drink to Apollonius of Tyana; the musical automata of Boethius mentioned by Cassiodorus; and the talking head described by William of Auvergne.122 Though Agrippa also mentioned the burning mirrors of Archimedes, automata played the key role in his story—as they would in future retellings of it, which added the artificial fly and eagle supposedly devised by Regiomontanus.123 Agrippa redefined the magus as a master mechanic and a creator of dazzling effects—a definition that would echo down the decades until the mid-seventeenth century.

Agrippa’s emphasis on automata was not accidental.124 Nothing in the Hermetic Corpus, as we have seen, bothered orthodox readers more than the description of the statues the Egyptians had directed daemons into in order to make their idols speak.125 Engineers like Fontana, who portrayed automata for pageants and weddings, had bravely offered to replicate the strange and frightening images of speaking devils with mechanical devices. Ficino seems to have taken a strong interest in these suggestions. In his Platonic Theology, he made clear that he saw an intrinsic connection between the moving statues of the Egyptians and the automata of the Greeks: “What is most astonishing,” he wrote, “is that the human arts devise on their own whatever nature devises, as if we were not the slaves of nature, but her rivals …. Archytas of Tarentum used mathematics to make a dove, balance it and inflate it so that it flew. The Egyptians, according to Hermes, made statues of the gods such that they spoke and walked …. In the end man imitates all the works of divine nature, and perfects, corrects and emends those of lower nature.”126 True, Ficino never explained how the work of the engineers could explain the achievements of the Egyptians. But his juxtaposition of them proved immensely suggestive.

A third of a century later, another Italian thinker, one who combined the practical and the philosophical, brought these threads together into a slightly different knot. The Venetian Franciscan Francesco Zorzi, a philosopher who mapped the magical cosmos at eloquent length in his De Harmonia Mundi, was also an expert architect who consulted on proportions, acoustics, and sightlines when the new church of S. Pietro della Vigna was built in 1554.127 In his treatise he offered a new context for moving statues and other manmade wonders: “Though God alone can make miracles,” he explained, “nonetheless, the human race, that work of the boldest nature, as Zoroaster puts it, and bold enough to do anything, has attempted many things in which man appeared as the emulator of God and nature, thanks especially to the help of that strong old serpent, who has always tried to exhibit himself as the ape of the Creator. Archytas of Tarentum supposedly made a wooden dove that flew through the air. Some boast that they have done the same in our day. The Egyptians, according to Mercury, crafted statues of the gods that could speak. Albert, nicknamed the Great, is also supposed to have done this, with his speaking head of bronze.”128 Zorzi explicated these classical and medieval tales of automata by invoking the philosophical claims that Roger Bacon had made for “Scientia experimentalis,” and applying them to natural magic. Bacon, he said, had used “pure and natural magic” to create thunder, clouds, and rain in the atmosphere and transmute certain substances.129 Zorzi, then, supplied Agrippa with what became, in Agrippa’s reworking, the canonical examples of mathematical magic. He also suggested—as Agrippa did in On the Vanity and Uncertainty of the Arts and Sciences—that this kind of magic, for all its technical purity, still somehow derived from diabolic suggestions or influence.

When it came to defining what exactly this form of magic represented, Zorzi showed hesitance, or perhaps caginess. He noted that some had actually “generated” simulacra of real creatures, while others had applied “active things to passive” and by doing so had brought things into full existence before their natural term. Feats like these, he argued, sounding very much like Pico or Ficino, had unjustly earned magic a bad reputation but really resulted from profound knowledge of nature’s secret powers: “Ordinary people thought that they were doing miracles, but they were really works of nature, changed only by being pushed forward in time. Those who used to do such works were called magi, that is, wise men, a Persian term: though many now use that term, wrongly, for necromancers. For they were wise men, and expert in hidden things. They included the men who saw the star at the birth of the Redeemer of the human race, which was beyond the normal order of nature, which they knew very well. From this they rightly predicted that one was born who would transcend the order and limits of nature.”130 At the same time, though, Zorzi noted that these phenomena might have an alternative explanation: “I have found those who boasted that they made bodies that could move and speak: yet they did not have the animal faculties and did not last long. They say that they observed the aspects and invoked the powers of the heavens to produce these. But perhaps something else serves as the cause.”131 Here Zorzi opened up the intellectual space that Agrippa would fill with his new concept of mathematical magic.

In the decades just before and after 1500, it was not only in the realms of natural philosophy and natural magic that automata were invested with special powers—powers that could somehow be seen as both mechanical and spiritual. When Thomas Cromwell dissolved the English monasteries, he and his allies seized on every piece of evidence they could to portray the monks as charlatans who had long exploited the simple piety of the English. One of the most prominent was the Rood of Boxley—a crucifix from Boxley Abbey, outside Maidstone in Kent—which featured a likeness of Jesus that moved its eyes, shed tears, and turned its head.132 When the crucifix was removed from its position on the wall, Geoffrey Chamber, the commissioner charged with dealing with Boxley, found “olde roton stykkes in the backe of the same, that dyd cause the eyes of the same to move and stere in the hede thereof lyke unto a lyvelye thing; and also the nether lippe in lyke wise to move as thoughe itt shulde speke.”133 John Hilsey, the bishop of Rochester, displayed the device and denounced it in a sermon held at Paul’s Cross in London on February 24, 1538. The news of its exposure circulated rapidly among Protestants of different stripes, who witnessed the downfall of Dagon with enthusiasm. But it is not certain what the monks of Boxley claimed or thought about the Rood. Did a few of them know and keep its secret? Did they expect their visitors to suspend disbelief while they marveled at the figure’s movements, while knowing that they were mechanical?134 The antiquarian William Lambarde, who examined Kent’s antiquities—and the abuses of the old church there—in granular detail, recorded a tradition that the Rood had been made by a clever English craftsman while he was in captivity in France, “so that now it needed not Prometheus fire, to make it a lively man, but onely the helpe of the covetous Priestes of Bell, or the ayde of some craftie College of Monkes, to deifie and make it passe for a very God.”135 What was miraculous about it was not its creation but its arrival at the Abbey, its refusal to leave Boxley (it proved impossible to move it once it had reached the abbey), and its ability to do miracles there.136

This interpretation receives support from the story of another crucifix whose figures moved: the Cross of Burgos. When the Bohemian nobleman, soldier, and diplomat Leo of Rožmitál arrived at Burgos on the way to Santiago da Compostela, he and his steward Gerard Tetzel were struck by a crucifix in the Augustinian convent outside the city. The figure of Jesus had elbows, knees, wrists, fingers, and other joints that could move, all of them covered by leather flaps.137 Its side contained a device—evidence of its theatrical origins—which emitted blood when the image’s side was pierced. Remains of animal blood show that the figure, which has been preserved, took part in performances of the Crucifixion.138 Rožmitál and Tetzel saw this as a product of human industry—that of Nicodemus, the Pharisee who helped Joseph of Arimathea embalm the body of Jesus, who prayed to God to allow him to make a crucifix. Yet Tetzel accorded the image almost supernatural properties: “It is made neither of wood nor stone, and the body is composed like that of a dead man. Its hair and nails grow, and when one touches its limbs they move. When one grasps its skin it feels like a man’s. It has a dreadful and solemn countenance.”139 The priests who tended the image seem to have regarded it with as much awe as their foreign visitors. Leo recorded that “they handled its limbs, one by one, with great reverence, singing, and making a clamor with all the bells.”140 On the day when the two travelers saw the crucifix, “two great miracles occurred”: a child was raised from the dead and a man and child were healed.141 A narrative of the image’s arrival at Burgos claimed that the famous Jewish convert Paul of Burgos, the convert from Judaism who served as the city’s archbishop from 1415 to 1435, had miraculously found it and brought it to its place. One of his sons, Alfonso of Cartagena, became so holy in later years “that the crucifix spoke to him and bowed to him.”142 Even more clearly than the pilgrims who came to Boxley in droves, citizens and visitors in Burgos were not fooled when they contemplated the Cross and admired its ability to move. They saw it as both a product of human craft and an object endowed with miraculous powers. In a classic article on the automata of the late Renaissance, Alexander Marr noted that “self-moving machines could be many things to many people: emblem of the technical superiority of the moderns over the ancients, dangerous magic, or harmless wonder depending on the sophistication of the viewer.”143 These earlier objects were not powered by clockwork or other forms of machinery, but they too could be many things to many people: anything from dangerous magic to holy craftsmanship. Their existence and the wonders they worked made room for much imaginative play with the powers of the crafts that brought them into being.

5.4 The Christ of Burgos. Photograph by Paul Meyvaert. Bildarchiv Monheim GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo.

Agrippa in Italy

What made Agrippa sensitive to the appeal of these texts and ideas—what made him take up and develop what he read in Alberti and Zorzi and reframe it as a powerful defense of magic—was partly his need to defend himself against censorship that was becoming harsher as he fought to have his book published. To some extent, the concept of “mathematical magic” represented a clever and effective piece of evasive action.144 But Agrippa’s own experience also played a vital role in inflecting his ways of reading and writing. In 1511 or early 1512 he went to Italy, and he spent the period from spring to early fall 1512 in Pavia and Milan.145 Agrippa arrived in northern Italy, as we have seen, as a soldier and engineer in his own right. He already believed that the practical arts, at the highest level, revealed divine inspiration. And a central chapter of On Occult Philosophy shows that Agrippa found in the engineers he met in Italy something like the instantiation of his highest hopes. A number of Italian architects and engineers, inspired by Vitruvius, insisted on the perfection of the human body. From Alberti onward, they studied the proportions of individual bodies in the hopes of working out the ratios that would generate perfection. Taccola and others—most famously Leonardo—tried in various ways to show how the perfect human body would fit perfectly inside a perfect circle. They took the bodies they drew, in a literal sense, as the ideal models for architectural forms—the modules on which they based their sketches for columns, pilasters, and capitals. Agrippa read or saw some of the materials they produced, agreed with their viewpoint, and developed their argument in new ways. In On Occult Philosophy he argued, following Zorzi, that the human body is a microcosm of the universe: “God Himself instructed Noah to build the ark according to the measurements of the human body, since He built the entire machine of the universe in symmetry with the human body. Hence the former is called the macrocosm, and the latter the microcosm.”146

Following Zorzi again, Agrippa incorporated this favorable view of the beauty of the human body not only into his text but also into a set of diagrams that appeared in the second book.147 These suggested, as astrological diagrams had for centuries, that particular signs of the zodiac and planets controlled each body part and organ. Yet they also graphically represented a novel way in which to understand human proportions. Agrippa remarked that “if, leaving the heels unmoved, the feet are stretched out on both sides to right and left, and the hands are raised to the level of the crown of the head, then the longest digits on the hands and feet will produce an equal sided square, the center of which is above the navel on the waist of the figure.”148 This description, as Frank Zöllner has shown, matches the views of Leonardo da Vinci, as recorded in the Codex Huygens, a compilation based on Leonardo’s work and now preserved in the Pierpont Morgan Library.149 Other features of Agrippa’s images as well—like his use of the human body to form a pentagram and his treatment of the hands and feet in this woodcut—seem to come from Leonardo’s drawings: in the latter case, from the version preserved in the Accademica in Venice.150 What matters most, though, is the clear evidence that Agrippa saw and pondered drawings of human proportions from the work of artist-engineers. When Agrippa insisted on the harmony of the human body, in other words, he did more than quote Zorzi. He also expressed his own confidence in contemporary artist-engineers’ ability to analyze the human body.151

5.5 Taccola, Diagram of human proportions. De ingeneis, fol. 36 verso; Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 197, 2 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

5.6 Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian man. Wikimedia commons.

Zorzi’s work offers one hint that he himself was inspired by Leonardo: “Daedalus,” he noted, “supposedly flew with artificial wings. In our time, someone has done this for a modest distance.”152 Fifteenth-century engineers had dreamed about machines that could enable men to fly—or at least to fall slowly from a height. But Leonardo, as in so many other realms of engineering, connected and perfected what had previously been inchoate thoughts about flying.153 He examined the wings and flight paths of birds and bats with his customary minute care, pen in hand. Convinced that human ingenuity could emulate the “subtlety and power” of living organisms, he sketched breathtakingly ingenious designs for flying machines, and considered in detail the materials to be used, the techniques for preparing them, and even the best ways to test their lifting power on the ground.154 Zorzi very likely had Leonardo—and the stories that circulated about him—in mind when he noted that an anonymous contemporary had flown.

Leonardo’s inspiration may have touched Agrippa as well. The artist spent much time in Milan from 1506 until September 1512, and it is entirely possible that he and Agrippa met there.155 Leonardo, moreover, actually made automata—automata that challenged comparison with the ancient ones invoked by Zorzi and Agrippa. The Milanese artist Gian Paolo Lomazzo recalled, in his Treatise on the Art of Painting, that Leonardo “used to make, from a certain material, birds that flew in the air. And once, in the presence of Francis I of France, he made a lion, constructed with miraculous skill, walk from its place in a room, and then stop, opening its chest, which was full of lilies and other flowers. This seemed such a wonder to the king and all those who were present, that they could easily have imagined that the wooden dove of Archytas of Tarentum was flying before them.”156 “It is only after experiencing an actual automaton in action,” Marr argues, “that the wondrous feats related in literature are believed to be possible rather than fictional.”157 In ateliers like Leonardo’s—and possibly in Leonardo’s own saturnine, inspiring presence—Agrippa became a true believer in a new, “mathematical” form of power over nature—and turned himself into the new prophet of statues that moved without undergoing occult influences from the skies, embodying what looked like miraculous powers.

5.7 Agrippa, version of Vitruvian man. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres (Cologne, 1533), 163. Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, E. F. Smith Collection Folio 540.1 Ag84.2 1533.

It is even possible that Agrippa had Leonardo himself in mind as his model of a Saturnian engineer. Sixty years after Agrippa wrote, when Lomazzo copied out long passages from On Occult Philosophy in his treatises on painting, he analyzed painting itself as a magical art. If a painter used astrologically chosen pigments and expressed the different planetary temperaments, his work could genuinely “fascinate” its viewers. Lomazzo also emphasized Leonardo’s feats as an engineer and their classical precedents, as if he believed that they bore out Agrippa’s ideas about both sorts of magic: the natural and the mathematical. Lomazzo may well have guessed that Agrippa brought his sources together to yield a new vision of magic because he had seen with his own eyes a new world of technical wonders.

The fact that Agrippa came to the Kabbalah and other late discoveries from the world of natural magic and engineering explains much. First, it helps to account for the strongly practical emphasis of his use of the Kabbalah and other rich, complex traditions. Defending the Kabbalah to a friend, Agrippa described it as “a completely holy and divine art, and doubtless an effective one.”158 As an engineer, Agrippa looked for sources less of knowledge than of power. No wonder, then, that he pulled the Kabbalah even further out of its original context than Pico and Reuchlin had and felt even freer than they had to compare and combine it with other forms of Jewish tradition and with other arts and sciences. The structure of the universe as a whole, and the identity of the language that had brought it into being, mattered to him. But they mattered less than his dual goal: obtaining power over it and using prayer to ascend through it. And Jewish magic promised to make that possible. Kabbalah, in this context, offered a dream of power over nature, to be obtained by radically new means, that captivated even a practical builder of pumps and explosives.

As an engineer, moreover, Agrippa could appreciate the hidden wounds of status that magicians often suffered in his own day. In the ancient world, at least as he encountered it in texts, both magi and engineers had both enjoyed high prestige—far more than in the bookish world of early modern universities or the lineage-obsessed society of early modern Germany. By taking the Cabalists as ancestors and authorities, Agrippa could place himself—both as magician and as engineer—within a tradition as ancient and noble as any other, one that led back, through Ezra, to Moses himself on Mount Sinai. As an engineer, moreover, Agrippa was especially well prepared to believe that natural magic and Cabalistic magic—engineering and conjuring—could solve the same sorts of problems, carry out the same sorts of tasks, and provide the same sorts of power. For engineering, as Agrippa knew it and saw it practiced in northern Italy, sought to inspire astonishment, awe, and bafflement—just as magic did.

That loose sense of a connection between engineering and other ways of obtaining power may explain why Agrippa placed his discussion of “mathematical magic” where he did. At the end of the chapter, he compared those who blindly described “some marvelous spectacle” as miraculous or demonic to those who did not understand the power of magnets. Those who understood the occult virtue of magnets, by contrast, did not marvel at all, even when they saw an iron idol of Mercury suspended in midair in the center of his temple at Trier.159 And just as natural magic operated with the occult powers of things, he explained, “so we can use abstract things, mathematical and heavenly ones, to take in celestial powers, such as motion, life, sense, speech, prophecy and divination, and even when the material in question is not well disposed to do so, since it has been fabricated by art, not nature. And it is said that images that speak and predict the future can be made in this way.” William of Auvergne, for example, described “a brazen head, molded at the rising of Saturn, that could speak with a human voice.”160 The magus, moreover, could achieve even more powerful effects by using materials disposed to receive the higher powers.161 When Agrippa evoked a mathematical magic that relied only on the human intellect, in other words, he did so to give substance and plausibility to the still higher forms of mathematical magic to which he turned next.162

Not everyone who read On Occult Philosophy took away exactly the lessons that Agrippa most wanted to convey. Duden, as we have seen, read Agrippa’s chapters on mathematical magic and human proportions with pen in hand, just as he worked through the rest of the book. But when he came to Agrippa’s diagrams of human bodies, although he saw that they were meant to say something about the perfection of the body’s form, Duden was chiefly inspired by them to think about the wheels on which convicts were broken—and the way in which doing so ruined the harmonious forms of their limbs. Duden also pointed out that poets no longer wrote, like prophets, by direct inspiration.163 But he came back to the book long after he first bought it to record his agreement with Agrippa on one central, novel point. Saturnian melancholy could transform an ordinary craftsman’s faculty of imagination into “the domicile of the lower daemons, from whom it often receives marvelous methods in the manual arts.” In 1567 Duden wrote that “in my time, exactly this happened to a certain monk.”164

Others read Agrippa’s chapter even more thoroughly and more sympathetically. In 1546, John Dee staged the Pax of Aristophanes at Trinity College Cambridge. He presented the play, as he later wrote, “with the performance of the Scarabaeus his flying up to Jupiter’s palace, with a man and his basket of victuals on her back.” Making a bird (or, in this case, an insect) fly was one of the central wonders of mathematical magic as Agrippa described it. When Dee remarked that his device provoked “great wondring, and many vain reports spread abroad of the means how that was effected,” he made clear that he had used strictly natural—that is, mathematical—means of the sort Agrippa had also praised. He also revealed that not only ordinary folk but the university itself found it almost impossible to believe what mathematics could do.165 Twenty-five years later, in his Mathematical Preface to Euclid, Dee still celebrated the possibilities of what he called “Thaumaturgike,” and defined as “that Art Mathematicall, which giveth certaine order to make straunge workes, of the sense to be perceived, and of men greatly to be wondred at.” Whether the machines in question worked by pneumatics, weights, or strings, they all inspired wonder, and rightly so. Dee himself remarked of one automaton that he had seen with his friend Oronce Fine at Saint Denis in 1551: “Of the straunge Self movyng … it were to straunge to tell.” Borrowing liberally from Agrippa, he celebrated the wooden dove of Archytas, the artificial eagle and fly of Regiomontanus, and other works of “Skill, will, Industry, and Hability.”166 As Frances Yates has explained, though Dee could explain how such machines operated, they still “filled him with a kind of awe” and made natural parallels, in his eyes, to the forms of knowledge and power he attained from his study of the “Cabala of nature” and his conversations with the angels who appeared to his scryers.167

Dee, moreover, was far from the only one to take Agrippa’s point. Across Europe in Naples, decades later, Tommaso Campanella reviewed the varieties of magic in book 14 of his Theology. Artificial magic, he explained, “either uses things made by art or uses things made by nature in an artful way in order to produce unusual effects, whose causes are unknown.”168 Any device that inspired wonder and whose audience did not know how it worked counted as an “artificial miracle.” “A clock that indicates the hours is a miracle, at this time, to the Chinese, for both reasons, but not to the Italians, who are used to them and understand their mechanism. Custom has made them less miraculous even for our peasants, who do not understand how they work.”169 The first cannon in Italy, Campanella argued, possessed magical effects, though these traits had been lost over time; so had the first guns used by the Spanish in the Americas, whose inhabitants took them for gods.170 He explained that magic of this sort could take one of two forms: “deceptive” and “real.” And “real artificial magic,” in Campanella’s terms, began exactly where Agrippa and Dee said it did—in the world of automata and burning mirrors: “Real artificial magic produces real effects, as when Archytas made a wooden dove that flew, and recently at Nuremberg, if we may credit Botero, they made an eagle and a fly of this kind. Archimedes used mirrors in combination to burn a fleet that was far away. Daedalus made statues move with weights or quicksilver.”171 Only after Campanella had described this sort of magic did he move on to those that transformed elements or organisms, or those that used talismans and characters to produce their effects. Mathematical magic was a solid foundation on which much of the edifice of learned magic now rested. In this respect as in others, Campanella and Dee were true, if partial, heirs of Agrippa—and through Agrippa, of Alberti and Fontana, Trithemius and Agrippa. From a discipline that challenged the magi and their art, it had become a central part of magic, and it would continue to have that status even as machines became the principal sources of wonder for erudite natural philosophers.172

Notes

Introduction

1. Gadi Algazi, “Scholars in Households: Refiguring the Learned Habitus,” Science in Context 16, no. 1–2 (2003): 9–42.

2. Gabriele Jancke, Gastfreundschaft in der frühmodernen Gesellschaft: Praktiken, Normen und Perspektiven von Gelehrten (Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2013); Richard Calis, “Reconstructing the Ottoman Greek World: Early Modern Ethnography in the Household of Martin Crusius,” Renaissance Quarterly 72, no. 1 (2019): 148–193.

3. Augustin Lercheimer, Christlich bedencken und erinnerung von Zauberey, 3rd ed. (Heidelberg, 1585; Speyer, 1597), in Philip Palmer and Robert More, The Sources of the Faust Tradition: from Simon Magus to Lessing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), 122. Here and elsewhere minor changes have been made in the translations provided by Palmer and More.

4. Frank Baron, Faustus: Geschichte, Sage, Dichtung (Munich: Winkler, 1982), esp. 84, 86–87.

5. It is entirely possible that Melanchthon never met the historical Faust: see ibid.

6. Gustav Milchsack, Gesammelte Aufsätze (Wolfenbüttel: Zwissler, 1922); Baron, Faustus.

7. For a parallel see Karl Hartfelder, Melanchthoniana paedagogica. Eine Ergänzung zu den Werken Melanchthons im Corpus reformatorum (Leipzig: Teubner, 1892), 182.

8. On the distribution of popular pamphlets and broadsides of this kind in the German world see Robert Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981; repr. with new introduction 1994); David Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Franz Mauelshagen, Wunderkammer auf Papier: die “Wickiana” zwischen Reformation und Volksglaube (Epfendorf: Bibliotheca Academica, 2011).

9. This story is told in the Explicationes Melanchthonianae, a record of Melancthon’s lectures on the Scriptures, delivered between 1549 and 1560. Palmer and More, Sources, 99–100. This too is a late testimony.

10. See the classic study of Aby Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Imagery in the Age of Luther (1920),” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt, intro. Kurt Forster (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 597–698, 760–774; as well as Claudia Brosseder, Im Bann der Sterne: Caspar Peucer, Philipp Melanchthon und andere Wittenberger Astrologen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004); and Robin Bruce Barnes, Astrology and Reformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

11. Caspar Waser to Jacob Zwinger, Rome, March 25, 1593; Basel, Öffentliche Bibliothek, MS Fr Gr I 11, fol. 15 recto-verso.

12. Ibid., fol. 15 recto: “quam vere illud Imperatore dignum Imperati Musaeum, quod cum stupore intuitus sum. Vir optimus et humanissimus ille, et revera φɩλοξενότατος.” On Imperato’s museum and its effect on visitors, see Paula Findlen, “Why Put a Museum in a Book? Ferrante Imperato and the Image of Natural History in Sixteenth-Century Naples,” Journal of the History of Collections 33, no. 3 (2021): 419–433.

13. Basel, Öffentliche Bibliothek, MS Fr Gr I 11, fol. 15 recto: “Portam et Imperatum ex vobis salutavi: quos iterum atque iterum conveni. De steganografia Trithemii ille mecum collocutus erat, ex qua ille suam Ziferorum inventionem sine dubio: Nam quae litteris Alphabeti Trithemius; ille notis Arithmeticis designavit. Meteororum non multam mentionem fecerat; quorum quaedam duntaxat; non omnia se demonstrare posse dixit. At, ut mihi demonstraret, obtinere non potui propter ejus quendam processum judiciarium, quo singulis dieb. nunc occupatur horis pomeridianis. Matutinis horis missam adit, conciones audit; ut nec eo tempore potuerim [sign of sun].” On della Porta see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. Giambattista della Porta, by Sergius Kodera (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/della-porta/).

14. Giambattista della Porta, Natural Magick (London: Young & Speed, 1658; repr. New York: Basic, 1957), 2.

15. Craig Martin, Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 92–98.

16. Giambattista della Porta, De aeris transmutationibus libri IIII (Rome: Mascardi, 1614), 114–115.

17. Gimabattista della Porta, Magiae naturalis sive de miraculis rerum naturalium libri IIII (Lyon: Rouillé, 1561), fols. 8 verso–9 recto.

18. Ibid., fols. 280 verso–283 verso.

19. Paola Zambelli, White Magic, Black Magic in the European Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2007); see Kodera in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. della Porta.

20. For an excellent survey of the history of alchemy, see Lawrence Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Some of the most important recent studies of alchemy and related fields in the Renaissance include William Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Tara Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Meredith Kay, Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Jennifer Rampling, The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020); and Alisha Rankin, The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2021). See also Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton and William Newman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

21. For a brief introduction to Faustus’s life and the earliest accounts see Ian Watt, Myths of Modern Individualism. Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3–26. The major primary sources—first assembled by Alexander Tille—are collected and translated in Palmer and More, Sources.

22. For the first scholarly effort to reconstruct Faustus’s career and set it in context, see Carl Christian Kirchner and Johann Georg Neumann, Vom Scharlatan Faust. Die erste akademische Schrift der Faust-Tradition (1683), trans. Nicola Kaminski, ed. Günther Mahal, Publikationen des Faust-Archivs, 3 (Maulbronn: Verlag Am Klostertor, 1996). In German universities, such theses were often written by, and almost always ascribed to, the professor who presided over the public oral defense rather than the student who actually defended them. In many cases, as in this one, precise authorship is impossible to establish. See Kirchner and Neumann, Vom Scharlatan Faust, 103–106.

23. Of early discussions, Robert Petsch, “Der historische Faust,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, neue Folge, 1 (1896–1897): 298–350, and Georg Witkowski, “Der historische Doctor Faust,” Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift 2 (1910): 99–115, remain important; for full discussions from different points of view see Hans Henning, “Faust als historische Gestalt,” Goethe 21 (1959): 107–139; Günther Mahal, Faust, der Mann aus Knittlingen, 1480/1980: Dokumente, Erläuterungen, Informationen (Pforzheim: Dettling, 1980) and Faust. Und Faust. Der Teufelsbündler in Knittligen und Maulbronn (Tübingen: Attempto, 1997); Leonard Forster, The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything, The 1980 Bithell Memorial Lecture (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London, 1981); and Frank Baron, Doctor Faustus from History to Legend (Munich: Fink, 1978) and Faustus. Willi Jasper, Faust und die Deutschen (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1998), offers a rich interpretative history of what Faust has meant to German writers, artists, and scholars.

24. See, for example, Baron, Doctor Faustus; Faustus; “Trithemius und Faustus: Begegnungen in Geschichte und Sage,” in War Dr. Faustus in Kreuznach? Realität und Fiktion im Faust-Bild des Abtes Johannes Trithemius, ed. Frank Baron and Richard Auernheimer (Alzey: Verlag der Rheinhessischen Druckwerkstätte Alzey, 2003), 39–60; “Der historische Faustus im Spiegel der Quellen des 16. Jahrhunderts. Von der Astrologie zum Teufelspakt,” ibid., 83–107; and Mahal, Faust. Und Faust, und Faust: Untersuchungen zu einem zeitlosen Thema (Neuried: Ars Una, 1998).

25. Earlier sources give his first name as Georg and place him in Helmstadt or Heidelberg; later ones refer to him as “Johannes” and trace his origin to Knittlingen.

26. Günther Mahal has ingeniously tried to show that Faustus was born on April 23, 1478, but his hypothesis depends on too many assumptions to be entirely convincing in the absence of further evidence: see his Faust: Untersuchungen.

27. Baron, Faustus, 18–21.

28. Joannes Trithemius to Joannes Virdung, August 20, 1507, in Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 175 recto = Johannes Trithemius, Epistolarum familiarium libri duo (Hanau: Brubach, 1536), fol. 312 verso. For an attack on the credibility of this report, see Mahal, Faust. Und Faust.

29. Stadtarchiv Bamberg, Hofkammerrechnungen des Kreisarchivs Bamberg, pro diversis (H 231, 1741), in Palmer and More, Sources, 89; Baron, Faustus, 34. For an ingenious effort to evaluate the value of the payment see Baron, Doctor Faustus.

30. Palmer and More, Sources, 90; Henning, “Faust,” 108; Baron, Faustus, 38.

31. Staatsarchiv, Nürnberger Ratsverlässe, 870, 12 recto, in Palmer and More, Sources, 90; Henning, “Faust,” 109–110; Baron, Faustus, 40: “Doctor Fausto dem groszen Sodomiten und Nigromantico zu furr [Baron reads furt] glait ablainen.” The meaning of “zu furr,” like the reading, is problematic, but the general sense of the passage seems clear.

32. On the sodomy charge see Robert Deam Tobin, “Faust’s Transgressions: Male-Male Desire in Early Modern Germany,” in Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800: Siting Same-Sex Desire in the Early Modern World, ed. Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 17–36.

33. Palmer and More, Sources, 90; Baron, Faustus, 38.

34. Trithemius to Johannes Virdung, 20 August 1507, BAV MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 174 recto; Trithemius, Epistolae, fol. 312 verso; Palmer and More, Sources, 83–84; Baron, Faustus, 127; Mahal, Faust: Untersuchungen, 14.

35. Palmer and More, Sources, 85. For the comment about Ezra see chapter 4 below.

36. Ibid., 83, 86.

37. Ibid., 84. In the passage quoted in n. 28, Trithemius says that Faustus called himself “the prince of necromancers.” War Dr. Faust in Kreuznach?, ed. Baron and Aurenherimer, offers a set of detailed studies of this text; see also chapter 5 below.

38. On Luther and the devil see esp. Heiko Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

39. Luther, Tischreden, in Palmer and More, Sources, 93.

40. Johannes Gast, Sermones convivales (1548), in Palmer and More, Sources, 96–98.

41. Gast, in Palmer and More, Sources, 98. Another report was similar: Joannes Manlius, Locorum communium collectanea (1563), 43, in Palmer and More, Sources, 102.

42. Johannes Wier, De praestigiis daemonum, in Palmer and More, Sources, 106.

43. Joachim Camerarius to Daniel Stibar, August 13, 1536, Libellus novus (Leipzig, Rambau, 1568), fol. X recto = Palmer and More, Sources, 92.

44. Wier, De praestigiis daemonum, in Palmer and More, Sources, 105.

45. Explicationes Melanchthonianae (1595), 442, in Palmer and More, Sources, 99.

46. Zacharias Hogel, Chronica von Thüringen und der Stadt Erffürth, in Palmer and More, Sources, 108–110.

47. Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Hill & Wang; London: Penguin, 2001).

48. Munich, Staatsbibliothek, MS icon. 242, fol. 70 recto; see Eugenio Battisti and Giuseppa Saccaro Battisti, Le macchine cifrate di Giovanni Fontana (Milan: Arcadia, 1984), 99–100. Fontana labeled the device “apparentia nocturna, ad terrorem videntium.” Battisti and Saccaro Battisti decipher his caption to the illustration: “Habes modum cum lanterna quam propriis oculis vidisti ex mea manu fabricatam et proprio ingenio.” For the similar device described in an anonymous treatise on perspective attributed by Parronchi to Paolo Toscanelli, see ibid., 100.

49. For introductions to this form of learning see L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); and Christopher Celenza, The Italian Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern Humanities: An Intellectual History, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

50. See esp. Baron, Faustus.

51. Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); Christopher Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

52. Trithemius to Virdung, BAV, MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 174 verso = Palmer and More, Sources, 85.

53. Baron, Faustus.

54. Desiderius Erasmus, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen, and H. W. Garrod, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906–1958), 2:323.

55. Poggio to Ermolao Barbaro, 1417 or 1418, in Silvia Rizzo, Il lessico filologico degli umanisti (Rome: Storia e letteratura, 1973), 173; cf. 290–291.

56. Hogel, Chronica, in Palmer and More, Sources, 110–111.

57. For a general treatment see Thomas Lahr, Was nach der Sintflut wirklich geschah: die Antiquitates des Annius von Viterbo und ihre Rezeption in Deutschland im 16. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang, 2012).

58. Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), chap. 3.

59. Francis Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). Guido Giglioni underlines the enduring value of her book in “Who Is Afraid of Frances Yates: Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) Fifty Years After,” Bruniana & Campanelliana 20, no. 2 (2014): 421–432. For a recent review of studies on Renaissance magic, emphasizing studies on Pico della Mirandola, see Flavia Buzzetta, Magia naturalis e scientia cabalae in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Florence: Olschki, 2019), 17–40.

60. See, for example, the three classic studies in Eugenio Garin, Interpretazioni del Rinascimento, II (Rome: Storia e letteratura, 2009), 3–44; Paolo Rossi, Francesco Bacone: dalla magia alla scienza (Bari: Laterza, 1957; Turin: Einaudi, 1974); Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovich (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1968; London: Routledge, 2009).

61. Yates’s theory about Hermeticism and science was only a small part of her larger argument: see Giglioni, “Who Is Afraid?”

62. See esp. chapters 2, 4, and 5 below for the work of Charles Burnett, Richard Kieckhefer, Frank Klassen, Philipp Nothaft, Sophie Page, David Pingree, Darrel Rutkin, E. R. Truitt, and other specialists on medieval magic and its afterlife.

63. See esp. Chapter 3 for the work of E. G. Ashworth, Eugenio Battisti, Giuseppe Saccaro Battisti, Pamela O. Long, Frank Prager, Giustina Scaglia, Hélène Vérin, and other historians of technology.

64. See esp. Chapters 4–6 for the work of Klaus Arnold, John Clark, Vittoria Perrone Compagni, Brian Copenhaver, Carol Kaske, Mary Quinlan-McGrath, Nicolaus Staubach, Paola Zambelli, and others on Renaissance magi and the sources on which they drew.

65. For a brilliant case study of what charlatanry meant in the realm of alchemy, see Tara Nummedal, Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

66. Klaus Arnold, “Additamenta Trithemiana. Nachträge zu Leben und Werk des Johannes Trithemius, insbesondere zur Schrift De demonibus,” Würzburger Diözesan-Geschichtsblätter: 37/38 (1975): 239–267 at 258–259.

67. For a full discussion of Maximilian’s patronage see Darin Hayton, Crown and Cosmos: Astrology and the Politics of Maximilian I (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015).

68. Hermann Wiesflecker, Kaiser Maximilian I. Das Reich, Oesterreich und Europa an der Wende zur Neuzeit, 5 vols. (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1971–1986), 1:161–162; 1:405, 528 n. 2; 4:431; 5:332–336.

69. Alwin Schultz, ed., Der Weisskunig, Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 6 (1888): 425: “Volens etiam percunctari secreta mundi didicit artem Nigromantiae, quam tamen nunquam voluit persequi, eo quod ab ecclesia prohibita est et homini multum periculosa in corpore et anima. Et ex patris thesauris habuit libros in orbe non similes.” The version of the story in the Weisskunig—designed, as Müller has shown, to make clear that Maximilian had all the qualities of an ideal prince, as portrayed in a Speculum principis—more emphatically states that Frederick III warned Maximilian not to study magic and that the young prince, who only did so in order to expose the art as evil, strongly agreed despite the efforts of a learned magician, whom he had engaged as his tutor, to convince him to the contrary.

70. See Kaiser Maximilians I. Weisskunig, ed. H. Th. Musper with Rudolf Buchner, Heinz Otto Burger, and Erwin Petermann, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1956), 1:224–225; 2:25; Müller, Gedechtnus, 144–146, and Neues vom Weisskunig: Geschichte und Selbstdarstellung Kaiser Maximilians I. in Holzschnitten, ed. Hans-Martin Kaulbach (Stuttgart: Graphische Sammlung Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1994).

71. See Nummedal, Anna Zieglerin.

72. See esp. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil (London: Routledge, 1994); Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); and Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

73. Deborah Harkness, “Managing an Experimental Household: The Dees of Mortlake and the Practice of Natural Philosophy,” Isis 88, no. 2 (1997): 247–262.

74. Erwin Panofsky, “Artist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on the Renaissance-Dämmerung,” in The Renaissance: Six Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 121–182.

Chapter 1

1. Nicholas of Cusa, Sermo II (Ibant magi), January 6, 1431; Nicolaus of Cusa, Sermones I (1430–1441), ed. Rudolf Haubst, Martin Bodewig, Werner Krämer, and Heinrich Pauli, Nicolai de Cusa Opera omnia 16 (Hamburg: Meiners, 1991). The sermon was preached in the diocese of Trier, in southwestern Germany. The translation is from Hymns Ancient and Modern, ed. Louis Courtier Biggs (Melbourne, Robertson, 1867), 74; slightly altered.

2. Rab Hatfield, “The Compagnia de’ Magi,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970), 107–161; Hatfield, Botticelli’s Uffizi “Adoration”: A Study in Pictorial Content (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976); Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 240–263; Richard Trexler, The Journey of the Magi: Meanings in History of a Christian Story (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

3. Nicholas of Cusa, Sermo II, 20.

4. See Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. Cusanus, Nicolaus (Nicholas of Cusa), by Clyde Lee Miller, https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=cusanus.

5. Nicholas of Cusa, Sermo II, 21.

6. Ibid., 26.

7. Pseudo-Chrysostom, Opus imperfectum in Mattheum, Patrologia Graeca 56, col. 638: “Apparuit stella eis descendens super montem illum victorialem habens in se formam quasi pueri parvuli et super se similitudinem crucis.” This text is a fifth-century commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, much esteemed in the Middle Ages. Erasmus was the first to point out that Chrysostom did not compose it.

8. Nicholas of Cusa, Sermo II, 33. On possession in this period see Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

9. On William’s views see Stephen Marrone, “Magic and the Physical World in Thirteenth-Century Scholasticism,” Early Science and Medicine 14, no. 1–3 (2009): 158–185.

10. Nicholas of Cusa, Sermo 2:37.

11. Charles Burnett, “Talismans: Magic as Science? Necromancy among the Seven Liberal Arts,” in Burnett, Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages: Texts and Techniques in the Islamic and Christian Worlds (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Variorum, 2010), article I.

12. Darrel Rutkin, Sapientia astrologica: Asttrology, Magic, and Natural Knowledge, ca. 1250–1800, volume 1 (Cham: Springer, 2019): 304–312; Neil Tarrant, Defining Nature’s Limits: The Roman Inquisition and the Boundaries of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 60, 67. See also Nicolas Weill-Parot, Les ‘images astrologiques’ au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance: Spéculations intellectuelles et pratiques magiques (XIIe-XVe siècle) (Paris: Champion, 2002) and Mary Quinlan-McGrath, Influences: Art, Optics and Astrology in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

13. Nicholas of Cusa, Sermo 2.

14. Nicole Oresme, De causis mirabilium, prologue, in Nicole Oresme and The Marvels of Nature: A Study of His De causis mirabilium with Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary, ed. Bert Hansen (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1985), 137; original on 136.

15. Nicholas of Cusa, Sermo 2:33.

16. Klaus Schreiner, “Laienfrömmigkeit—Frömmigkeit der Eliten oder Frömmigkeit des Volkes? Zur sozialen Verfasstheit laikaler Frömmigkeitspraxis im späten Mittelalter,” in Laienfrömmigkeit im späten Mittelalter, ed. Klaus Schreiner and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992), 1–78 at 36–40; Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

17. Fritz Graf, Magic in the Ancient World, tr. Franklin Philip (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1–19; Matthew Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).

18. Stanley Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 19; Brian Copenhaver, Magic in Western Culture from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). For a brief but wide-ranging survey of the development of scholarship on magic see Owen Davies, Magic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 32–48.

19. See, for example, John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), and Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

20. Gabriele Zarri, Le sante vive: Profezie di corte e devozione femminile tra ‘400 e ‘500 (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990); the core of Zarri’s book is translated with other important articles in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, trans. Marjorie Schneider (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Jenni Kuuliala, “The Saint as Medicator: Medicine and the Miraculous in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Social History of Medicine 34, no. 3 (2021): 703–722.

21. Robert Bartlett, Why Can Saints Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Cynthia Hahn, The Reliquary Effect: Enshrining the Sacred Object (London: Reaktion, 2017).

22. Livia Cárdenas, Friedrich der Weise und das Wittenberger Heiltumsbuch: mediale Repräsentation zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit (Berlin: Lukas, 2002), 20–24.

23. Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe, ed. Martina Bagnoli, Holger Klein, C. Griffith Mann, and James Robinson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

24. Cárdenas, Friedrich der Weise; Cárdenas, Die Textur des Bildes: das Heiltumsbuch im Kontext religiöser Mentalität des Spätmittelalters (Berlin: Lukas, 2013). The Bamberg Book of Relics, British Library Add MS 15689, has been digitized (https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_15689); see Clarck Drieshen, “The Bamberg Book of Relics,” Medieval Manuscripts Blog, October 3, 2020, https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2020/10/the-bamberg-book-of-relics.html.

25. Dye zaigung des hochlobwirdigen hailigthumbs der Stifftkirchen aller hailigen zu wittenburg (Wittenberg: Symphorian Reinhart, 1509); Livia Cárdenas, Friedrich der Weise.

26. For a case in point, the translation and reception of the head of Saint Andrew, given to the Roman Church by Thomas Palaeologus, despot of the Morea, see Maya Maskarinec, “Mobilizing Sanctity: Pius II and the Head of Andrew in Rome,” in Authority and Spectacle in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Teofilo F. Ruiz, ed. Yuen-Gen Liand and Jarbel Rodriguez (London: Routledge, 2017), 186–202.

27. On Vegio and the cult of Monica see Ian Holgate, “The Cult of Saint Monica in Quattrocento Italy: Her Place in Augustinian Iconography,” Papers of the British School at Rome 71 (2003): 181–206. Vegio’s account of the translation is in Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Urb. Lat. 59, fol. 314 recto-verso: “Quum venissent fratres magna cum celebritate magnoque et solempni cum apparatu et honore deducturi in urbem sanctum corpus mirum quanta ibi confluxerit omnis sexus omnisque etatis hominum multitudo. Tantus erat affectus: tantum studium: tam incensa omnibus videndi contingendique vel digito sacrum sarcophagum. Vnde et quosdam a demonis liberatos: nonnullos a lepra mundatos: alios varijs a langoribus sanatos fuisse omnibus manifestissime constitit. Quo magis etiam auctus est cunctorum amor et devotio factusque maior est undique concursus et exultantium clamor.”

28. É. Bougaud, Histoire de Sainte Monique (Paris, 1873), 594: “Quid dicam sterilem illam uxorem fabri, qui Sepulcri ejus ferramenta confecerat, expresso ad Sepulcrum voto, paullo post concepisse? Quid eumdem fabrum pene caecum, consimili voto splendidum lumen accepisse?”

29. Nicholas of Cusa, Sermo 2:32.

30. Ibid., 23. On the pseudo-Ovidian De vetula (On the Hag) and astrology see, for example, Cecilia Panti, “An Astrological Path to Wisdom. Richard de Fournival, Roger Bacon and the Attribution of the Pseudo-Ovidian De vetula,” in Richard de Fournival et les sciences au XIIIe siècle, ed. Joëlle Ducos and Christopher Lucken (Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2018), 363–400.

31. Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).

32. On this story see Charles Burnett, The Introduction of Arabic Learning into England (London: British Library, 1997) and his “The Translating Activity in Medieval Spain,” in Magic and Divination, article IV; Sophie Page, Astrology in Medieval Manuscripts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); and Rutkin, Sapientia astrologica, volume 1.

33. Burnett, “Talismans,” 15.

34. On the question of this work’s authorship and for its text see Paola Zambelli, The Speculum astronomiae and Its Enigma: Astrology, Theology, and Science in Albertus Magnus and His Contemporaries (Berlin: Springer, 2013).

35. Albertus Magnus, Speculum astronomiae xi, in Zambelli, The Speculum astronomiae. Cf. Burnett, “Talismans,” 3–4.

36. Steven Williams, “The Scholarly Career of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Century,” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1991.

37. Roger Bacon, “Epistola de secretis operibus artis et naturae, et de nullitate magiae,” in Opera quaedam hactenus inedita, ed. J. S. Brewer (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1859), 526.

38. Scott Hendrix, “Albertus Magnus and Rational Astrology,” Religions 11, no. 10 (2020): 481.

39. Nicholas of Cusa, Sermo II, 31. For the origins, meanings, and uses of the phrase quoted by Nicholas see Justin Niermeier-Dohoney, “Sapiens dominabitur astris: A Diachronic Survey of a Ubiquitous Astrological Phrase,” Humanities 10, no. 4 (2021): 117–141.

40. On Bacon and astrology see C. Philipp E. Nothaft, Dating the Passion: The Life of Jesus and the Birth of Scientific Chronology (200–1600) (Leiden: Brill, 2012), which he has revised and amplified in the articles cited below.

41. Roger Bacon, Opus maius, ed. John Bridges, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), 1:242.

42. Ibid.

43. Stephen Gersh, “Nicholas of Cusa,” in Interpreting Proclus from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 318–350; Thomas Burman, Reading the Qu’ran in Latin Christendom, 1140–1560 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 179–180.

44. See Stephan Heilen, “Ancient Scholars on the Horoscope of Rome,” Culture and Cosmos 11, nos. 1–2 (2007): 43–68.

45. Jean-Patrice Boudet, “From Baghdad to ‘Civitas Solis’: Horoscopes of Foundation of Cities,” in From Masha’allah to Kepler: Theory and Practice in Medieval and Renaissance Astrology, ed. Charles Burnett and Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum (Lampeter: Sophia Centre Press, 2015), 49–76.

46. Laura Smoller, “Teste Albumasare cum Sibylla: Astrology and the Sibyls in Medieval Europe,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (2010): 76–89.

47. Friedrich von Bezold, “Astrologische Geschichtskonstruktion im Mittelalter,” in Aus Mittelalter und Renaissance: Kulturgeschichtliche Studien (Munich and Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1918), 165–195; Margaret Aston, “The Fiery Trigon Conjunction: An Elizabethan Astrological Prediction,” Isis 61, no. 2 (1970): 159–187; Laura Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d’Ailly, 1350–1420 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

48. Bacon, Opus maius, 1: 256–257.

49. C. Philipp E. Nothaft has identified Bacon’s source in a series of highly important articles: see “Climate, Astrology and the Age of the World in Thirteenth-Century Thought: Giles de Lessines and Roger Bacon on the Precession of the Solar Apogee,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 77 (2014): 35–60, and “’With Utmost Certainty’: Two Thirteenth-Century Pioneers of Technical Chronology,” Journal of Medieval History 46, no. 3 (2020): 335–349.

50. Bacon, Opus maius, 1:389.

51. Nothaft, Dating the Passion, chap. 6.

52. Bacon, Opus tertium, xi:, Bacon, Opera quaedam, 36.

53. Ibid.

54. Jeremiah Hackett, “Roger Bacon on Astronomy and Astrology: The Sources of the Scientia experimentalis,” in Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed. Jeremiah Hackett (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 175–198.

55. See Smoller, History, Prophecy and the Stars.

56. Pierre d’Ailly, Concordantia astronomie cum theologia. Concordantia astronomie cum hystorica narratione. Et elucidarium duorum praecedentium (Augsburg: Ratdolt, 1490), sig. b verso.

57. Frank Fürbeth, Johannes Hartlieb: Untersuchungen zu Leben und Werk (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992).

58. Bacon, Opus maius, 1:395.

59. Maslamah ibn Aḥmad Majrīṭī, Picatrix: The Latin Version of the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, ed. David Pingree (London: Warburg Institute, 1986), 106.

60. Ibid.

61. Bacon, Opus maius, 1:240.

62. Ibid., 1:241–242.

63. Ibid., 1:240.

64. Williams, “The Scholarly Career”; “Roger Bacon and his Edition of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum,” Speculum 69 (1994): 57–73; “Roger Bacon and the Secret of Secrets,” in Roger Bacon and the Sciences, ed. Hackett, 365–393; William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 46–53. This work, which purported to be a letter from Aristotle to his former pupil Alexander the Great, was an Arabic text written before the later tenth century and translated into Latin in two different versions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

65. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 2872, digitized on Gallica, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b60002894.

66. Bacon, Commentary on the Secretum secretorum, in Bacon, Opera hactenus inedita, fasc. v: Secretum secretorum cum glossis et notulis. Tractatus brevis et utilis ad declarandum quedam obscure dicta fratris Rogeri, ed. Robert Steele (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), 38–39 n. 4, quoted by Williams, “The Scholarly Career,” 216–217 n.77.

67. Bacon, Commentary on the Secretum secretorum, in Opera hactenus inedita, v, 39 n 4.

68. Amanda Power, Roger Bacon and the Defence of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

69. Bacon, Opus maius, 1:401. Cf. Williams, “The Scholarly Career,” 87.

70. See Malcolm Barber, “The Crusades of the Shepherds in 1251,” in Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 1982 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1982).

71. Matthew Paris, quoted by Bridges in Bacon, Opus maius, 1:401n1.

72. Ibid., 1:401.

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid.

75. Michael Ryan, A Kingdom of Stargazers: Astrology and Authority in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Monica Azzolini, The Duke and the Stars: Astrology and Politics in Renaissance Milan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist and Physician (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), and the extraordinary Casebooks Project that Kassell founded and directed (https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/).

76. Nicholas of Cusa, Sermo 2:32.

77. Johannes Hartlieb, Das Buch der verbotenen Künste: Aberglaube und Zauberei des Mittelalters, ed. Falk Eisermann and Eckhard Graf with Christian Rätsch (Ahlerstedt: Param Verlag, Günter Koch, 1989), on which see the full and judicious study by Fürbeth, Johannes Hartlieb. In Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), Richard Kieckhefer sheds much light on the wider context. He has also provided a translation of Hartlieb’s book on the forbidden arts in Hazards of the Dark Arts: Advice for Medieval Princes on Witchcraft and Magic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017).

78. Hartlieb, Buch, 170–173; Kieckhefer, Hazards, 78.

79. Fürbeth, Johannes Hartlieb.

80. Hartlieb, Buch, 78–80; Kieckhefer, Hazards, 38.

81. Hartlieb, Buch, 68–78.

82. Kieckhefer, Hazards, 42. The magi, like the devil, could also quote Scripture. See Hartlieb, Buch, 114–116.

83. Hartlieb, Buch, 162.

84. Ibid., 192; Kieckhefer, Hazards, 87.

85. Ibid., 91–92, 202–204.

86. Ibid., 43–44, 92.

87. Hartlieb, Hazards, 36.

88. Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic, ed. Clare Fanger (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).

89. Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites.

90. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 849, fols. 25 verso–27 verso = Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 221–224.

91. Kieckhefer, Magic.

92. Sophie Page, Magic in the Cloister: Pious Motives, Illicit Interests, and Occult Approaches to the Medieval Universe (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 85–98.

93. Ibid., 1–2.

94. Raimundus de Puteo, quoted in Lothar Kolmer, “Papst Clemens IV beim Wahrsager,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 38 (1982): 141–165 at 160n63.

95. See Francis Young, introduction to Paul Foreman (attrib.), The Cambridge Book of Magic: A Tudor Necromancer’s Manual, ed. Francis Young (Cambridge: Texts in Early Modern Magic, 2015), xi-xxxvii, and more generally the wide-ranging treatment by Frank Klaassen, The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013).

96. Paul Foreman (attrib.), The Cambridge Book of Magic, 17, 31.

97. Katelyn Mesler, “The Latin Encounter with Hebrew Magic,’ in The Routledge History of Medieval Magic, ed. Sophie Page and Catherine Rider (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019).

98. R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); Hsia, Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven, CT: Published in cooperation with Yeshiva University Press, Yale University Press, 2002); Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Magda Teter, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

99. Martin Luther, “Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi,” D. Martin Luthers Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe, 53: 573–648.

100. Ibid., 614; another version in his Tischreden, D. Martin Luthers Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe 5, 246, no. 5567; ibid., 247–248.

101. Kolmer, “Papst Klemens IV.” For the evolution of official views on magic and witchcraft, see Rainer Decker, Witchcraft and the Papacy: An Account Drawing on the Formerly Secret Records of the Roman Inquisition, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 1–74; Tarrant, Defining Nature’s Limits, 1–130.

102. See Montserrat Moli Frigola, “Iakobo,” in Scrittura biblioteche e stampa a Roma nel Quattrocento: Aspetti e problemi. Atti del seminario 1–2 giugno 1979, ed. Concetta Bianca et al. (Vatican City: Scuola Vaticana di Paleografia, Diplomatica e Archivistica, 1980), 183–203; Anna Modigliani, “Testamenti di Gaspare da Verona,” in Scrittura biblioteche e stampa a Roma nel Quattrocento: Aspetti e problemi. Atti del 2º seminario 6–8 maggio 1982, ed. Massimo Miglio et al. (Vatican City: Scuola Vaticana di Paleografia, Diplomatica e Archivistica, 1983), 611–627.

103. Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS lat. 397, fol. 77 recto: “[de sortilegiis multa dicta sunt in iure diuino. quae quidem sunt prohibita sicut et pleraeque species presagiendi ut necromantia chiromantia auguria extispitia pyromantia auspicia [et sic de singulis recte tractauit.”

104. Ibid., fol. 77 recto–verso: “[comburi autem iussit quandam veneficam et necromanticam mulierem observandissimus d. Cardinalis firmanus quae in agro perusino eam detestabilem artem exercebat [nichil melius nichil iustius facere potuisset [ipse etiam est a vertice ad plantas iustissimus et prudentissimus simul et doctissimus altissimique consilii princeps: cuius verba aurea sunt quotienscunque legitur: quem nil ob aliud amo colo et obseruo.” See Modigliani, “Testamenti,” 619.

105. Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS lat. 397, fol. 26 verso: “[carmina nunc sunt incantationes verborum [quomodo coquatur venenum illis relinquo quae faciunt. et ex medicina aliquid scio in hoc. quod tamen silentio penitus praeteribo.”

106. Ibid., fol. 77 verso: “[et ego vidi quosdam seniores in territorio seu agro patriae meae hoc est veronae, rusticos quidem qui siquis amisisset asinum vel equum praesagiebant et videbant statim ubi esset res amissa. et dictis verbis et sacris suis perfectis, videbatur cadere stella quaedam certo loco in quo certa res quaerebatur et tandem inveniebatur [semel ex his quidam dum essent turbulentissima tempora, tonitrua, fulgura, imbres, pronosticatus est fulmen fore de subito, et casurum in cacumen cuiusdam montis [atque ita fuit ut praedixerat [agebat homo octogesimum annum illiteratus et indoctus.”

107. Modigliani, “Testamenti,” 618.

108. Ibid.

109. David Collins, “Albertus, Magnus or Magus? Magic, Natural Philosophy, and Religious Reform in the Late Middle Ages,” Renaissance Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2010): 1–44 at 3 (translation slightly altered).

110. Ibid., 30–35. See more generally Michael Bailey, “From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Later Middle Ages,” Speculum 76 (2001): 960–990.

111. Carlo Ginzburg, “Un letterato e una strega al principio del ‘500: Panfilo Sasso e Anastasia la Frappona,” in Studi in memoria di Carlo Ascheri, Differenze 9 (1970): 129–137.

112. Ibid.

113. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 3917, fols. 166 recto–verso, in Angelo Mercati, Il Sommario del processo di Giordano Bruno: con appendice di documenti sull’eresia e l’Inquisizione a Modena nel secolo XVI (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1942), 132.

114. Tarrant, Defining Nature’s Limits, 151–152; Matteo Duni, Under the Devil’s Spell: Witches, Sorcerers and the Inquisition in Renaissance Italy (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), esp. 48: “it was not rare to find texts of magic in apparently unlikely hands such as those of Bernardina Stadera, a woman denounced in 1499 for being a ‘charmer, conjurer and procuress,’ who read and copied invocations of demons from a document she had borrowed from some Servite friars and shared with her lover, the priest Antonio Montagnana.”

115. Frank Klaassen, “Learning and Masculinity in Manuscripts of Ritual Magic of the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance,” Sixteenth Century Journal 38, no. 1 (2007): 49–76.

116. Nicholas of Cusa, Sermo 2:37.

Chapter 2

1. There are two modern editions of the text: Giannozzo Manetti, De dignitate et excellentia hominis, ed. Elizabeth Leonard (Padua: Antenore, 1975), and Manetti, On Human Worth and Excellence, ed. and trans. Brian Copenhaver (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). For a full study of Manetti see David Marsh, Giannozzo Manetti: The Life of a Florentine Humanist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

2. Vespasiano da Bisticci, Vite di uomini illustri del secolo xv (Florence: Rinascimento del Libro, 1938), 71–72; Renaissance Princes, Popes, and Prelates: The Vespasiano Memoirs, intro. Myron Gilmore (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 72–74. On this episode see Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972; repr. 1974), 14, whose description of the incident is quoted in the text.

3. On these “hours of the book” and their concentration on performance see Damiele Miano, “The Two Tarquins from Livy to Lorenzo Valla: History, Rhetoric and Embodiment,” Intellectual History Review 32, no. 3 (2022): 359–386.

4. Manetti, De dignitate, 2–3; On Human Worth, 2–5.

5. Ibid., 57–58, 102–105.

6. Ibid., 58, 104–105.

7. Ibid., 59, 104–107.

8. Ibid., 59–60, 106–107.

9. Ottavio Besomi, “Dai Gesta Ferdinandi Regis Aragonum del Valla al De Orthographia del Tortelli,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 9 (1966): 75–121 at 113–124; Lorenzo Valla, Gesta Ferdinandi regis Aragonum, ed. Ottavio Besomi (Padua: Antenore, 1973), 194. This brilliant digression on words and things was removed from Valla’s text and published in part by another humanist, Giovanni Tortelli, in his lexicon, De orthographia (printed in 1471), s.v. Horologium. See Besomi, “Dai Gesta Ferdinandi,” and Alex Keller, “A Renaissance Humanist Looks at ‘New’ Inventions: The Artricle ‘Horologium’ in Giovanni Tortelli’s ‘De orthographia,’” Technology and Culture 11, no. 3 (1970): 345–365, where the core of the text, still ascribed to Tortelli, is translated.

10. Besomi, “Dai Gesta Ferdinandi,” 114; Valla, Gesta Ferdinandi, 194.

11. Besomi, “Dai Gesta Ferdinandi,” 114–115; Valla, Gesta Ferdinandi, 194.

12. Horace Ars Poetica, 343–344: “Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci, lectorem delectando pariterque monendo” (He who could combine the useful with the sweet won every vote, delighting and instructing the reader at the same time). Valla actually uses the terms utilitatis and iocunditatis.

13. As Lodi Nauta has shown, Valla’s vision of the nature of Latin shifted from context to context: see his “Latin as a Common Language: The Coherence of Lorenzo Valla’s Humanist Program,” Renaissance Quarterly 71, no. 1 (2018): 1–32.

14. Michael Baxandall presented and discussed these texts in Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 99–111.

15. See the erudite edition, translation, and commentary provided by Christine Smith and Joseph O’Connor, Building the Kingdom: Giannozzo Manetti on the Material and Spiritual Edifice (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007).

16. Alberti, dedicatory letter to Della pittura, in Alberti, On Painting and on Sculpture. The Latin Texts of De pictura and De statua, ed. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon 1972), 33; slightly altered, original on 32.

17. See Mary Ann Quinlan-McGrath, Influences: Art, Optics, and Astrology in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), chap. 6, and Maren Elisabeth Schwab, “Rome as ‘Part of the Heavens’: Leon Battista Alberti’s Descriptio Urbis Romae (ca. 1450) and Ptolemy’s Almagest,” Journal of the History of Ideas 84, no. 1 (2023), 1–27.

18. Alberti, On Painting, ed. Grayson, 63; original 62.

19. See Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (London: Penguin, 2001).

20. Alberti, De commodis litterarum atque incommodis, ed. Laura Goggi Carotti (Florence: Olschki, 1976), 39.

21. Ibid.

22. See Copenhaver’s introduction to Manetti, On Human Worth, and Marsh, Manetti, chap. 4.

23. Roger Bacon, Opus tertium, in Bacon, Opera quaedam hactenus inedita, ed. J. S. Brewer (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1859), 39.

24. Ibid., 40.

25. Bacon, Epistola de secretis operibus artis et naturae, ibid., 534–535.

26. Ibid., 535. Cf. Opus tertium, ibid., 46: “… sed valerent [sc. specula sufficientia] plus quam unus exercitus contra Tartaros et Saracenos.”

27. Bacon, Opus tertium, ibid., 43.

28. Ibid., 44.

29. Elly Rachel Truitt, “Knowledge and Power: Courtly Science and Political Utility in the Work of Roger Bacon,” Revista española de filosofía medieval 28, no. 1 (2021): 99–123.

30. See Dictionary of Scientific Biography, s.v. Petrus Peregrinus, by Edward Grant.

31. Peter of Maricourt, Opera, ed. Loris Sturlese (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 1995), 65–66.

32. Ibid., 69.

33. Bacon, Opus tertium, Opera quaedam, 46.

34. Ibid., 46–47.

35. Bacon, Epistola de secretis operibus artis et naturae; ibid., 537.

36. See William Newman, The Summa perfectionis Ascribed to Geber: A Critical Edition, Translation, and Study (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1991).

37. Ibid., 538.

38. Ibid., 537.

39. Ibid., 532–533.

40. Truitt, “Knowledge and Power,” 118–123.

41. Newman, The Summa perfectionis, 542.

42. Ibid., 536.

43. See Lynn White, “Medical Astrologers and Late Medieval Technology,” Viator 6 (1975); Pamela Long, “Power, Patronage and the Authorship of ‘Ars’: From Mechanical Know-How to Mechanical Knowledge in the Last Scribal Age,” Isis 88 (1998): 1–41; Long, Artisan-Practitioners and the Rise of the New Science, 1400–1600 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011); Long, Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). For a historical overview see Hélène Vérin, La gloire des ingénieurs: l’intelligence technique du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993), and cf. James Ackerman, Distance Points: Essays in Theory and Renaissance Art and Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 211–268.

44. Prima di Leonardo: cultura delle macchine a Siena nel Rinascimento, ed. Paolo Galluzzi (Milan: Electa, 1991); Jörg Jochen Berns, Die Herkunft des Automobils aus Himmelstrionfo und Höllenmaschine (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1996).

45. Julia Martines, trans., Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence: The Diaries of Buonaccorso Pitti and Gregorio Dati, ed. Gene Brucker (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 78–79; for the original text see Vittore Branca, Mercanti scrittori: Ricordi nella Firenze tra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Milan: Rusconi, 1986), 434–435, where it is noted that Domenico served the Duke of Milan. Cf. the brilliant case study by Nicholas Adams, “Architecture for Fish: The Sienese Dam on the Bruna River—Structures and Designs, 1468–ca. 1530.” Technology and Culture 25 (1984): 768–797.

46. Christine Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence, 1400–1470 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Vérin, La Gloire.

47. White, “Medical Astrologers.”

48. Göttingen, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, MS philos. 63, 4 verso–11 recto, transcribed in Conrad Kyeser, Bellifortis, ed. Götz Quarg, 2 vols. (Düsseldorf: VDI-Verlag, 1967), 2:7–15. Cf. Mariano di Jacopo detto il Taccola, De machinis, ed. Eberhard Knobloch (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1984), 62–63.

49. See Pamela Smith, From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).

50. Erwin Panofsky, “Artist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on the Renaissance-Dämmerung,” The Renaissance: Six Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).

51. See esp. Prima di Leonardo, ed. Galluzzi.

52. See Smith, From Lived Experience, and Pamela O. Long, “Power, Patronage, and the Authorship of Ars: From Mechanical Know-How to Mechanical Knowledge in the Last Scribal Age,” Isis 88 (1997): 1–41.

53. See in general William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Long, “Power, Patronage,” and Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

54. Taccola, De machinis, 53; Frank Prager and Giustina Scaglia, Mariano Taccola and His Book De ingeneis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 17.

55. Taccola, De machinis, 138–139: “plus valet ingenium quam bubalorum vires.”

56. On Taccola’s career see Beck, introduction, in Taccola, Liber tertius de ingeneis ac edifitiis non usitatis, ed. James Beck (Milan: il Polifilo, 1969), 11–22; Prager and Scaglia, Taccola, 3–21; Bernhard Degenhart and Annegrit Schmitt, with Hans-Joachim Eberhardt, Corpus der italienischen Zeichnungen, 1300–1450, Vol. 2: Venedig. Addenda zu Süd- und Mittelitalien, 4: Katalog 717–719. Mariano Taccola (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1982). For the larger context in which he worked see Prima di Leonardo, ed. Galluzzi, and Long, Artisan-Practitioners.

57. Taccola, De machinis, 96–97.

58. Johannes Hartlieb, Das Buch der verbotenen Künste: Aberglaube und Zauberei des Mittelalters, ed. Falk Eisermann and Eckhard Graf with Christian Rätsch (Ahlerstedt: Param Verlag, Günter Koch, 1989), chap. 54, 114–117; Hazards of the Dark Arts: Advice for Medieval Princes on Witchcraft and Magic, trans. Richard Kieckhefer (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 54. See also Hartlieb, Das Buch, chap. 58, 120–121, and Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 68–71.

59. Mariano di Jacopo detto il Taccola, De ingeneis: liber primus leonis, liber secundus draconis, addenda, ed. Gustina Scaglia, Frank Prager, and Ulrich Montag, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1984).

60. Ibid., 1:53; 2:fol. 16 recto = 31.

61. For a text and a discussion of the manuscript see Antonio Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi preceduta da La novella del Grasso, ed. Domenico De Robertis, intro. Giuliano Tanturli (Milan: il Polifilo, 1976); for an English translation see Manetti, The Fat Woodworker, trans. Robert Martone and Valerie Martone (New York: Italica, 1991).

62. Taccola, De machinis, 94–95; color plate in Prima di Leonardo, ed. Galluzzi, III.b.15.

63. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 849, fols. 20 verso–21 recto, ed. in Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 215.

64. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 849, fol. 21 recto, ed. Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 215–216.

65. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 849, fol. 21 recto, ed. Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 216.

66. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 849, fol. 21 recto, ed. Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 216.

67. On Giovanni Fontana see esp. Eugenio Battisti and Giuseppa Saccaro Battisti, Le macchine cifrate di Giovanni Fontana (Milan: Arcadia, 1984), 7–34. They provide a full bibliography of his works, ibid., 39–41, and of secondary literature, ibid., 166–167. Also important are Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1923–1958), 4:150–182; and Marshall Clagett, “The Life and Works of Giovanni Fontana.” Annali dell’Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze 1 (1976): 5–28.

68. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Icon. 242, fols. 59 verso–60 recto; Battisti and Saccaro Battisti, Le macchine, 94, 134–135.

69. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Icon. 242, fol. 51 recto; Battisti and Saccaro Battisti, Le macchine, 88, 131, offer a very helpful commentary.

70. Giovanni Fontana, Liber Pomponii Azali de omnibus rebus naturalibus quae continentur in mundo videlicet coelestibus et terrestribus necnon mathematicis et de angelis motoribus quae [!] coelorum (Venice: O. Scotus, 1544), 3:10, fol. 73 verso (misnumbered 72).

71. Fontana, Secretum de Thesauro, I.3, Battisti and Saccaro Battisti, Le macchine, 144. Fontana, Liber, I.17, fols. 18 verso–19 verso; I.27, fol. 26 recto–26 verso; II.44 (misnumbered 46), fols. 66 recto–73 recto; for example, 66 verso.

72. Fontana, quoted in Thorndike, History, 4:175.

73. Fontana, Liber, vol. 9, fols. 110 verso–111 verso.

74. Roberto Valturio, De re militari (Paris: Christian Wechel, 1536), bk. 10, 261.

75. Bert Hall, The Technological Illustrations of the So-Called ‘Anonymous of the Hussite Wars’: Codex Latinus Monacensis 117, part 1 (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1979); Smith, Architecture.

76. Manetti, Vita di Brunelleschi, 98.

77. Valturio, De re militari, bk. 10, 267.

78. Long, Openness, Secrecy, 96–101.

79. Manetti, Vita di Brunelleschi, 97–98.

80. Translation from Prager and Scaglia, Taccola, 11, slightly altered; original in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS L 197, fol. 107 [228] verso, printed in Taccola, Liber tertius, 15; Degenhart and Schmitt, with Eberhardt, Mariano Taccola, 121 n.14.

81. See the full discussion in Long, Openness, Secrecy.

82. See Prager and Scaglia, Taccola.

83. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Urb. lat. 899, fol. 1 recto–verso.

84. Ibid., fol. 124 verso: “Scripto di mano di Lionardo da Colle seruitore desso illustrissimo Signor Meser Constantino anni domini Mcccclxxx.” For the authorship of the text see Claudia Cieri Via, “L’ordine delle nozze di Costanzo Sforza e Camilla d’Aragona del ms. Urb.Lat. 899,” in La città dei segreti. Magia, astrologia e cultura esoterica a Roma (XV–XVIII secolo), ed. Fabio Troncarelli (Milan: F. Angeli. 1985), 185–197. A good general discussion and full bibliography appear in Nicoletta Guidobadi, “Musique et danse dans une fête ‘humaniste’: les noces de Costanzo Sforza et Camilla d’Aragona (Pesaro 1475),” in Musique et humanisme à la Renaissance (Paris: Presses de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, 1993).

85. Patrizia Castelli, “Cronache dei loro tempi II: Le ‘allegrezze’ degli Sforza di Pesaro, 1440–1512,” in Pesaro tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, ed. Maria Rosaria Valazzi (Venice: Marsilio, 1989), 223–254 at 232–241; Maria Grazia Ciardi Dupré Dal Poggetto, “Un problema di coerenza: memoria e realizzazione nella pittura di Giovanni Santi. Nuove proposte cronologiche e attributive,” ibid., 105–114 at 109–110 and 114 n.18.

86. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Urb. lat. 899, fol. 1 recto.

87. Ibid., fol. 6 recto–verso: “Ad uno quarto di miglio presso la terra incontro li prefati Signori sposi circa xl mercatanti & borghisani di pesaro: li quali uennero tutti in una naue condotta da homini cum grandissima facilita & mirabile ingegno di rote. E era detta naue grande & superba colla vela sconfiata dal uento tutta dipinta a dui solari cum colonne lauorata in forma di Buccinthoro & di sopra nella gabbia & in cima del primo solaro chariche di bandiere & di scoppetti tamburini trombetti & altri stormenti diuersi.”

88. Ibid., fols. 12 verso–13 recto; fol. 52 verso; fol. 53 verso; fols. 66 verso–67 recto; fol. 67.

89. Ibid., fols. 82 verso–83 recto.

90. Ibid., fols. 86 recto–91 recto.

91. Ibid., fol. 113 recto–verso.

92. Ibid., fol. 117 recto–verso.

93. For Costanzo’s interest in astrologers like Lorenzo Buonincontri and Camillo Leonardi, see Benedetto Soldati, La poesia astrologica nel Quattrocento (Florence: Sansoni, 1906), 127, and Castelli, “Cronache.”

94. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Urb. lat. 899, fol. 6 verso: “Ne si uedea chi menasse decta naue per li artifici di Legname: et tela cogengnato a questo che quasi non si cognosceua dalle uere naue.”

95. Ibid., fol. 86 verso: “Poi ueniua uno Elephante maggiore assai che uno grande boue col muso & colli denti si ben contrafatto che quasi pareua uerone si uedea chil portasse ançi dasi medesimo siuidea cominare si bene erano compertite le gambe delli homini che erano dentro cum quelle dello elephante che inpossibile saria a scriuere chi non lauesse ueduto el mirabile arteficio desso.”

96. Ibid., fol. 106 recto: “si ben contrafatto & cum tanta arte che parea uiuo & era grande & apriua la boccha & distendeua el collo & colcauasi in terra como fanni li ueri Camelli.”

97. Ibid., fol. 124 recto: “Constantio … non ha lassato che fare in dimostrare la diligentia & la pelligrineça del suo ingegno.”

98. Giovanni Dondi dall’Orologio, Tractatus astrarii, ed. and tr. Emmanuel Poulle (Geneva: Droz, 2003), 38.

99. Ibid., 40.

100. Giovanni Dondi dall’Orologio to Fra’ Guglielmo Centueri, in Neal Gilbert, “A Letter of Giovanni Dondi dall’Orologio to Fra Guglielmo Centueri: A Fourteenth Century Episode in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns,” Viator 7 (1976):299–346, translation at 344–345, original at 366.

101. Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, A Documentary History of Art: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 1:161; Lorenzo Ghiberti, I commentarii, ed. Lorenzo Bartoli (Florence: Giunti, 1998), 95. For a classic study, see E. H. Gombrich, Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966), 1–10.

102. Alberti, On Painting, 98–99.

103. See, generally, Charles Mendelsohn, “Blaise de Vigenère and the ‘Chiffre carré,’” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 82 (1940), 103–129; the excellent survey by David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (New York: Macmillan, 1967; New York: Scribner, 1996); and Arielle Saiber, Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 26–48.

104. Leon Battista Alberti, A Treatise on Ciphers (Turin: Galimberti, 1997), 4; original ibid., 28.

105. Ibid., 4 (slightly altered); original ibid., 28.

106. Aloys Meister, Die Geheimschrift im Dienste der päpstlichen Kurie von ihren Anfängen bis zum Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts (Paderborn: Schöning, 1906).

107. Marcello Simonetta, Rinascimento segreto. Il modo del Segretario da Petrarca a Machiavelli (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004); see more generally Paul Dover, The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), chap. 4. For the Milanese chancery see also P.-Michel Perret, “Les règles de Cicco Simonetta pour le déchiffrement des écritures secrètes (4 juillet 1474),” Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 51 (1890), 516–525; Marcello Simonetta, The Montefeltro Conspiracy: A Renaissance Mystery Decoded (New York: Doubleday, 2008); and Walter Höflechner’s introduction in Francesco Tranchedino, Diplomatische Geheimschriften. Codex Vindobonensis 2398 der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. Faksimileausgabe (Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1970), 13–16.

108. Michele Zopello, Litterarum simulationis liber, University of Pennsylvania Library, Kislak Center for Special Collections, MS LJS 225. See Nicholas Herman, “Who Was Michele Zopello?,” Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, November 22, 2019, https://schoenberginstitute.org/2019/11/22/who-was-michele-zopello/. The manuscript has been digitized: https://openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0001/html/ljs225.html.

109. Zopello, Litterarum simulationis liber, fols. 19 verso–20 recto.

110. Tranchedino’s notebook is now Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 2398, and is reproduced in Tranchedino, Diplomatische Geheimschriften.

111. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 2398, fol. 6 recto.

112. Ibid., fol. 7 verso.

113. Alberti, Treatise on Ciphers, 5; original 29.

114. Ibid., 6–7; original 30–31.

115. Ibid., 7–13; original 31–38.

116. Ibid., 18; original 42.

117. Zopello included h, but not k: Litterarum simulationis liber, fol. 19 verso.

118. Alberti, On Ciphers, 19; original 43.

119. Ibid., 19: original 43.

120. Ibid., 17; original 41.

121. Ibid., 17; original 41.

122. Ibid., 14; original 38–39.

123. Ibid., 4; original 29.

124. See the ingenious article by David Kahn, “On the Origins of Polyalphabetic Substitution,” Isis 71 (1980): 122–127; and for the wider history of volvelles see the fascinating study by Suzanne Karr, “Constructions Both Sacred and Profane: Serpents, Angels, and Pointing Fingers in Renaissance Books with Moving Parts,” Yale University Library Gazette 78 (2004): 101–127.

125. Giorgio Vasari, Vasari on Technique, trans. Louise Maclehose, ed. G. Baldwin Brown (London: Dent, 1907; repr. New York: Dover, 1960), 29–31.

126. Leon Battista Alberti, Descriptio urbis Romae, ed. Mario Carpo (Geneva: Droz, 2000).

127. Alberti, On Sculpture 8, in Alberti, On Painting and on Sculpture, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), 129; original text on 128.

128. Albert, On Sculpture, 12, ibid., 133; original on 132.

129. Alberti, On Sculpture, 11, ibid., 133; original on 132.

130. See Battisti and Saccaro Battisti, Le macchine, 35–38.

131. Biblioteca Riccardiana MS 927, fol. 67 recto; Trivia senatoria, ed. Stefano Cartei (Florence: Polistampa, 2008), plate 6, 240. This manuscript also contains Alberti’s work on ciphers (ibid., 67). A manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Lat. MS 8754, fol. 27 recto, which also contains the work on ciphers, also shows a device with moving disks (ibid., 77 and plate 9, 243), as does an undated edition perhaps printed in Venice (ibid., 86 and plate 17, 251).

132. Alberti, “Trivia senatoria,” in Opera, ed. Girolamo Massaini (Florence: Bartolomeo de’ Libri. c. 1499), sig. [e6 recto]; Trivia senatoria, ed. Cartei, 174.

133. Flavio Biondo, Italia illustrata, quoted in Howard Burns, “Quattrocento Architecture and the Antique: Some Problems,” Classical Influences on European Culture A.D. 500–1500, ed. R. R. Bolgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 273.

134. Alberti, De re aedificatoria VI.8; On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 175; L’architettura (De re aedificatoria), ed. and. trans. Giovanni Orlandi, 2 vols. (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1966), 2:497.

135. Fontana, Liber, 3:13 (misnumbered 14), fol. 76 recto (misnumbered 75).

136. Ibid.

137. Ibid.

138. Niccoli, Prophecy and People.

139. Fontana, Liber, 3:13 (misnumbered 14), fol. 76 recto (misnumbered 75).

140. For the traditions that Fontana drew on see Elly Rachel Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

141. For period conventions see the rich case studies in Picturing Machines 1400–1700, ed. Wolfgang Lefèvre (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

142. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Icon. 242, fol. 63 verso; Battisti and Saccaro Battisti, Le macchine, 96–97, 137.

143. Ibid., 97.

144. Brian Curran and Anthony Grafton, “A Sixteenth-Century Site Report on the Vatican Obelisk,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 58 (1995): 234–248 at 244–245; original text at 247–248.

145. John Webster Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934).

146. Curran and Grafton, “A Site Report,” 244; original text at 247.

147. Ibid., 237–238. For the full story of the Vatican and other Roman obelisks see Brian Curran, Anthony Grafton, Pamela Long, and Benjamin Weiss, Obelisk: A History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), as well as the classic works of Cesare D’Onofrio, Gli obelischi di Roma: storia e urbanistica di una città dall’età antica al xx secolo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1967; 3d ed., Rome: Romana società editrice 1992), and Erik Iversen, Obelisks in Exile, vol. 1: The Obelisks of Rome (Copenhagen: Gad, 1968).

148. Curran and Grafton, “Site Report,” 245; original text at 248.

149. Sallust, Bellum Catilinae, 13.1.

150. Alberti, On the Art, 3; Dell’Architettura, 1: 9–11.

151. Manetti, De dignitate, 77–78.

Chapter 3

1. Baptista Mantuanus to Gianfranesco Pico, in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Opera omnia, ed. Eugenio Garin, 2 vols. (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1972), 1:387–388.

2. Ficino to Sixtus IV, in Ficino, Epistolae (Venice: Blondus, 1495), fol. CXIV verso. Ficino also ascribed the plague that struck Florence in 1478–1479 to this conjunction. See Remi Chiu, Plague and Music in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 57.

3. Ficino, Epistolae, fol. CXV recto.

4. Ibid.

5. Laura Smoller, History, Prophecy and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d’Ailly, 1350–1420 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Dietrich Kurze, “Johannes Lichtenberger—Leben und Werk eines spätmittelalterlichen Propheten und Astrologen,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 38, no. 1 (1956), 328–343; Kurze, “Prophecy and History: Lichtenberger’s Forecasts of Events to Come (from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Century): Their Reception and Diffusion,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21, no. 1–2 (1958): 63–85; Kurze, “Popular Astrology and Prophecy in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” in ‘Astrologi hallucinati’: Stars and the End of the World in Luther’s Time, ed. Paola Zambelli (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1986; repr. 2014), 177–194; and, for the larger context, Jonathan Green, Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change, 1450–1500 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012).

6. James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 1:302–304.

7. Donald Weinstein, Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), chap. 24.

8. For a good general account and bibliography see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. Marsilio Ficino, by Christopher Celenza, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ficino/.

9. See Brian Cophenhaver, Pico della Mirandola on Trial: Heresy, Freedom, and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), esp. 7–10.

10. For a good general account and bibliography see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, by Brian Copenhaver, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pico-della-mirandola/; on the rich and contentious historiography see Brian Copenhaver, Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019).

11. Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, ed. and trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998), 110–111.

12. See the Introduction, ibid.; D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958); Mary Quinlan-McGrath, Influences: Art, Optics, and Astrology in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Brian Copenhaver, Magic in Western Culture from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

13. Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), chap. 3.

14. The Disputationes, as well as Pico’s sources and the reception of his work, are finally beginning to be the object of systematic study, though much remains to be done. In addition to Darrel Rutkin’s studies (e.g., “Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Early Reform of Astrology: An Interpretation of Vera Astrologia in the Cabalistic Conclusions,” Bruniana & Campanelliana 10 (2004): 495–498), see Ovanes Akopyan, Debating the Stars in the Italian Renaissance: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes Adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem and Its Reception (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021), with the critical review by Jean-Marc Mandosio, Kritikon Litterarum 49, no. 1–2 (2022): 7–25.

15. Grafton, Commerce, 113.

16. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 330–333.

17. See the close analysis in Copenhaver, Magic in Western Culture.

18. Ibid.

19. Giovanni Fontana, Liber Pomponii Azali de omnibus rebus naturalibus quae continentur in mundo videlicet coelestibus et terrestribus necnon mathematicis et de angelis motoribus quae [!] coelorum (Venice: O. Scotus, 1544), 26–27.

20. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Omnia opera (Reggio Emilia: Lodovico Mazzali, 1506), sig. [T iv recto].

21. Ibid., sig. I iii recto.

22. Ibid., sig. [T v recto].

23. On this trend in medical practice and writing see Giana Pomata, “Sharing Cases: The Observationes in Early Modern Medicine,” Early Science and Medicine 15 (2010): 193–236; Pomata, “Observation Rising: Birth of an Epistemic Genre, ca. 1500–1650,” in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 45–80.

24. Antonio Benivieni, De abditis nonnullis ac mirandis morborum et sanationum causis, tr. Charles Singer (Springfield: Thomas, 1954), 70–71.

25. Pico 1506, sig. [T v recto-verso]. The English translation comes from Copenhaver, Magic and the Dignity of Man, 477–478.

26. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 397–399; original 396–398.

27. Giambattista della Porta, Magiae naturalis sive de miraculis rerum naturalium libri IIII (Lyon: Rouillé, 1561), fols. 8 verso–9 verso.

28. Benito Pereira, De magia, de observatione somniorum et de divinatione astrologica, libri tres (Cologne: Gymnicus, 1612), 25–26, 33. The anecdote from Augustine comes from City of God 14.24.

29. Pico, Omnia opera, sig. [T v recto]; translation from Copenhaver, Magic and the Dignity of Man, 477.

30. Pico, Omnia opera, sig. [T v recto]; translation from Copenhaver, Magic and the Dignity of Man, 478.

31. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 112–115.

32. Ibid., 182–183.

33. See Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic.

34. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 196–197.

35. Ibid., 196–199.

36. For Caius’s bookishness—which was accompanied by a serious interest in what hunters, fisherman, and other skilled workers could tell him about natural history—see Anthony Grafton, “Philological and Artisanal Knowledge Making in Renaissance Natural History: A Study in Cultures of Knowledge,” History of Humanities 3, no. 1 (2018): 39–55.

37. Thomas Muffett, Health’s Improvement: or, Rules Comprizing and Discovering the Nature, Method, and Manner of Preparing All Sorts of Food Used in This Nation, corrected and enlarged by Christopher Bennett (London: Thomson, 1655), 123.

38. Constantinus Africanus, quoted in Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Nelson, 2019), 85 n.47.

39. On the origins of these categories see Saul Jarcho, “Galen’s Six Non-Naturals: A Bibliographic Note and Translation,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 44, no. 4 (1970): 372–377; and Jerome Bylebyl, “Galen on the Non-natural Causes of Variation in the Pulse,” ibid., 45, no. 5 (1971): 482–485.

40. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 290–291.

41. See, for example, Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic; Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).

42. Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Theory and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990; repr. 2009); Katharine Park, “Natural Particulars: Epistemology, Practice, and the Literature of Healing Springs,” in Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton and Nancy G. Siraisi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 347–367.

43. Proclus, De sacrificio et magia, in Opera quae hactenus extitere et quae in lucem nunc primum prodiere omnia, by Marsilio Ficino, 2 vols. (Basel: Henricpetri 1576; repr. Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1972), 1928.

44. Ibid.

45. Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, 104.

46. Denis Robichaud, “Ficino on Force, Magic, and Prayers,” Renaissance Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2017): 44–87.

47. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 388–389.

48. Robichaud, “Ficino on Force, Magic, and Prayers.”

49. Fontana, Liber, 19.

50. Ibid.

51. Girolamo Aliotti, Epistolae et opuscula, 2 vols. (Arezzo: Bellotti, 1769), 1:180–187 at 180–181.

52. Ibid., 184–185.

53. Ibid., 183–184.

54. Ibid., 187. On visionary women see Chiara Frugoni,“Female Mystics, Visions and Iconography,” in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, trans. Marjorie Schneider (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 130–164. On Francesca Romana and Giovanni Mattioti, see Anna Esposito, “S. Francesca Romana and the Female Religious Community in Fifteenth-Century Rome,” ibid., 197–218 at 199–200.

55. Chaim Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

56. See Flavius Mithridates, Sermo de passione Domini, ed. Chaim Wirszubski (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1963); Wirszubksi, Pico’s Encounter; and the articles collected in Flavio Mitridate mediatore fra culture nel contesto dell’ebraismo siciliano del XV secolo: atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Caltabellotta, 30 giugno-1 luglio 2008, ed. Mauro Perani and Giacomo Corazzol (Palermo: Officina di studi medievali, 2012).

57. Mithridates, Sermo, 13–25.

58. See, for example, Miriam Rothman, The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2021).

59. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Olivier Boulnois and Giuseppe Tognon (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993), 60–62; English translation from Copenhaver, Magic and the Dignity of Man, 478.

60. Pico, Oeuvres, 64; Copenhaver, Magic and the Dignity of Man, 479.

61. Pico, Oeuvres, 64–66; Copenhaver, Magic and the Dignity of Man, 480.

62. Pico, Oeuvres, 66; Copenhaver, Magic and the Dignity of Man, 480.

63. Ibid., 480–481.

64. See in general Fabrizio Lelli, “Un collaboratore ebreo di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,” Vivens Homo 5 (1994): 401–430. For a description of the project to edit and translate the texts produced by Mithridates see http://www.pico-kabbalah.eu/ (accessed March 18, 2011).

65. For the details see Wirszubski, Pico’s Encounter, and the new material added by Saverio Campanini in The Book of Bahir: Flavius Mithridates’ Latin Translation, the Hebrew Text, and an English Version, ed. Saverio Campanini (Turin: Nino Aragno, 2005); Campanini, “Guglielmo Moncada (alias Flavio Mitridate). Un ebreo converso siciliano,” in Guglielmo Moncada alias Flavio Mitridate. Un ebreo converso siciliano (Palermo: Studi medievali, 2008), 49–88 at 54–58; The Gate of Heaven, trans. Flavius Mithridates, ed. Susanne Jurgan and Saverio Campoanini (Turin: Nino Aragno, 2012); Gersonides, Commento al Cantico dei Cantici nella traduzione ebraico-latina di Flavio Mitridate, ed. Michaela Andreatta (Florence: Olschki, 2009); and the studies collected in Giovanni Pico e la cabbalà, ed. Fabrizio Lelli (Florence: Olschki, 2014).

66. Mithridates, Sermo, 37–39.

67. Campanini, “Guglielmo Moncada,” 79, 87.

68. Ibid., 67–68.

69. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Ebr. 190, fol. 81 recto: “nemo a mithridate intellexisset hoc in heb.”; fol. 210 verso: “nemo a mithridate hoc recte potuisset traducere ex hebraico adeo obscurum est.” See further the very systematic collection and analysis of annotations in Campanini, “Guglielmo Moncada.”

70. Copenhaver, Magic and the Dignity of Man, explicates this and other passages with great erudition and clarity. I follow him here.

71. Warm thanks to Brian Copenhaver for this point. Note also Campanini’s remark in The Book of Bahir, 85: “The texts Pico, with the substantial help of Mithridates, ‘discovered,’ had to be truly Jewish, otherwise his discovery would have been worthless, but at the same time they had to be compatible with a Christian interpretation of Jewish mysticism. This subtle and risky reading between the lines is precisely the sort of performance Mithridates could deliver.”

72. Pico, Conclusiones nongentae, ed. Albano Biondi (Florence: Olschki, 1995), 56.

73. Ibid., 38.

74. Ibid., 140.

75. Ibid., 118.

76. Brian Copenhaver, “Number, Shape, and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala: The Upright Tzade, the Closed Mem, and the Gaping Jaws of Azazel,” in Natural Particulars, 25–76.

77. Pico, Omnia opera, sig. [I v ro].

78. See Copenhaver, “Number, Shape, and Meaning.”

79. See R. Po-chia Hsia, Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven: Published in cooperation with Yeshiva University Press, Yale University Press, 2002); Magda Teter, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). For the larger background, see Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999).

80. Processi contro gli ebrei di Trento (1475–1478), ed. Anna Esposito and Diego Quaglione, 2 vols. (Padua: CEDAM, 1990–2008), 2:196–197.

81. Ibid., 165–166.

82. Daniela Rando, Dai margini la memoria: Johannes Hinderbach (1418–1486) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), 484; Processi, ed. Esposito and Quaglione, 2:44 n. 46.

83. Ibid. For a full account of Bruneta’s story see Processi, ed. Esposito and Quaglione, 2:42–47.

84. On Lange see Nancy Siraisi, History, Medicine and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), esp. 68.

85. Johann Lange, Medicinalium epistolarum miscellanea (Basel: Oporinus, 1554–60), 1:312–18.

86. Ibid., 318.

87. Ibid., 319: “Nam amare sanguinem daemones dicuntur.”

88. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Urb. Lat. 1384. On this manuscript and its context see Kristin Lippincott and David Pingree, “Ibn al Hatim on the Talismans of the Lunar Mansions,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 50 (1987).

89. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Urb. Lat. 1384, fol. 1 verso: “haec est illa scientia divina quae felices homines reddit et ut dij inter mortales videantur edocet. haec est quae cum astris loquitur: et si maius dicere fas est: cum deo ipso: cuius nutu quicquid in mundo est gubernatur.”

90. Ibid., fol. 3 recto: “Petrus patavinus ad fontem aponi natus, ponit, quod sole existente in corde Leonis iove aut venere aspiciente, et infortuniis cadentibus si imprimeretur imago Leonis, in Lamina aurea, valeret ad omnes infirmitates renum: quod Nicolaus ariminensis medicus expertus est. Ego quoque vidi caput tantum Leonis in Lamina aurea sculptum manu patris mei Rabi nissim abuilfaragh involutum in bombice odorifera musco et nuce muscata: et a tergo hi characteres erant. quod facilem partum mulieribus dedit collo parientium alligatum.”

91. Ibid., fol. 2 recto: “Moyses vero experientia reliquit posteris Astrologiam esse ex omni parte veram: quemadmodum in Talmud legitur. Rabi tan huma super textu exo. Et accepit Moyses ossa ioseph cum eo. Vnde scivit moyses ubi Iosephus sepultus erat. ex quo aegyptii quando decessit fecerunt ei arcam aeneam et proiecerunt in Nilum”

92. Ibid.: “ita enim fiebat omnibus aliquam virtutem singularem habentibus. Venit Moyses et stetit super nilum: accepit Laminam gemmae in quas sculpsit imaginem Tauri: et in circuitu has literas: ורש הלע i. ascende Taure: et precante populo proiecit in Nilum et clamavit Ioseph Ioseph venit hora qua deus sanctus et benedictus redimat filios suos, hic deitas et israel et nubes glorie expectant te: si vis revelare te: bene quidem: sin autem sumus liberi a iuramento tibi facto. Mox apparuit Arca, et emersit: et in summa aqua enatavit: donec pervenit ad populum cum imagine illa.”

93. Samuel Berman, Midrash Tanhuma-Yelammedenu: An English Translation of Genesis and Exodus from the Printed Version of Tanhuma-Yelammedenu (Hoboken: Ktav, 1995), 411.

94. Pico, Omnia opera, sig. K verso.

95. Flavia Buzzetta, Magia naturalis e Scientia cabalae in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Florence: Olschki, 2019), 247.

96. Pico, Omnia opera, sig. [I iv recto]: “Mirabilia artis magicae non sunt nisi per unionem et actuationem eorum quae seminaliter et separate sunt in natura.”

97. Ibid.: “Nulla potest esse operatio magica alicuius efficaciae nisi annexum habeat opus cabalae, explicitum vel implicitum.”

98. Leonardo Dati on the inspiration of Palmieri’s City of Life, Matteo Palmieri, Libro del Poema chiamato Citta di Vita, ed. M. Rooke, Smith College Studies in Modern Languages 8: 1–2; 9:1–4 (Northampton and Paris: Smith College, 1926–1928), 2:261–262: “Dicebat circumagitari planetas aeterna lege et cursu perpetuo et stare stellas fixas terminis suis, et omne id spatium suo cursu circumagi et plenum esse angelis atque animabus bonis. Quae cum dixisset interrogavit Mattheus ubi sibi locus contigisset. cui ille respondit paululum supra lunam. Mattheus tunc illi: ergo in mercurio … Interrogavit tunc Matthaeus. possentne ad nos venire. Ille vero subridens possumus inquit ipse venio ut libet.”

99. Fontana, Liber, fol. 66 verso.

100. Stéphane Toussaint, “Ficino, Archimedes and the Celestial Arts,” in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 307–326,

101. Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, ed. James Hankins with William Bowen, trans. Michael Allen with John Warden (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1:200–201.

102. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 346–347. See Toussaint, “Ficino, Archimedes.”

103. Yates, Giordano Bruno.

104. Pico, Oeuvres philosophiques, 54–57; Copenhaver, Magic and the Dignity of Man, 476.

105. Augustine, De civitate Dei 10.9.

106. Ibid.

107. Ibid.

108. Petrus Garsias, Determinationes magistrales contra conclusiones apologales Johannis Pici Mirandulani Concordie Comitis (Rome: Eucharius Silber, 1489), sig. m iii recto, quoting Aquinas, Secunda secundae qu. 96, art. 2.

109. Ficino, Apologia, Three Books on Life, 398–399.

110. Butzbach, Macrostoma, quoted by Paola Zambelli, “Scholastiker und Humanisten. Agrippa und Trithemius zur Hexerei. Die natürliche Magie und die Entstehung kritischen Denkens,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 67 (1985): 41–79 at 58.

111. Della Porta, Magiae naturalis libri, I.1, fols. 8 verso–9 recto.

112. Gabriel du Puy-Herbaut, Theotimus, sive de tollendis et expungendis malis libris (Paris: Roigny, 1549), 9–11, 180–183.

113. Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola, Opera omnia, Vol. 1, 668: “cum Magiam dicimus artem faciendorum mirabilium intelligimus, nec ope naturae nec Dei, sed daemonis.” On the afterlife of Apollonius see Maria Dzielska, Apollonius of Tyana in Legend and History, Problemi e ricerche di storia antica (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1986); for this episode, see 194–197.

114. Conrad Mutian, Der Briefwechsel des Mutianus Rufus, ed. Carl Krause (Kassel: Im Commissionsverlage von A. Freyschmidt, Hof-Buchhandlung, 1885), 93–94.

115. See Francis Young, introduction to Paul Foreman (attrib.), The Cambridge Book of Magic: A Tudor Necromancer’s Manual, ed. Francis Young (Cambridge: Texts in Early Modern Magic, 2015), xi–xxxvii.

Chapter 4

1. On Trithemius’s early hermeneutics see Johannes Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes. De laude scriptorum, trans. Roland Behrendt, ed. Klaus Arnold (Lawrence, KS: Coronado, 1974); James O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and above all Karlheinz Froelich, “Johannes Trithemius on the Fourfold Sense of Scripture: The Tractatus de Investigatione Scripturae (1486),” Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation: Essays Presented to David C. Steinmetz in Honor of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Richard Miller and John Thompson (Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1996), 23–60.

2. Rutger Sicamber de Venray to Conrad Celtis, June 30, 1494, in Conrad Celtis, Der Briefwechsel des Conrad Celtis, ed. Hans Rupprich (Munich: Beck, 1934), 129.

3. On Trithemius as historian see esp. Frank Borchardt, German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971); Borchardt, “Wie falsch war der Fälscher Trithemius?,” in Das Faustbuch von 1587: Provokation und Wirkung, ed. Richard Auernheimer and Frank Baron (Munich and Vienna: Profil, 1991), 29–37.

4. See Klaus Arnold, Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516) (Würzburg: Schöningh, 1971; new ed. 1991) and Paola Zambelli, “Scholastiker und Humanisten. Agrippa und Trithemius zur Hexerei. Die natürliche Magie und die Entstehung kritischen Denkens,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 67 (1985): 41–79.

5. See in general Arnold, Johannes Trithemius, which gives a richly documented, critical, and sophisticated account of Trithemius’s life and works; Noel Brann, The Abbot Trithemius (1462–1516): The Renaissance of Monastic Humanism (Leiden: Brill, 1981) and Trithemius and Magical Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), are also very helpful. The attacks on his historical works can be followed in Urkunden, Briefe und Aktenstücke zur Geschichte Maximilians I. und seiner Zeit, ed. Josef Chmel (Stuttgart: Literarischer Verein, 1845).

6. Joel F. Harrington, Dangerous Mystic: Meister Eckhart’s Path to the God Within (New York: Penguin, 2018); Mysticism and Reform, 1400–1700, ed. Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015).

7. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Bleeding Hosts and Their Contact Relics in Late Medieval Northern Germany,” The Medieval History Journal 7, no. 2 (2004): 227–241 at 236; Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

8. Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Bynum, Dissimilar Similitudes: Devotion Objects in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone, 2020).

9. Livia Cárdenas, Friedrich der Weise und das Wittenberger Heiltumsbuch: mediale Repräsentation zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit (Berlin: Lukas, 2002); Cárdenas, Die Textur des Bildes: das Heiltumsbuch im Kontext religiöser Mentalität des Spätmittelalters (Berlin: Lukas, 2013).

10. Johannes Trithenius, Opera pia et spiritualia (Mainz: Albinus, 1605), 1083–1085 at 1084.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. See Helmut Flachenecker, “Karmeliten in Franken: Ein Mendikantenorden am Rande der Erinnerung?,” in Historiography and Identity: Responses to Medieval Carmelite Culture, ed. J. Röhrkasten and C. Zermatten (Zurich: LIT, 2017), 169–182 at 180.

17. Trithemius, Opera pia, 1133.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.: “Cavillanti respondeo, scriptum est. in ore duorum vel trium testium stabit omne verbum. [2 Cor 13:1: ecce tertio hoc venio ad vos in ore duorum vel trium testium stabit omne verbum].”

20. Ibid., 1133.

21. Ibid., 1134.

22. Richard Serjeantson, “Testimony and Proof in Early-Modern England,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30 (1999): 195–236.

23. Trithemius, Opera pia, 1134.

24. Ibid., 1080.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 928.

27. Ibid., 923.

28. Ibid., 927.

29. Ibid., 930.

30. Ibid., 927–928.

31. Trithemius to Richmodes de Horst, 24 June 1505, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 12 recto = Johannes Trithemius, Epistolarum familiarium libri duo (Hanau: Brubach, 1536), letter 1.11, 22.

32. Albrecht Dürer, Schriftlicher Nachlass, ed. Hans Rupprich (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1956–1969), 1:38; translation from Peter Parshall, “Albrecht Dürer’s Gedenkbuch and the Rain of Crosses,” Word & Image 22, no. 3: 202–210 at 205.

33. Dürer, Schriftlicher Nachlass, ed. Rupprich, 1:38 n10.

34. Pirckheimer to Trithemius, June 13, 1515; Willibald Pirckheimer, Briefwechsel, ed. Emil Reicke et al. (Munich: Beck, 1940), 2:555.

35. Terence Cave, Thomas More’s Utopia in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008); Emmanouli Aretoulakis, “The Prefatory/Postscript Letters to St. Thomas More’s Utopia: The Culture of ‘Seeing’ as a Reality-Conferring Strategy,” Journal of Early Modern Studies 3 (2014): 91–113.

36. Erasmus to Aldus Manutius, October 28, 1507, in Desiderius Erasmus, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen, and H. W. Garrod, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906–1958), 437–439 at 439.

37. Zambelli, “Scholastiker und Humanisten,” 1985.

38. Johannes Trithemius, Liber octo quaestionum (Cologne: Novesianus, 1534), Cambridge University Library H* 15.9 (F), sig. C2 verso–C3 recto: “Quemadmodum pueri in abdito latitantes aut discurrentes larvati, subito erumpentes de latibulis suis, coaevos nil tale suspicantes ex inopinato terrore concutiunt, et rursus ne cognoscantur se iterum abscondunt: qui cum nescientes territos considerant, quasi magnum ex hoc videantur assecuti honorem, gloriantur.” Dee has put a cross at the start of this passage and an asterisk at the end, to mark the application of the notes quoted in the next footnote.

39. Dee, marginal note, ibid., sig. C2 verso: “+similitudo bona ad quam possis tuas meditationes dirigere: cum altera nota * in alia pagina confer. pudeat igitur nos terrritos esse vel machinis vel laqueis daemonum.”

40. Ibid., sig. [F6 recto] (Trithemius): “Vnde habemus compertum, quod simpliciores hominum quosdam nunnunquam in sua latibula montium duxerunt, stupenda mirantibus ostendentes spectacula”; (Dee): “Nota, 1561 mihi quoque comperta.”

41. Ibid., sig. C6 verso.

42. Ibid., sig. E4 verso (Dee): “Nota horrendum facinus.”

43. Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek MS C IV, fols. 135 recto–verso: “Tercio homines miracula faciunt cooperacione demoniace pravitatis: quod fit tripliciter. Invocacione manifesta: implicacione occulta: supposicione fraudulenta. Miranda faciunt homines invocacione demonum manifesta: sicuti mulieres malefice que malignorum se spirituum potestati submiserunt: fidemque abnegantes catholicam homagium fidelitatis in reprobum sensum averse demonibus prestiterunt. His permittente deo semper in malum rogati demones cooperantur aliquando visibiliter aliquando invisibiliter apparentes. aerem turbant, suscitant tempestates: choruscaciones et grandines inducunt: ledunt fruges: et queque nascencia terre suis maleficiis devastant. Denique homines infirmant et bestias: et quicquid in perniciem excogitare generis humani possunt summo studio exequuntur. Agunt cum demonibus feda commercia spurcissime voluptatis: et eos quociens voluerint suum provocant in aspectum. Harum facta non miracula, sed maleficia sunt: sevi exustione ignis punienda.” Trithemius, Liber octo quaestionum, sig, [C6 recto]: “Maleficae quodam professionis genere subiiciuntur daemonibus, quorum ministerio aerem turbant, tempestates suscitant, fruges devastant, homines et iumenta infirmant. Agunt cum daemonibus spurcissimae voluptatis foeda commertia, et eos pernitiosis carminibus quos voluerint ab inferis revocant in aspectum. Harum facta non miracula sed potius maleficia dicenda sunt, et extremo supplicio merito punienda.” For a similar argument see Trithemius, Opera pia, 291–292.

44. Trithemius Opera pia, 288, on fascinatio: “Nam hoc genere maleficii nimis implicantur mulieres, et in ultimam plure dementiam adduxerunt. Est itaque fascinare maleficarum, inferre alicui perniciem.” Cf. Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum, ed. and trans. Christopher Mackay, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1:503–504; 2:621–622.

45. Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek MS C IV, fol. 135 verso: “Est et aliud hominum genus manifesta demonum utens invocacione: quos improprie vulgo necromanticos appellant homines perniciosos. deo inimicos hostes et adversarios. hoc ipso nomine demonstrantes. Horum infinita sunt scelera: et licet non omnes inveniantur opere pares: voluntate tamen optate curiositatis in sui sunt perniciem concordes.” Cf. Trithemius to Jodocus Beiselius, August 16, 1507, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Pal. lat. 730, fols. 175 verso–176 recto = Trithemius, Epistolae, 2.49, 315–317, where he suggests that demonic agency gave astrological predictions their appearance of validity.

46. Upsala Universitetsbibliotek MS C IV, fol. 135 verso: “Multi sunt inter eos reprobi circa fidem. incantatores atque malefici. qui manifestos cum demonibus iniere contractus. Quorum si quando videntur miracula: non vera sed illusoria sunt iudicanda.”

47. Trithemius, Liber octo quaestionum, sig. [C6 recto]. Cf. Zambelli, “Scholastiker und Humanisten.”

48. Trithemius, Liber octo quaestionum, sig. E5 recto–verso.

49. Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek MS C IV, fol. 134 verso: “Omnia enim miracula demonum phantasmata sunt que nullam penitus continent veritatem: ut pote qui sanctorum spirituum vera et manifesta cupiunt gestiuntque imitari signa: quemadmodum symiorum curiositas facta hominum queque viderit in similitudine solum imitatur.”

50. Trithemius to Theodoric, Bishop of Lübeck, April 16, 1507, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 139 recto–verso = Epistolae, 2.22, 250.

51. P. O. Kristeller, “The Scholar and His Public in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” in his Medieval Aspects of Renaissance Learning: Three Essays (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1974; New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 3–28.

52. Trithemius to Beiselius, August 26, 1507, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 730, fols. 175 verso–176 recto = Epistolae, 2.49, 315. For Augustine’s views see, for example, Confessions 7.6.8–10.

53. For this text see Klaus Arnold, “Additamenta Trithemiana. Nachträge zu Leben und Werk des Johannes Trithemius, insbesondere zur Schrift De demonibus,” Würzburger Diözesan-Geschichtsblätter: 37/38 (1975), 239–267 at 258: “Factum demonis adtende magistri et imitacio patebit discipuli.”

54. Ibid., 261–264, esp. 261 from the projected Book IV: “Quod demones multos ex curiositate decipiant 1. Quemadmodum artes magicas tradiderint hominibus 2. De illis qui primi artes magicas acceperunt a demonibus 3. Qui posteris reliquerint libros magicarum arcium 4. Quod multi falso inscribantur libri auctoribus. 5 …” See also Arnold’s commentary, ibid., 252–256, and Zambelli, “Scholastiker und Humanisten.”

55. Michael Mattaire, Annales Typographici ab anno MD ad annum MDXXXVI continuati, 2:1 (The Hague: Vaillant & Prevost, 1722), 210–211.

56. Ibid., 210.

57. Ibid., 211.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid.

60. Klaus Arnold, “Warum schrieben und sammelten Humanisten ihre Briefe? Beobachtungen zum Briefwechsel des Benediktinerabtes Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516),” in Adel—Geistlichkeit—Militär. Festschrift für Eckhardt Opitz xum 60. Geburtstag, ed. M. Busch and J. Hillmann (Bochum: Winkler, 1999), 97–100 and 275–276 n. 12, suggests that Bovelles really sent the letter in 1506, since Trithemius responded to it in his 1508 preface to the Polygraphia. See also Arnold, Trithemius, 181–184, and Joseph Victor, Charles de Bovelles, 1479–1553: An Intellectual Biography (Geneva: Droz, 1978), 31–36. A friendly letter to Bovelles of August 22, 1505, appears in Trithemius’s letter collection, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 55 recto–verso, and a friendly reference to him in a letter to Libanius Gallus of 5 October 1507, ibid., fol. 190 recto–verso—but see below on the historicity of the collection in general and letters like these in particular.

61. Pirckheimer, Briefwechsel, 2:555–556, esp. 556.

62. See in general Brann, Abbot Trithemius.

63. Johannes Trithemius, Steganographia, ed. Wolfgang Ernst Heidel (Mainz: Zubrodt, 1676), 147–148.

64. Ibid., 146, 159, 168.

65. John Bailey, “Dee and Trithemius’s ‘Steganography,’” Notes & Queries, 5th ser., 11 (May 24, 1879), 401–402; (May 31, 1879), 422–423 at 402.

66. National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 423, 3: “Admirandum & inestimabile opus Steganographiae A Joanne Tritemio Abbate Spanheymensi Anno Christi 1500 conscriptum nunc demum de tenebris & pulveribus, in quibus sepultum hactenus iacuit, erutum diligentia et studio Jacobi Casteluitrei. Londini 1591.”

67. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

68. Jim Reeds, “Solved: The Ciphers in Book III of Trithemius’s Steganographia,” Cryptologia 22, no. 4 (1998): 291–317; Thomas Ernst, “Schwarzweisse Magie. Der Schlüssel zum dritten Buch der Steganographia des Trithemius,” Daphnis 25 (1996): 1–205.

69. D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958).

70. Ernst, “Schwarzweisse Magie.”

71. Johannes Trithemius, Polygraphiae libri sex ([Reichenau], Haselberger, 1518), sigs. b v recto–Q v recto; cf. Gerhard Strasser, Lingua universalis: Kryptologie und Theorie der Universalsprachen im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1988).

72. Trithemius, Polygraphia, sig. b iv verso.

73. Michele Zopello, Litterarum simulationis liber, University of Pennsylvania Library, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, MS LJS 225, fols. 11 recto, 18 recto.

74. Richard Oosterhoff, “Finding a Voice for Humility in Google Books,” Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study Quarterly 3 (2014): 6–11.

75. Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Quincuplex Psalterium (Paris: Henri Estienne, 1509), fol. 210 recto.

76. Beatus Rhenanus, comment in his copy of Lefèvre d’Étaples 1509, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 2.R.3, fol. 210 recto: “Tritemius abbas homo audaculus hoc polliceri ausus est. Taxatur ille suppresso tamen nomine.” Later on the same page Lefèvre attacks those “qui circea administrant pocula.” Beatus writes: “Latenter taxat P.B.”

77. Girolamo Cardano, Opera, ed. Charles Spon (Lyons: Huguetan & Ravaud, 1663) vol. 3: 234, entered in MS in Trithemius, Polygraphia, Princeton University Library 2014-0879Q, sig. A recto.

78. Ibid.

79. Giambattista della Porta, De occultis literarum notis (Naples: Scotus, 1563).

80. Trithemius, Polygraphia, sig. o verso.

81. Ibid., sig. r v recto.

82. Gerhard Strasser, “Ninth-Century Figural Poetry and Medieval Easter Tables—Possible Inspirations for the Square Tables of Trithemius and Vigènere?” Cryptologia 34 (2010): 22–26.

83. Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); Kathy Eden, Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property, and the Adages of Erasmus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

84. Arnold, “Warum schrieben und sammelten Humanisten ihre Briefe?,” both analyses Trithemius’s correspondence in detail and elegantly sets it into its larger context.

85. Desiderius Erasmus, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen, and H. W. Garrod, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906–1958), 4:290; cf. Ernst, “Schwarzweisse Magie,” 106.

86. Conrad Mutian, Der Briefwechsel des Mutianus Rufus, ed. Carl Krause (Kassel: Im Commissionsverlage von A. Freyschmidt, Hof-Buchhandlung, 1885), 392.

87. Trithemius to Jacob Trithemius, December 28, 1506, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. 730, fol. 95 recto–verso: “Congessimus autem in hoc ipso volumine sexaginta sex epistolas nostras et duodecim alienas ad nos missas coniunximus: que omnes cum ista quidem ad te simul faciunt novem et septuaginta: in quibus more nostro familiari nobis scribendi genere sumus usi: non pro admiracione nostri sequentes eloquenciam que in nobis nulla fuit umquam: sed scholastico sermone quo facile intelligamur.”

88. Trithemius to Libanius, October 5, 1507, ibid, fol. 189 verso = Epistolae, 2.58, 340: “Erunt mihi litere he tue quo ad vixero memoriale sempiternum.” Admittedly, the De copia did not appear until 1512. But the dates Trithemius ascribes to these letters and to the collection as a whole are problematic; see below.

89. Maximilian I, autobiography, ed. Alois Schultz, Jahrbücher der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 6 (1888): 425.

90. Trithemius, “De tribus naturalis magiae principiis,” in Trithemius, De septem secundaeis (Cologne: Birckmann, 1567), 89–90.

91. Trithemius, “De rebus convenientibus vero mago,” ibid., 105.

92. Trithemius, “De tribus principiis,” 90.

93. See David Collins, “Albertus, Magnus or Magus? Magic, Natural Philosophy, and Religious Reform in the Late Middle Ages,” Renaissance Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2010): 1–44.

94. Trithemius, “De rebus convenientibus,” 106–107.

95. Trithemius to Joachim of Brandenburg, November 25, 1506, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 119 recto = Epistolae letter 2.9, 213–214.

96. For these events see Ludovico Lazzarelli (1955), “Epistola Enoch,” Testi umanistici du l’Ermetismo, ed. Eugenio Garin et al. (Rome: Bocca, 1955), available in English translation with other documents and detailed commentary in Wouter Hanegraaff and Ruud Bouthoorn, Ludovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500): The Hermetic Writings and Related Texts (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005).

97. Trithemius, Annalium Hirsaugiensium opus, 2 vols. (St. Gallen: Schlegel, 1690), 2:584–585.

98. Trithemius to Chapelier, 16 August 1507, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 169 verso = Epistolae letter 2.43, 303.

99. Johannes Trithemius, Antipalus maleficiorum (Mainz: Lippius, 1605).

100. Quoted by Paul Lehmann, Merwürdigkeiten des Abtes Johannes Trithemius. Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse, 1961, Heft 2, 24: “Meum de magicis experimentis codicem quem habes mihi oro quantocius curato remittere …”; 25: “Ficini varias translationes nuper vidi Latinas. Pici Mirandulani excellentissimi viri, multa volumina fulgentissima legi.”

101. Trithemius to Jacobus Kymolanus, 16 August 1507, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 730, 170 ro = Epistolae, letter 2.44, 304.

102. See esp. R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), and Revealing the Secrets of the Jews: Johannes Pfefferkorn and Christian Writings about Jewish Life and Literature in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017).

103. See David Price, Johannes Reuchlin and the Campaign to Destroy Jewish Books (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

104. Johannes Reuchlin, Recommendation Whether to Confiscate, Destroy, and Burn All Jewish Books: A Classic Treatise against Anti-Semitism, trans. and ed. Peter Wortsman; critical introduction by Elisheva Carlebach (New York: Paulist, 2000); Erika Rummel, The Case against Johann Reuchlin: Religious and Social Controversy in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

105. Trithemius, Liber octo quaestionum, sig. B4 recto–verso; sigs. B 5 verso–[B 6 recto]; sig. [B6 verso].

106. Trithemius, Liber octo quaestionum, sig. D verso.

107. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS hebr. 234; see Lehmann, Merwürdigkeiten, 33.

108. Mutian, Briefwechsel, 348: “Cordi est huic hebraica disciplina atque adeo tuam pietatem et Janum Reuchlin sive Capnionem, nihil tamen minus quam Capnionem, salutare constituit. Delectatur etiam magorum honestioribus mysteriis, quae tibi penitus perspecta sunt et cognita.” Mutian’s dry little joke about Reuchlin’s name (Capnion is Greek for Räuchlein, a whiff of smoke, and he says that Reuchlin in Greek is Capnion, but he could not be more different from a whiff of smoke), is hard to render economically.

109. Brann, Abbot Trithemius, xiii, 94.

110. Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek MS C IV, fol. 134 verso: “Omnia enim miracula demonum phantasmata sunt que nullam penitus continent veritatem: ut pote qui sanctorum spirituum vera et manifesta cupiunt gestiuntque imitari signa: quemadmodum symiorum curiositas facta hominum queque viderit in similitudine solum imitatur.”

111. Trithemius, Liber octo quaestionum, sig. C4 recto: “Omnia daemonum miracula aut sunt fantasmata, aut naturali quadam industria facta. Nam si homines in occultioribus naturae mysteriis experti, quadam abstrusa caeteris applicatione materiae ad formam inconsuetos et mirandos producunt effectus: sicuti ex rore coeli naturales formare anguilas, ex vitulinis carnibus apes, ex quibusdam radicibus herbarum serpentes, et his multa similia, ne dicam maiora, sicut nos in plerisque probatio fecit expertos: quis neget daemones subtilioris naturae et maioris experientiae plura posse operari naturaliter miranda, quae nulli hominum sunt manifesta.”

112. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 386–389. This in turn is similar in general, but not in detail, to the animal-making passages found in Picatrix 4.9 (Picatrix, ed. Pingree, 226–227).

113. Johannes Trithemius, Nepiachus, in War Dr. Faustus in Kreuznach? Realität und Fiktion im Faust-Bild des Abtes Johannes Trithemius (Alzey: Verlag der Rheinhessischen Druckwerkstätte Alzey, 2003), 47–68 at 54.

114. Ibid., 54–55.

115. Ibid., 56.

116. Ibid., 57.

117. Ibid.

118. Trithemius to Jean Chapelier, July 8, 1505, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 19 recto = Epistolae, letter 1.15, 35–36; Libanius to Trithemius, June 6, 1505, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. fol. 53 verso = Epistolae, letter 1.37, 98.

119. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Pal.lat. 730, fol. 141 recto = Epistolae, letter 2.22, 253: “Vt ergo summatim universa thianei miracula concludam: si fecit ea que sui miranda in eius laude scripserunt: magus profecto et demonum larvarumque infernalium excantator fuit. Si non fecit, ut mea sentencia habet, nulli dubium esse potest, quin omnia per damidem ceterosque discipulos eius sint excogitata conficta et ementita: ut falsis magistrum exornarent laudibus: quo et ipsi gloriam inter mortales consequerentur eternam.”

120. Trithemius, Nepiachus, 57–58.

121. Ibid., 63–64.

122. Trithemius. De septem secundaeis, 105.

123. Ibid.

124. Trithemius to Jacob Trithemius, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. Lat. 730, fol. 2 verso = Epistolae, letter 1.3, 4.

125. Trithemius to Jacob Trithemius, 31 April 1505, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. Lat. 730, fol. 4 recto = Epistolae, letter 1.5, 7.

126. Trithemius to Rutger Sycamber de Verday, 12 July 1505, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. Lat. 730, fol. 24 recto = Epistolae, letter 1.20. 44–46.

127. Joachim of Brandenburg to Trithemius, 28 May 1507, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. Lat. 730, fol. 142 recto = Epistolae, letter 2.23, 265: “Reliqua vero secretiora que ore ferenda commisi penes te maneant donec eum [the archbishop elector of Cologne] personaliter accedere potueris”; Trithemius to Hermann, archbishop of Cologne, June 5, 1507, ibid., fol. 142 verso = Epistolae, letter 2.24, 255–256.

128. Trithemius to Libanius, 20 August 1505, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. Lat. 730, fol. 54 recto = Epistolae, letter 1.38, 99: “Melancius totum cum suis in nos malum suscitavit: quem non dubitamus casurum in foveam quam paravit”; Wolfgang Hopylius to Trithemius, July 29, 1505, ibid., fol. 51 recto; Trithemius to Hopylius, 24 August 1505, ibid., fols. 52 verso–53 recto.

129. Trithemius to de Ganay, August 24, 1505, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. Lat. 730, fol. 50 verso = Epistolae, letter 1.34, 93–94.

130. Trithemius, “De rebus convenientibus,” 111–112.

131. Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek C IV, fols. 137 verso–138 recto: “Sunt autem qui dicant mentem sive spiritum qui est in ipso homine miranda posse producere spectacula. sicuti sunt futura predicere. occulta reserare. curare morbos. hominumque subito mutare affectiones. Sed iste miraculorum modus sicuti est subtilis et multum difficilis: sic et paucissimis omnino comprehensibilis. Tria enim huius ferunt rei principia: quibus cognitis magna posse fieri per hominem existimant. primum in unitate consistens per binarium in quaternarium consurgit. Vnitas vero in quaternarium rite deducta numerum facit omnibus perfectum. Monadis ignarus principii nihil in ternario proficiet: et ad sacrum pyctagore quaternarium non pertinget. Secundum vero principium ordine non dignitate per binarium operatur in uno: et est unum et non est unum: est simplex et in quaternario componitur: quo igne purgato solari. perfectum rursus in suam simplicitatem revertitur. Hic est centrum sapiencie chaldeorum. qui miraculis claruerunt: quod nostre puritas religionis particulariter habet suspectum: que animam in corpore morantem operari ad extra sine mediatore non concedit: quod tamen physicus admittit: experiencia multorum possibilitatem facti demonstrante. Principium vero tercium per se quidem non est principium: sed in binario constat. Compositum et varium est: et per septenarium in ternarium octies multiplicatum consurgens fixum manet: et in nullo facilius quam in ipso error negligencie contingit. Vtrum vero se quispiam exterarum potestatum intermisceat his principiis operanti. difficile prorsus est iudicare: quandoquidem mente in summitatis vertice constituta libera et semipar angelis facta. sensibus iam non utitur: nec mole corporis gravatur.”

132. For the larger background see in general Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. Edwin Minar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); S. K. Heninger Jr., Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1974), and Michael Allen, Nuptial Arithmetic: Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on the Fatal Number in Book VIII of Plato’s Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

133. Trithemius to Germain de Ganay, 1505; Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Pal.lat. 730, fol. 48 verso = Epistolae, 89–90.

134. See, for example, Jacques Gohory, De usu et mysteriis notarum liber (Paris: apud V. Sertanas, 1550), sig. Hiij verso, summarized in the margins by John Dee (Cambridge University Library LE 19.8 (2).

135. Trithemius, Liber octo quaestionum, Cambridge University Library H* 15.9 (F), sigs. D 2 verso–D 3 recto: “Cum prosequerer adolescens studia literarum, in uno lecto quatuor eramus nocte quadam dormientes. Surrexit e latere meo coaevus & dormiens, ut solebat, in somnis, domum oculis clausis et luna introlucente quinta decima quasi vigil circumambulabat, Ascendit muros, et aelurum agilitate sua vincebat, lectum quoque secundo et tertio sopitus transcendit, calcavit nos pedibus omnes, nec magis sensimus pondus, quam si mus nos contigisset exiguus. Quocunque dormiens corpus movebatur, subito ianuarum omnes ultra aperiebantur clausurae. Altiora domus aedificia velocissime penetravit et more passeris haerebat in tectis. Visa loquor non vaga relatione audita.” John Dee comments: “Mirandum.”

136. Ibid., sig. C5 recto (Dee): “Hoc nobis det Deus aliquando.”

137. On Dee and angels see Deborah Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy and the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Stephen Clucas, “John Dee’s Angelic Conversations and the Ars Notoria: Renaissance Magic and Medieval Theurgy,” in John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in Renaissance Thought, ed. Stephen Clucas (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 231–273.

138. Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes, 61–63; original text ibid., 60. He did not reveal that his story came from Cesarius of Heisterbach.

139. Jean Dupèbe, “Curiosité et magie chez Johannes Trithemius,” in La curiosité à la Renaissance, ed. Jean Céard (Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1986), 71–97; analyzes this side of Trithemius’s work admirably.

140. Ibid., 86–88; Peter of Blois and Trithemius, Paralipomena opusculorum, ed. Joannes Busaeus SJ (Cologne: Wulffraht, 1624), 391–392.

141. See in general Das Buch als magisches und als Repräsentationsobjekt, Wolfenbütteler Mittelalter-Studien, 5, ed. Peter Ganz (Wiesbaden: In Kommission bei Otto Harrassowitz, 1992); The Use of Sacred Books in the Ancient World, Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and Theology, 22, ed. L. V. Rutgers, P. W. van der Horst, H. W. Havelaar and L. Teugels (Leuven: Peeters, 1998); Don Skemer, Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006).

142. Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993; repr. with a new preface, 2015).

143. Trithemius to Conrad Celtis, July 1, 1507, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 155 verso = Epistolae, letter 2.33, 279.

144. Trithemius to Joachim of Brandenburg, 26 June 1503, Trithemius, De septem secundaeis, 110–111.

145. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Des Kaisers alte Kleider: Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des Alten Reiches (Munich: Beck, 2008), translated as The Emperor’s Old Clothes: Constitutional History and the Symbolic Language of the Holy Roman Empire, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York: Berghahn, 2015).

146. Trithemius, Nepiachus, 55–56.

147. Trithemius to Libanius, October 5, 1507; Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 189 verso = Epistolae, letter 2.58, 340: “Magnis mirandisque in philosophia scatent archanis: que meo iudicio nullius capiet mortalis intellectus: qui tuo prius non fuerit magisterio imbutus.”

148. For the dates see the subscriptions in Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Pal. lat. 730, which were not reprinted in the 1536 edition by its editor, Jacob Spiegel: (fol. 95 verso) “Ioannis tritemii abbatis spanhemensis ac postea sancti iacobi herbipolensis liber epistolarum spanheimensium ultimus explicit. scriptus manu eius propria et completus Anno christianorum Mill. D. vi. decembris. xxviii. die”: (fol. 191 verso) “Ioannis tritemii abbatis monasterii sancti iacobi apostoli in suburbano herbipolensi quondam spanhemensis liber epistolarum herbipolensium primus finit scriptus manu eius propria et completus xvi. die mensis octobris Anno christianorum Millesimo D. septimo.”

149. Joachim of Brandenburg to Trithenius, Saint Burchard’s day 1505, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 117 recto–verso; Trithemius to Joachim, November 25, 1506, ibid., fol. 118 verso; Joachim to Trithemius, March 6, 1507, ibid., fol. 127 recto–verso; Trithemius to Joachim, April 9, 1507, ibid., fol. 134 verso; Joachim to Trithemius, May 19, 1507, ibid., fol. 135 verso.

150. Trithemius to Chapelain, August 16, 1507, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 169 verso = Epistolae, letter 2.43, 303.

151. Trithemius to Kymolanus, August 16, 1507, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 170 recto = Epistolae, letter 2.44, 304.

152. Trithemius to Libanius, October 5, 1507, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 189 verso = Epistolae, letter 2.58, 340.

153. See the articles collected in Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic, ed. Claire Fanger (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), and Dupèbe, “Curiosité et Magie.”

154. Pirckherimer, Briefwechsel, 2: 555: “De peculiari tua oratione ad proprium Angelum quid senseris … aut scripseris … [the letter is unfortunately preserved in an incomplete copy].”

155. “De arte crucifixi Pelagii Solitarii. Doctrina non vulgaris,” British Library MS Harl. 181, fols. 75 recto–81 recto at 75 recto: “Omnia bona in mundi scibilia, huius artis misterio hominis recte operantis intellectui sese miraculose offerunt: et subito ex idiota et imperitissimo in omni scientia, doctissimus redditur.”

156. Ibid.

157. Ibid., fol. 75 verso: “Tunc fac tibi fieri per manus sculptoris ymaginem Domini nostri in cruce bracchiis expansis, de more pendentis, de ligno novo et mundo quercino, aut olivarum, aut lauri ligno; quod in nullo alio ante usu fuerit manuali, neque in loco fetido et immundo fuit proiectum, in feria sexta. Et quanto ymago ipsa Crucifixi fuerit pulchrior, et ad similitudinem patientis vicinior, tanto erit ad operationes efficatior.”

158. Ibid.: “Completa ergo ymagine atque perfecta, facias ex corio rubri coloris fieri capsulam unam tante capacitatis ut ymaginem panniculo perlucido involutam possit recipere. In qua etiam omni tempore, cum non opereris per eam: tunc eam mundissime servabis …”

159. Ibid., fols. 75 verso–76 recto: “deinde habens ad manum sacerdotem fidelem tuis operationibus congruentem, honeste conversationis, bonum, castum, atque devotum, et huic ymaginem istam Crucifixi offerens, consecrandam cum peticione humili, et fiat sub una missa de passione Domini in sexta feria quacunque per annum.”

160. Ibid., fol. 76 recto: “Atque iste est modus operandi in hac arte. Qui tamen in parvis et non urgentibus rebus nullatenus debet exerceri; sed tantum in re ardua et magna.”

161. Ibid.: “si<s> mundus a peccato originali, nec pollutus mulieribus, neque alio quovis genere pollutionum: sis sobrius, non nimium cibo et potu repletus, sine turbatione mentis, sine pollutione, per triduum, absque melancholia, seu occupatione fixa aliarum cogitationum.”

162. Ibid.: “et cameram habeas secretam, nitidam, mundam, ab immunditiis aranearum, et pulveris, et clausam: sisque solus dormiens in ea: sit etiam stratus mundus …”

163. Ibid., fol. 75 recto–verso: “et in ea in modum altaris mensula mundis lintheis cooperta, et super eam duo candelabra cum cereis benedictis in Purificatione ardentes. Et omnibus ita dispositis, tandem proferas crucem extra capsulam, super mensulam locando dices devote …”

164. Ibid., fol. 80 recto: “Tandem surgens aspergas aqua benedicta lectum, crucem, cameram, per circuitum, ac te ipsum, et extinctis luminaribus te dormitum reponas, nil aliud orando, aut loquendo, intras In nomine Patris et filii et spiritus sancti lectum tuum. Interim autem dum non potes dormire, revolve ea verba: Ihesu veritas aeterna ostende veritatem.”

165. Ibid.: “Si hoc cum puritate operatus fueris; apparebit tibi dormienti in sompnis veritas ipsa personaliter; et respondebit tibi ad omnia interrogata, quae non sunt divine maiestati contraria, aliquando clare et manifeste: aliquando in similitudine enigmatis …”

166. Ibid., fol. 80 verso: “Et si bene in operacione processeris; ipsamque in consuetudinem duxeris; apparebit tibi Crucifixus interdum etiam non rogatus; loqueturque tecum ore ad os, sicut amicus ad amicum; docens in pluribus veritatem, a qua poteris scire omnis questionis dubie veritatem, vel pro te, vel pro alio.”

167. Ibid.: “Etiam scire poterimus occultas cogitaciones, et earum actiones, eventum futurorum, thesaurum absconditum, funem, lationem, valetudinem amici et inimici, complementum artium, Alkimiam, medicinam, theologiam, reliquasque scientias vel artes, mineras, vires, virtutes, lapidum vim, et colligationes verborum, officia et nomina spirituum, atque characteres bonorum et malorum, proprietatesque creaturarum, caeteraque in mundo scibilia per istud experimentum leviter consequeris …”

168. Trithemius to Masseeu, August 16, 1507, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 172 recto = Epistolae, letter 2.45, 308–309.

169. Trithemius to Veldicus, August 12, 1507, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 165 verso = Epistolae, letter 2.41, 296–297.

170. Trithemius to Theodoricus Mosellanus, 1 September 1507, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 730, fol. 186 recto = Epistolae, letter 2.54, 334.

171. Trithemius, Liber octo quaestionum, Cambridge University Library H* 15.9 (F), sig. D2 recto: “Sunt autem qui praescriptis tribus modis adijciunt quartum, dicentes mentem sive spiritum ipsius hominis posse naturaliter miranda facere: modo sciat se ab omni adventitio in sepipsam supra sensum in unitatem revocare.”

172. Trithemius, Vita Rabani Mauri, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 850, fol. 93 recto-verso: “Meditacionem dominice passionis in corde suo singulari devocione quotidie solebat revolvere: et pro morte salvatoris innocentissima lachrimans et gemens gracias referre. Fertur enim sanctam in consuetudinem duxisse. ut numquam cibum sumeret: nisi prius gracias agens. vitam. actus. et passionem domini et salvatoris nostri iesu christi. ab incarnacione incipiens usque ad ascensum eius in celum. per singulos articulos meditando. gemendo et orando percurrisset. In argumentum est veritatis opus illud de laudibus sancti [!] crucis. in quo summa diligencia et devocione mysteria dominice passionis enodavit. Nisi enim christo pacienti magnopere fuisset compassus: tanta laudum preconia nunquam in eius passionis memoriam scribere potuisset. Verum quia mentem christo compacientem habuit: vires quas negavit infirmitas. pietas ministravit. Omnium namque spiritualium exerciciorum dominice passionis est maximum: in quo monachus qui recto et sapido modo fuerit assiduus: cito magnum inveniet conversacionis interne profectum. Monachum in hac sancta meditacione homini mundano preposui: propterea quod exutus negociis secularibus. ad meditacionem dominice passionis. vite. et mortis. aptior iure censetur.

Rhabani autem conversacio multum segregata fuit a mundo: propterea factus est deo proximus: et sibi per binarium in ternario monostice unitus. Huius sanctissime conversionis ad monadem ternarii mysterium nemo utiliter intelligit: qui adhuc viciorum pulvere sordescit. Quisquis enim purgatus a voluptatibus carnis. et segregatus a vanis mundi sollicitudinibus in domo domini secum solus habitat: iam oculos mentis apertos habere laudabiliter incipit: et nihil preter deum solum vel amat vel metuit.”

173. London, British Library Add. MS 15, 102, fol. 1 recto: “Hec eadem virgo beata ab infancia sua divinis semper revelacionibus visitata multa scripsit non sensu humano sed quemadmodum in vera visione illa didicit … In omnibus autem opusculis suis beata hildegardis mistice valde et obscure procedit: unde nisi a religiosis et devotis vix eius scripta intelliguntur … Nec mirum. Omnia enim que scripsit per revelacionem didicit et sensum et verba que mistica sunt et preciosa nec ante porcos i. carnales homines ponenda ne quod non intelligent irridere incipient et spernere. Animalis siquidem homo ea que spiritus sunt percipere non valet quod licet audiat vento spiritus quo vult spirante non tamen scit unde veniat vel quo vadet. Spirituali autem homini eciam innotescunt spiritualia quoniam qui acquiescunt deo intelligent veritatem. Amen.”

174. Pelagius eremita, Liber anacriseon, Bibliothèque Nationale Paris MS Lat. 7456:

“Vnitas et Monas frequenter ponuntur pro mente Divina, et principio totius.

Binarius aliquando pro intellectu Angelico <aliquando> pro mente humana, praesertim quando ternarius non sequitur.

Ternarius pro Anima sive mente humana semper accipitur, nisi quoties de sancta trinitate sermo proprie habetur.

Quaternarius in hoc volumine pro operatione mentis ponitur, quamvis alias philosophia saepius, pro humano corpore accipiat, ut Deus, Angelus, Anima, corpus.”

175. William Newman, “Thomas Vaughan as an Interpreter of Agrippa von Nettesheim,” Ambix 29, no. 3 (1982): 125–140 at 129–130.

176. A. Goldmann, Zwei unedierte Briefe des Abtes Johannes Trithemius (Brünn: Druck der Raigerner Benedictiner in Brünn, 1883), 5–6.

177. See John Monfasani, Fernando of Cordoba: A Biographical and Intellectual Profile, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 82, pt. 6 (1992). He noted that Professor Zambelli shared his doubts about the existence of Pelagius or Libanius.

178. Compare, for example, Libanius to Trithemius, June 6, 1505, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat.730, fol. 53 recto, with Trithemius, Epistolae, sig. a2 recto and 97; Trithemius to Libanius, August 20, 1505, ibid., fol. 54 recto, with Trithemius, Epistolae, sig. a 2 recto and 99; Gerbelius to Trithemius, May 12, 1507, ibid., fol. 152 recto, with Trithemius, Epistolae, sig. a4 recto and 272.

179. Rutger Sycamber to Trithemius, December 1, 1506, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 730, fols. 122 verso–124 recto; Ioannes de Woesbrouck to Trithemius, March 4, 1507, ibid., fols. 150 recto–151 recto.

180. Compare, for example, Trithemius’s two versions of the story of a shepherd who depended on the devil when he thought a saint was protecting his pigs, Trithemius, Liber octo quaestionum, sigs. [C8 verso]–D recto: “Erat homo quidam custos porcorum, qui schedulam bacillo intercluserat nomen divi martyris Blasii continentem: cui tantum fidei detulit, ut baculo in medio gregis terrae affixo lupum ab accessu prohibitum crederet omnem. Hac stulta confidentia per longam experientiam tandem roborata, ibat homo securus quocunque volebat, dimittens sine periculo in nemore porcos cum luporum iam nullus haberet accessum. Contigit pertransire videntem absente pastore, qui cernens daemonem custodiam habere gregis, dixit ad eum: Quid miser hic agis? Qui respondit: Istos custodio porcos. At ille: Quis tibi curam porcorum commisit? Iterum respondit: Stulta confidentia pastoris. Nam schedulam quandam bacillo inclusam magnae putat esse virtutis, qua Blasii cuiusdam meritis lupi arceantur a porcis: suam peccavit in legem, et nostras sequitur vanitates. Verum quia invocatus non comparet, ego ne homo confidentiam suam amitteret, porcos eius custodio: et me pro Blasio libens suppono. Ita, inquit, mortales vanis coniurationibus nos molestant, ut nisi velimus aestimationem nostri et honorem apud eos perdere omnem, necesse sit ut eorum invocationibus stultis plerumque occurramus” and Upsala Universitetsbibliotek MS C IV, fols. 136 verso–137 recto: “Erat in vvestrasiorum territorio paucos ante annos homo simplex custos porcorum. qui oracionem de sancto blasio martyre in summitate baculi portabat inclusam. cui plurimum confidebat. Nam quociens volebat ire ad tabernam vel ad oppidum vico proximum. gregem porcorum tercio cum baculo circuiens postea illum fixit in terram. nullasque iam luporum incursiones metuens. quorsum voluisset abibat securus. Mira res. Circundabant porci fixum interea bacillum, et nusquam discurrebant donec pastor rediret: neque luporum quisquam accessit. Tandem vero contigit quendam preterire hominem cuius deus aperuit oculos. et vidit manifeste demonem porcos ne diffugerent custodientem, cui dixit. Quid hic facis miser? Ille respondit. Istos quos cernis porcellos rusticorum custodio. Cui homo. Quis tibi hanc tradidit curam? Ad quem diabolus. Homo inquit iste fatuellus deo et cuidam blasio porcellos oracione baculo inclusa pascendos committens abijt in tabernam. Ego autem quia nec deus illum exaudire dignatur nec blasius. cum essem ociosus accessi, satisfacturus peticionibus eius: ne tanta confidentia quam habet in baculo cupito frustretur effectu. Ita inquit fatui homines suis coniuracionibus nos molestant: ut nisi velimus spem nostram et honorem penitus negligere: eorum votis aliquociens compellimur subvenire.”

181. On the role of fantasy in German humanist visions of the national and local pasts, see Borchardt, German Antiquity, and Christopher Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

182. Walter Stephens, “Berosus Chaldaeus: Counterfeit and Fictive Editors of the Early Sixteenth Century,” PhD diss., Cornell University, 1979; Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990; new ed. 2019); Stephens, Giants in Those Days (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Ingrid Rowland, “Annius of Viterbo and the Beginning of Etruscan Studies,” in A Companion to the Etruscans, ed. Sinclair Bell (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2015), 431–445; Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450–1800, ed. Earle Havens and Walter Stephens (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).

183. Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991; repr. with corrections, 1994), 93.

184. Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

185. Trithemius, Compendium sive breviarium primi voluminis annalium sive historiarum, de origine regum et gentis Francorum (Paris: Christian Wechel, 1539), 4.

186. Ibid., 12–13.

187. See the superb article by Nikolaus Staubach, “Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit: Die historiographischen Fiktionen des Johannes Trithemius im Licht seines wissenschaftlichen Selbstverständnisses,” in Fälschungen im Mittelalter, 5 vols. (Hanover: Hahn, 1988), 1:263–316, and for the larger background see the erudite and comprehensive study of Alastair Hamilton, The Apocryphal Apocalypse: The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999).

188. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana 5.41, 6.29, 6.31, 6. 33, 8.27.

189. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana 8.28.

190. Neither the 1501–1504 Aldine edition of Philostratus’s life nor the 1502 Bologna edition of the Latin translation contained the separate collection of ninety-seven letters ascribed to Apollonius in antiquity, nor do early scholars seem to have mentioned them.

Chapter 5

1. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres (Cologne: Soter, 1533); Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Hr 4º 1, owned by Heinrich Duden OSB (hereafter “Duden,”). This book contains notes in two hands, one neater than the other; most notes seem, however, to be by Duden. For an exception see the note on 1.54, 68 (“Aranea a superioribus filum ducens, spem venturae pecuniae nunciare dicitur”): “probatum est, 23. Febr. Aº *. 1626.”

2. On Duden see Walter Ziegler, Die Bursfelder Kongregation in der Reformationszeit, dargestellt an Hand der Generalkapitelsrezesse der Bursfelder Kongregation (Münster Westfalen: Aschendorff, 1968). His abbey, a Carolingian foundation, was at Essen-Werden on the Ruhr.

3. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres, ed. V. Perrone Compagni (Leiden, New York and Cologne: Brill, 1992), 1.54,196: “Ipse etiam monachorum occursus vulgo ominosus habetur, magis autem si matutinus fuerit: quia id hominum genus plurimum e mortuario veluti vultures ex morticiniis victitat.”

4. Duden, ibid: “Nota bene. Monachi semper infausti, praecipue Franciscani, et ratio de hac re.” On the other hand, at I.58, where Agrippa described the feat of one Nicolaus de Saxo, “quem in eremo duobus et viginti annis, quousque vita excessit, sine omni cibo vixisse constat” (77), Duden remarked: “Vltra naturam admiranda de ciborum ac potus abstinentia,” an exclamation that seems to reflect a sound Benedictine sensibility. Cf also his note on Agrippa’s description of the dress of the Bragmani Indorum in 3.54, 324: “Hunc ritum modo sequuntur Episcopi ac prelati.”

5. Duden on 2.3, De occulta philosophia, 1533, 102; “Lege Bullengerii commentaria in Apocalipsin.” Heinrich Bullinger’s Centum conciones on the book of Revelation were published by Oporinus in Basel in 1557. Cf. also the interesting notes on revelations to individuals in 3.61, 335 and 336: “pontificum de hac materia diversa ac optime cum verbo dei coniuncta”; “Lege et Iacob. Stapulensem de quodam sacerdote in hispania suo tempore miranda facienti.” In a note on 3.30, 276, Duden cites another Protestant writer, Sebastian Münster: “Vide Munsterum in historiis cesarum” (on the Roman and Holy Roman emperors’ use of seals in their letters, a relatively neutral topic). Duden also took an interest in more orthodox sources, both as he encountered them cited by Agrippa and as he knew them on his own; see, for example, Duden on 2.35, 179, commenting on Aquinas’s views on the power of the stars: “Observa Aquinatis sentent: In eadem opinione est et Beda”; Duden on 3.19, 247: “Augustini de Daemone sententia.”

6. Ziegler, Die Bursfelder Kongregation, 63, 104, 120.

7. For the book’s acquisition see n. 9 below. A note dated 1554 is quoted n. 16 below; a book published in 1557 is mentioned in the note quoted in n. 5 above; and a note dated 1567 appears in n. 164 below. Duden’s interest in Agrippa evidently extended over a good many years.

8. Duden, note on title page, De occulta philosophia, 1533: “O hinrice plus scivisti quam scripsisti”; cf. ibid. where he quotes Persius 1.27: “Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter?”

9. Ibid.: “D. Hinricho dudeno coenobitae Werdenensi attineo eumque (relicto priore scilicet N. philosophiae huius unico cultore) nunc meum agnosco herum. anno a nativitate filii dei altissimi Iesu. 1550.”

10. Ibid., sig. aa ii verso: “Scientia non habet inimicum nisi ignorantem”; “Lege et miraberis”; sig. aa v recto: “Lege cum observatione diligenti: chare Lector, et miraberis minimeque poenitebit.”

11. Ibid., sig. [aa v verso]: “Cum sedula lectione ac observatione ac in marginibus annotatiunculis per me hinrichum duden Werdenensem Coenobitam asscriptis.”

12. Ibid., on 2.16, 138: “hac in arte praecipue excelluit Beda Anglicus, doctus vir”; 139: “De hac numerandi mannum gesticulatione vidi aliquando in Monasterio Leisbonnensi in quodam antiquo libro manuscripto mirabilem et artificiosam picturam de arte numerandi per manuum ac digitorum demonstrationem.” Cf. ibid., 2.19, 142: “Similem numerandi formam habeo apud me in antiquissimo quodam codice conscriptam.” The monastery of Liesborn or Leisborn, a Carolingian foundation like Werden, was in Wadersloh, in Münsterland. For the traditional methods to which Agrippa and Duden refer see Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) and Clare Richter Sherman et al., Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Carlisle, PA: The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, with the participation of The Folger Shakespeare Library; Seattle: Distributed by University of Washington Press, 2000).

13. Duden, note on 1.49, De occulta philosophia, 1533, 57: “Valde obscurum legenti, nisi qui priora penitus [non] introspexerit”; 2.22, 153 (misnumbered 253): “hoc valde obscurum et non facile. ingeniosus pervestigare potest”; cf. 1.48, 66 on divination from the behavior of birds: “Observatu dignum. Hoc plane non est refellendum, nam hoc nostra aetate exploratum habemus.”

14. Ibid., on 2.3, 102: “bona allegatio.”

15. Ibid., 1.6, 9: “Anno 1546 ego idem fieri vidi a quodam artis huius professore in lunae umbra ac lamina plumbea.”

16. Ibid. 1.64, 85: “Simile contigit et mihi febricitanti anno 1554” (not a completely random remark, since Duden took an interest in disease and treatises about it, as is clear from his note on 3.11, 230: “Similia lege apud Michaelem Savonarolam. de febribus”; 1.65, 86 (on producing white peacocks by surrounding their nests with white cloths): “Hoc vidi aliquandum fieri, et est verum.”

17. Ibid., 1.9, 14: “Idem fieri vidi a quodam qui manum in liquefactum cuprum misit, nihilque detrimenti passus”; cf. Duden on 361 (on the description of writing with blood on a mirror in the chapter De praestigiis from De vanitate: “Consimile ego vidi a quodam fieri in lamina plumbea graphio quodam inscripta. anno 1546”; Duden on 14: “Propterea interdicta est candentis ferri probatio apud Christianos. Nam scriptum est, non temptabis dominum deum tuum.”

18. See Charles Zika, “Agrippa of Nettesheim and His Appeal to the Cologne Council in 1533: The Politics of Knowledge in Early Sixteenth-Century Germany,” in Humanism in Cologne, ed. James Mehl (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 1991), 119–174.

19. Martín Del Rio SJ, Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (Cologne: Hermann Demen, 1679), bk.II, qu. ii, 108; qu. 3, 110.

20. On Del Rio, a learned philologist, see Roland Mayer, “Personata Stoa: Neostoicism and Senecan Tragedy,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994): 151–174; Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); P. G. Maxwell-Stuart’s introduction to Martín Del Rio SJ, Investigations into Magic, trans. and ed. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000); Paola Aretini, I fantasmi degli antichi tra Riforma e Controriforma: Il soprannaturale greco-latino nella trattatistica teologica del Cinquecento (Bari: Levante, 2000), 219–225, 237–238, from whom I borrow the nicely appropriate term ”mosaic”; and the marvelous comprehensive account in Jan Machielsen, Martin Delrio: Scholarship and Demonology in the Counter-Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2015).

21. Del Rio, Disquisitiones, bk. II, qu. xii, sec. 10, 164.

22. Ibid., bk. II, qu. xxix, sec. 1, 339–340.

23. Pasquale Lopez, Inquisizione, stampa e censura nel Regno di Napoli tra ‘500 e ‘600 (Naples: Edizioni del delfino, 1974), 70–71, 73–4, 77, 179–182, 187–189, 216; Ruth Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice, 1560–1650 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 89, 96, 120; David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), 229.

24. Wolfgang Schmitz, “Das humanistische Verlagsprogramm Johannes Soters,” in Humanismus in Köln, ed. Mehl, 77–117; Zika, “Agrippa and His Appeal.”

25. The biography by Charles Nauert, Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), remains very useful. The most important additions to our knowledge of Agrippa’s life and work on magic appear in the many pioneering studies by Paola Zambelli, all based on massive exploration of unpublished and unstudied materials. e.g.: “Cornelio Agrippa: scritti inediti e dispersi,” Rinascimento 16 (1965): 195–316; “Agrippa von Nettesheim in den neueren kritischen Studien und Handschriften,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 51 (1969): 264–295; “Corneille Agrippa, Erasme et la théologie humaniste,” Colloquia Erasmiana Turonensia, 2 vols. (Paris: Vrin, 1972), 1:113–159; “Magic and Radical Reformation in Agrippa of Nettesheim,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976): 69–103; Di un’opera sconosciuta di Cornelio Agrippa. Il Dialogus de vanitate scientiarum et ruina christianae religionis (Castrocaro Terme: Zauli, 1982); “Scholastiker und Humanisten. Agrippa und Trithemius zur Hexerei. Die natürliche Magie und die Entstehung kritischen Denkens,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 67 (1985): 41–79; L’ambigua natura della magia: filosofi, streghe, riti nel Rinascimento (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1992; 3d ed. Venice: Marsilio, 1996); “Cornelius Agrippa, ein kritischer Magus,” in Die okkulten Wissenschaften in der Renaissance, ed. August Buck (Wiesbaden: In Kommission bei Otto Harrassowitz, 1992), 65–89. Zika, “Agrippa and His Appeal,” offers a superb study of the immediate contexts within which Agrippa’s career unrolled, while Marc van der Poel provides the first rigorous study of his place in the larger humanist movement in Cornelius Agrippa, the Humanist Theologian and His Declamations (Leiden, New York, and Cologne: Brill, 1997). Perrone Compagni’s edition of the De occulta philosophia is exemplary both as a presentation of the text and as a penetrating analysis of its sources and development.

26. Zika, “Agrippa and His Appeal.”

27. Zambelli, “Magic and Radical Reformation.”

28. Heinrich Kramer, Malleus maleficarum, ed. Christopher Mackay, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pt. II, qu. i, chap. 4. On these aspects of the Malleus see Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

29. Agrippa to Officialis at Metz, 1519; Agrippa, Opera in duos tomos concinne digesta, 2 vols. (Lyon: per Beringos fratres, n.d.), vol. 2, pt. 2, 80–81.

30. See esp. Zambelli, “Scholastiker und Humnaisten”; Wolfgang Ziegeler, Möglichkeiten der Kritik am Hexen- und Zauberwesen im ausgehenden Mittelalter: Zeitgenössische Stimmen und ihre soziale Zugehörigkeit (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1973); Zika, “Agrippa and His Appeal”; van der Poel, Agrippa the Theologian, 36–37. Vera Hoorens and Hans Renders, “Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Witchcraft: A Reappraisal,” Sixteenth Century Journal 43, no. 1 (2012): 3–18, show that Agrippa accepted the existence of witchcraft and approved of the capital punishment of convicted witches. Their treatment of the Metz case, ibid., 7–9, emphasizes his concentration on procedural issues and his distaste for the inquisitor.

31. Cf. esp. Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke, “Therapeutische Vorstellungen bei Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535),” Deutsche Apotheker-Zeitung 51/52 (1972): 2070–2073.

32. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia 1.51; ed. Perrone Compagni, 183.

33. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia 1.42; ibid., 164–165. For Agrippa’s sources see Perrone Compagni’s notes, ibid.

34. Duden, on 1.42, Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, 1533, 49.

35. Ibid., 1.49, 1533, 57: “Hoc ipse magno cum pavore expertus.”

36. Ibid., 1.50, 1533, 59: “a quadam venefica meo tempore Hammone carnifici factum”; 1.20, 26: “Hoc factum est annis paucis praeterlapsis Hammone a venefica quae carnificem tali aspectu infecerat.” On 3.19, 248, Duden remarks on Agrippa’s discussion of incubi and succubi: “Veneficarum praestigia”; “Plus de Incubis quam Succubis legimus: quare de foemineo sexu demonum multi dubitant”; and, at the very end of the chapter, “Ita Sage imaginantur.”

37. See in general Pierre Béhar, Les langues occultes de la Renaissance: essai sur la crise intellectuelle de l’Europe au XVIe siècle (Paris: Editions Desjonquères, 1996), and the classic earlier studies by I. R. F. Calder, “A Note on Magic Squares in the Philosophy of Agrippa of Nettesheim,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 12 (1949): 196–199, and Karl Anton Nowotny, “The Construction of Certain Seals and Characters in the Work of Agrippa of Nettesheim,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 12 (1949): 46–57.

38. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, II.22, ed. Perrone Compagni, 311.

39. Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Nelson, 1964); cf. Nowotny, “Construction of Certain Seals.”

40. Juris Lidaka, “The Book of Angels, Rings, Characters and Images of the Planets: Attributed to Osbern Bokenham,” in Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic, ed. Claire Fanger (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 65; original text, ibid., 64.

41. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, 1533, I.47, 55; Duden comments: “Nota” and adds a jaunty drawing of a ring.

42. See, for example, Frank Klaasen, The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).

43. The systematizing aspect of Agrippa’s work is well brought out by Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).

44. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, 1.37, ed. Perrone Compagni, 155: “Sic enim inferiora ad superiora invicem connexa sunt, ut influxus ab eorum capite prima causa, tanquam chorda quaedam tensa, usque ad infima procedat, cuius si unum extremum tangatur, tota subito tremat et tactus eiusmodi usque ad alterum extremum resonet ac moto uno inferiori moveatur et superius, cui illud correspondet, sicut nervi in cythara bene concordata.” For the addition of the last phrases see Perrone Compagni’s text and apparatus ad loc.

45. Duden on 1.37, Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, 1533, 44: “Pulchrum et aptissimum simile.”

46. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, I.33, ed. Perrone Compagni, 147–148.

47. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia (n.p., 1541), Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 4º Phys.m. 7., front inside cover: “Physiognomia, Metoposcopia, et Chiromantia, et Divinationum artes ex figuris ac gestibus corporis humani per signa dependent.”

48. William Newman, “Thomas Vaughan as an Interpreter of Agrippa von Nettesheim,” Ambix 29, no. 3 (1982): 125–140; Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 197.

49. Newman, “Thomas Vaughan.”

50. Agrippa to Trithemius, n.d., in Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, ed. Perrone Compagni, 68–71.

51. Trithemius to Agrippa, April 8, 1510, ibid., 72–73.

52. See the full study by van der Poel, Agrippa the Theologian.

53. Agrippa, De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum atque artium, chs. 41 (“De magia in genere”), 42 (“De magia naturali”), 43 (“De magia mathematica”), 44 (“De magia venefica”), 45 (“De goetia et necromantica”), 46 (“De theurgia”), 47 (“De cabala”), and 48 (“De praestigiis”); Agrippa, Opera, 2, pt. 1:68–80. Agrippa reprinted these chapters with the De occulta philosophia, 1533, ccclii–ccclxii.

54. Duden on Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, 1533, 362: “Ars Occulte philosophie a suo proprio autore explosa ac reiecta. Ergo valeat in nomine diabolorum. Tu Christe salva nos defende nos iustifica nos in te solos confidentes.”

55. Nauert, Agrippa. Van der Poel, Agrippa the Theologian, 1997, has effectively refuted such views.

56. See Michael Keefer, “Agrippa’s Dilemma: Hermetic Rebirth and the Ambivalences of De vanitate and De occulta philosophia.” Renaissance Quarterly 41 (1988): 614–653; cf. Van der Poel, Agrippa the Theologian, and Perrone Compagni, “Introduction,” in Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, ed. Perrone Compagni.

57. Perrone Compagni, “Introduction,” ibid., 15–50.

58. Agrippa, De vanitate et incertitudine scientiarum declamatio invectiva, chap. 29 (“De metallaria”), Agrippa, Opera, 2, pt. 1:50–51.

59. See the exemplary case study by Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), as well as her indispensable survey of book-based knowledge-making practices, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

60. Agrippa to Brennonius, June 16, 1520, Agrippa, Opera, 2, pt. 2:99–100.

61. See ‘Astrologi hallucinati,’ ed. Zambelli and Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Elide Casali, Le spie del cielo: oroscopi, lunari e almanacchi nell’Italia moderna (Turin: Einaudi, 2003) shows in ample detail that the beliefs and practices of the astrologers survived this crisis, even in Italy. See also Brendan Dooley, Morandi’s Last Prophecy and the End of Renaissance Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

62. See the letter from a friend to Agrippa, August 28, 1526, in Agrippa, Opera, 2, pt. 2:187–188, and Agrippa’s reply, September 26, 1526, ibid., 192–193.

63. Agrippa, De vanitate atque incertitudine scientiarum et artium, chap. 31, “De astrologia iudiciaria,” Agrippa, Opera, 2, pt. 1:56–62.

64. Agrippa to a friend, n.d. (1531), in Agrippa, Opera, 2, pt. 2:311–312. Both content and tone are revealing: “perquirendae sunt Principum nativitates & intronizationes revolutionesque, ut sciatur, si in alicuius eorum nativitatis intronizationis revolutionisve ceciderit horoscopum: … Illud autem dicere non verebor, quod, quemadmodum corpus Cometae est significator eventus futuri, ita cauda est ostensor regionis, ubi haec potissimum futura sunt.”

65. See Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, ed. Perrone Compagni, 51–52. The manuscript, Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek, MS M.ch.q.50, is reproduced by Karl Nowotny in Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, 1967, App. 1, 519–586. Hans Meyer transcribed the MS in preparation for a critical edition of the De occulta philosophia, and galley proofs of his work are preserved in the Warburg Institute. Perrone Compagni’s edition enables the reader to compare this first version line by line with the final printed text.

66. Johannes Reuchlin, De arte cabalistica (Hagenau: Thomas Anselm, 1517; repr. Stuttgart and Bad Canstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1964), fol. lxviii recto–verso.

67. Ibid., fol. lxxviii verso. See Lucian Zeuxis or Antiochus 8 and Pro lapsu inter saltandum 5.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid.: “Quantum igitur valuerunt sigilla et signacula testes erunt summi viri, Iudaeis Machabaeus, Graecis Antiochus, Romanis Constantinus.”

70. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, 3.31, ed. Perrone Compagni, 495.

71. Reuchlin, De arte cabalistica, fol. lxviii verso.

72. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, 3.31, ed. Perrone Compagni, 496.

73. Béhar, Les langues occultes.

74. Yates, Bruno; Zika, “Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifico and the Magic Debate of the Late Fifteenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976): 104–138; Zika, Reuchlin und die okkulte Tradition der Renaissance (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1998).

75. Agrippa to Trithemius, n.d., Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, ed. Perrone Compagni, 68.

76. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, 1.73, ed. Perrone Compagni, 241.

77. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, 1.73, ed. Perrone Compagni, 241–242.

78. Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke, “Agrippa von Nettesheim et la Kabbale” in Kabbalistes chrétiens (Paris: A. Michel, 1979) 197–209; Béhar, Les langues occultes.

79. Agrippa to Trithemius, n.d., in Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, ed. Perrone Compagni, 68–69 in the critical apparatus.

80. Agrippa to Maximilianus Transylvanus, Antwerp, April 16, 1529, Agrippa, Opera, 2, pt. 1:375.

81. Ibid., 379–402; critical text and French translation in Agrippa, De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus: édition critique d’après le texte d’Anvers 1529, ed. Ch. Béné, tr. O. Sauvage, ed. R. Antonioli (Geneva: Droz, 1990); English translation in Agrippa, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, trans. and ed. Albert Rabil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

82. Agrippa, Opera, 2, pt.1:379.

83. Ibid., 379.

84. Ibid., 380.

85. Agrippa, Expostulatio super expositione sua in librum de verbo Mirifico, ibid., 370–374, at 371–372.

86. Deborah Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy and the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

87. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, III.11, ed. Perrone Compagni, 434.

88. Johannes Reuchlin, De verbo mirifico, Sämtliche Werke, ed. W.-W. Ehlers et al., I, 1 (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1996), 248.

89. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, III.11, ed. Perrone Compagni, 434, apparatus: “Peli quod apud nos interpretatur.” Note that in the final version he substituted the differently pointed noun pele for the adjective peli.

90. See Josef Dan,“The Kabbalah of Johannes Reuchlin and Its Historical Significance,” in The Christian Kabbalah, ed. Josef Dan (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, 1997), 55–95.

91. Béhar, Les langues occultes.

92. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, III.2, 1533, 213.

93. Duden, ibid.: “Magus qualis debet esse.”

94. Duden on Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, III.18, 1533, 246 (“Hinc Cabalistae etiam daemones nonnullos salvandos putant, quod etiam sensisse constat Origenem”): “Cabalistarum somnia de salute demonum”; “Ideo Origines a doctis suspectus habitus.”

95. Cf. Duden on Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, III.32, 1533, 279, on earthly spirits: “Nota. Similia observamus in desolatis antiquisque castris et aedificiis.”

96. Duden on Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, III.36, 1533, 284: “hoc Caput est dignum ut legatur cum observatione.”

97. Zambelli, “Magic and Radical Reformation.”

98. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, III. 63, 1533, 340; ed. Perrone Compagni, 1992, 591, Duden comments in very large letters written vertically down the margin: “OBSERVA.”

99. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, III.64, 1533, 345; ed. Perrone Compagni, 593. Duden comments: “Scopus.”

100. For a lucid treatment of the religious side of Agrippa’s magic see Frank Klaassen, The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), chap. 7.

101. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, III.65, ed. Perrone Compagni, 599.

102. Zika, “Agrippa and His Appeal.”

103. See Isabel Barton, “Georgius Agricola’s De re metallica in Early Modern Scholarship,” Earth Sciences 35, no. 2 (2016): 265–282.

104. Agrippa to a friend, 16 September 1526, Agrippa, Opera, 2, pt. 2:189: “Verum scribo nunc pyromachiam, et non tam scribo, quam ipsa experientia ostendo, jamque habeo apud me non modicis sumptibus paratos architecturae et bellicarum machinarum meae inventionis Modulos admodum utiles simul et perniciosos, & quales hactenus (quod sciam) nostra non viderit aetas. Haec fortassis Regi ipsi et cognitione gratiora, et usu adversus hostes multo utiliora futura essent.” Agrippa to a friend, November 19, 1526, ibid., 214: “Inveni tandem proijciendorum igneorum globorum machinam, cui in velocitate, in facilitate, et in compendio non est par: quin et alia his similia plura.”

105. Amicus to Agrippa, 1520, ibid., 108–109.

106. A friend to Agrippa, December 28, 1532, ibid., 354–356 at 356.

107. Agrippa, De vanitate et incertitudine scientiarum et artium, chap. 42 (“De magia naturali”), ibid., 68–69.

108. Marsilio Ficino, Theologia Platonica XIII.2, Théologie Platonicienne de l’immortalité des âmes, ed. and trans. Raymond Marcel, 3 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964–70), II, 202–206.

109. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, I.60, ed. Perrone Compagni, 212–214.

110. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, II.1, ed. Perrone Compagni, 249–251.

111. Agrippa, De vanitate et incertitudine scientiarum et artium, chap. 43 (“De magia mathematica,” Agrippa n.d., II, 71). The connection between this passage and De occulta philosophia II.1 has been independently noted by Frank Zöllner, Vitruvs Proportionsfigur (Worms: Werner, 1987), Zambelli, “Agrippa, ein kritischer Magus,” and Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), to all of whom I am indebted, though the conclusions offered here are my own. Agrippa drew here on the work of Francesco Zorzi (see the passage cited in n. 128 below).

112. Agrippa, De vanitate et incertitudine scientiarum et artium, chap. 28 (“De architectura,” Agrippa, Opera, 2, pt. 1:49: “disciplina alioqui pernecessaria & honesta, si non admodum fascinaret mortalium animos, ut nemo ferme reperiatur, modo facultates non desint, qui non totus cupiat etiam bene constructis semper aliquid coaedificare. Quod insatiabili aedificandi studio desiderioque effectum est, ut huius rei nullus staturus sit modus, neque finis: …” 50: “Caeterum vero quantam perniciem haec ars saepissime adferat hominibus, ipsae hostiles arces, bellorumque machinae, cataphrattae, scorpiones, basilistae, caeteraque subvertendae mortalium vitae instrumenta, devicti horum ingenio populi testes sunt.”

113. Heinrich Duden, Historia monasterii Werthinensis, in Werdener Geschichtsquellen, ed. Otto Schantz, 2 vols. (Bonn: Kommissions-Verlag von P. Hanstein, 1912–19), 1: 3–38 at 35, 37, 38.

114. Duden on Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, II.1, 1533, 100: “Columnas Herculis extare, minime crediderim. Nam duo montes sunt apud fretum Herculeum in Gaditano dicti Calpe et Abila”; “Similia et ego vidi in Comitatu Lingensi miro artificio elevata ingentia saxa”; “Idem vulgus eo loci referebant.”

115. Duden, ibid.: “Vt est crustatio pavimentorum, et antiquorum murorum.” Cf. his remark on Agrippa’s description of his “duo specula reciproca, in quibus sole lucente omnia quaecunque illius radiis illustrantur, per remota plurium milliarium spatia evidentissime cernuntur”: “observa. Tale dicitur olim fuisse specul: in arce Cliviensi.”

116. Agrippa, De vanitate et incertitudine scientiarum et artium, cap. 28 (“De architectura”), Agrippa, Opera, 2:49: “hinc abscissae rupes, completae valles, acti in planum montes, perfossa saxa et adaperta maris promontoria, excavata terrae viscera, deducta flumina, iuncta maribus maria, exhausti lacus, exiccatae paludes, coercita aequora, scrutataque maris profunda, factae novae insulae, rursusque aliae restitutae continenti: quae omnia et his plura, quamquam cum natura ipsa pugnent, saepe tamen non modicam universo orbi commoditatem attulerunt.”

117. L. B. Alberti, De re aedificatoria, prologus, Alberti, L’architettura (De re aedificatoria), ed. and trans. Giovanni Orlandi, int. and notes Paolo Portoghesi, 2 vols. (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1966), 1:9–11: “Daedalum sua probarunt tempora vel maxime, quod apud Selinuntios antrum aedificarit, ex quo tepens lenisque vapor ita efflaret ac collieretur, ut sudores gratissimos eliceret corporaque curaret summa cum voluptate. Quid alii? Quam multa istiusmodi excogitarunt, quae ad bonam valitudinem faciant, gestationes natationes thermas et huiusmodi! … Quid demum, quod abscissis rupibus, perfossis montibus, completis convallibus, coercitis lacu marique, expurgata palude, coaedificatis navibus, directis fluminibus, expeditis hostiis, constitutis pontibus portuque non solum temporariis hominum commodis providit, verum et aditus ad omnes orbis provinicias patefecit?”

118. Conrad Peutinger, marginal note in his copy of De re aedificatoria, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 2 Inc. c. a. 1540 m, sig. aii recto: “Debellatae atque subactae urbes non nisi ab architecto.”

119. Agrippa, De vanitate atque incertitudine artium et scientiarum, chap. 28 (“De architectura”), Agrippa, Opera, 2, pt. 1:50.

120. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, 2.1, ed. Perrone Compagni, 250. The Caspian Gates were the iron gates supposedly built by Alexander the Great. For a medieval example see ibid., 251.

121. A view further developed by John Wilkins: see Mark Thomas Young, “Enchanting Automata: Wilkins and the Wonder of Workmanship,” Intellectual History Review 27, no. 4 (2017): 453–471.

122. E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

123. On these later retellings see esp. Kang, Sublime Dreams.

124. For a different view see A. George Molland, “Cornelius Agrippa’s Mathematical Magic,” in Mathematics from Manuscript to Print, 1300–1600, ed. Cynthia Hay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 209–219.

125. For discussion on this point see D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958); Yates, Giordano Bruno; the comments of Carol Kaske and John Clark in their edition of Ficino, Three Books on Life (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998); Wouter Hanegraaf, “Sympathy for the Devil: Renaissance Magic and the Ambivalence of Idols,” Esoterica 2 (2000): 1–44; Brian Copenhaver, Magic in Western Culture from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

126. Ficino, Théologie platonicienne, XIII.3, II, 223. Cf. Ficino, Three Books, III.13, 304–306, and Stéphane Toussaint, “Ficino, Archimedes and the Celestial Arts,” in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, ed. Michael Allen and Valery Rees with Martin Davies (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 307–326.

127. See Frances Yates, Theatre of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Elizabethan Neoplatonism Reconsidered: Spenser and Francesco Giorgi (London: Society for Renaissance Studies, 1977); The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge, 1979); Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 5th ed. (Chichester: Academy Editions, 1998); Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Philosophie perennis: Historische Umrisse abendländischer Spiritualität in Antike, Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998).

128. Francesco Zorzi, De harmonia mundi totius cantica tria, 2nd ed. (Paris: Berthelin, 1546), III.iv, 9, fol. 379 recto–verso; L’armonia del mondo, ed. and trans. Saverio Campanini (Milan: Bompiani, 2010), 2088–2090. Campanini points out that the text, which reads “igneam” (fiery) should be emended to “ligneam” (wooden) ibid., 2761 n. 211.

129. Ibid., III.iiv, 9, fol. 379 verso; 2090.

130. Ibid.

131. Ibid.

132. Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap. 6; Leanne Groeneveld, “A Theatrical Miracle: The Boxley Rood of Grace as Puppet,” Early Theatre 10, no. 2 (2007): Article 2.

133. Original Letters Illustrative of English History, ser. 3, 3, ed. Sir Henry Ellis (London: Bentley, 1846), 168.

134. G. W. Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church: Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with Rome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 145–146; see also Peter Marshall, “The Rood of Boxley, the Blood of Hailes and the Defence of the Henrician Church,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46, no. 4 (1995): 689–696.

135. William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent (London: Ralph Newberie, 1576), 183.

136. Ibid., 182–189; Groeneveld, “A Theatrical Miracle,” 40–42.

137. See the brilliant account, based on recent restoration of the crucifix, in Felipe Pereda, Images of Discord: Poetics and Politics of the Sacred Image in Fifteenth-Century Spain (London and Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2018), 63–67; on the texts that record these travels see Werner Paravicini, “Bericht und Dokument Leo von Rožmitál unterwegs zu den Höfen Europas (1465–1466),” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 92 (2010): 253–308.

138. Pereda, Images of Discord, 63–64.

139. Leo von Rožmitál, Des Böhmischen Herrn Leo’s von Rozmital Ritter-, Hof- und Pilger-Reise durch die Abendlande 1465–1467 (Stuttgart: Gedruckt auf Kosten des Literarischen Vereins, 1844), 168; translation from Leo of Rožmitál, Travels through Germany, Flanders, England, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, 1465–1467, trans. and ed. Malcolm Letts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).

140. Leo von Rožmitál, Reise, 165: “Ejus imaginis singula membra magna cum reverentia, canentes et omnibus campanis insonantes, sacerdotes attrectabant.”

141. Ibid., 168.

142. Ibid., 169.

143. Alexander Marr, “Understanding Automata in the Late Renaissance,” Journal de la Renaissance 2 (2004): 205–221 at 221.

144. Zambelli, “Agrippa, ein kritischer Magus”; Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines; Marr, “Understanding Automata”; Young, “Enchanting Automata.”

145. Nauert, Agrippa, 35–39.

146. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, II.27, ed. Perrone Compagni, 329: “Quin et ipse Deus docuit Noë fabricare arcam ad humani coporis mensuram, ut qui ipse totam mundi machinam humano corpori symmetram fabricavit: unde ille magnus, hic vero minor mundus nuncupatur.”

147. For Zorzi’s diagram of the human body inscribed in a circle see Zorzi, De harmonia mundi, I.vi.2, fol. 100 verso; L’armonia del mondo, ed. and tr. Campanini, 588; for Agrippa’s series of diagrams see Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, II.27, ed. Perrone Compagni, 328–339.

148. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, II.27, ed. Perrone Compagni, 332: “Quod si immotis talis, pedes dextrorsum sinistrorsumque in utrunque latus protendantur et manus ad capitis lineam eleventur, ipsi tunc extremi pedum manuumque digiti aequilaterum quadratum dabunt, cuius centrum supra umbilicum est in cinctura corporis.”

149. See the classic study by Erwin Panofsky, The Codex Huygens and Leonardo da Vinci’s Art Theory. The Pierpont Morgan Library, Codex M.A. 1139 (London: Warburg Institute, 1940).

150. Frank Zöllner, “Agrippa, Leonardo and the Codex Huygens,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 48 (1985): 229–234; Vitruvs Proportionsfigur.

151. Zöllner, “Die Bedeutung von Codex Huygens und Codex Urbinas für die Proportions- und Bewegungsstudien Leonardos da Vinci,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 52 (1989): 334–352.

152. Zorzi, De harmonia mundi, III.iv, 9, fol. 379 verso; L’armonia del mondo, ed. and trans. Campanini, 2090.

153. Augusto Marinoni, “Leonardo’s Impossible Machines,” in Leonardo da Vinci: Engineer and Architect (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1987), 111–130 at 118–119.

154. Martin Kemp, “The Inventions of Nature and the Nature of Invention,” ibid., 131–144 at 138–142; Jean Paul Richter, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, 2 vols. (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1883; repr. New York: Dover, 1970), II, 278–279, #1122–#1125.

155. For Leonardo’s movements see A. Richard Turner, Inventing Leonardo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 49–50.

156. Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte de la pittura, scoltura et architettura, in Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arti, ed. Roberto Ciardi, 2 vols. (Florence: Marchi & Bertolli, 1973–1974), II, 96. On the meanings and uses of Leonardo’s lion see Jill Burke, “Meaning and Crisis in the Early Sixteenth Century: Interpreting Leonardo’s Lion,” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 1 (2006): 77–91; and cf. Mark Elling Rosheim, Leonardo’s Lost Robots (Berlin, Heidelberg and New York: Springer, 2006).

157. Marr, “Understanding Automata,” 219.

158. Agrippa to Chrysostomus, April 31, 1512, Opera 2, pt. 2: 30: “Est siquidem ars haec tota sancta atque divina, ac sine dubio efficax.”

159. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, 2.1, ed. Perrone Compagni, 251.

160. Ibid. Note that William of Auvergne in fact denied that statues could speak: De legibus 26, William of Paris (1674). Opera omnia, 2 vols. (Paris: Billaine, 1674), 2:86.

161. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, 2.1, ed. Perrone Compani, 251.

162. Cf. Molland, “Agrippa’s Mathematical Magic.”

163. Duden on Agrippa, De occulta philosphia, I.60, 1533, 78 (“… etiam quae ipsimet vix intelligant”): “Id hodie non fit”.

164. Duden on Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, I.60, 1533, 79: “Anno 1567. Idem contigit meo tempore in quodam monacho.”

165. Dee, Compendious Rehearsal, quoted in Lily Bess Campbell, Scenes and Machines in the English Stage during the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 87.

166. John Dee, The Mathematical Preface to the Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara, ed. Allen Debus (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), sig. Ai ro–vo.

167. Yates, Theatre of the World, 31; see also Yates, Giordano Bruno, 147–149.

168. Tommaso Campanella, Magia e grazia, Inediti. Theologicorum liber XIV, ed. Romano Americo (Rome: Bocca, 1957), 178.

169. Ibid.

170. Ibid.

171. Ibid., 180.

172. Young, “Enchanting Automata.”

Acknowledgments

It gives me great pleasure to thank Princeton University and the Andrew Mellon Foundation for the financial support that made my research possible. I would also like to thank the American Academy in Rome, the Seminar für Geistesgeschichte und Philosophie der Renaissance, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität Munich, and the Forschungsbereich of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel for the generous hospitality that enabled me to spend long periods in great collections of manuscripts and rare books. I also owe heartfelt thanks to the many libraries that have allowed me to work on rare materials, in person or by providing digital facsimiles: the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Biblioteca Casanatense, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Cambridge University Library, the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, and the Universitetsbibliotek, Uppsala. John Pollack and his colleagues at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts of the University of Pennsylvania Library showed me many kindnesses when I was working with their extraordinary holdings for the history of cryptography. As always, the staff of the Princeton University Library have provided gracious support, ever since I became a “heavy user” in the fall of 1975.

My thanks also to the lively audiences organized by the late Eckhard Kessler at Munich and the critical readers mustered by Simon Goldhill at Cambridge, who commented helpfully on early versions of this book; to Ann Blair, Brian Copenhaver, Lauren Kassell, Jill Kraye, Pamela O. Long, Philipp Nothaft, Mary Quinlan-McGrath, Ingrid Rowland, and Darrel Rutkin, who have provided information, advice, and criticism, as well as the examples of their own scholarship, on many of the subjects treated here over many, many years; to the late Noel Swerdlow, who taught me so much; to Simon Winder, for detailed comments on an earlier version; and to Lauren Kassell and the other, anonymous reader who assessed my manuscript for Harvard University Press. Their penetrating comments, sometimes caustic but always constructive, guided my revisions at every point. Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press encouraged me to begin this project and offered helpful advice and generous encouragement over the years. Emily Silk, Lindsay’s successor, brought the ship into harbor at last, with the able help of Jillian Quigley.

Louise Grafton practiced magic unforgettably in our shared houses for many years. Though she is gone, the working model of Fontana’s she-devil that she built and many other works of her hands inspire me every day. My gratitude belongs to all; my errors, to me alone.

Index

The page references in this index correspond to the print edition from which this ebook was created, and clicking on them will take you to the location in the ebook where the equivalent print page would begin. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

Page numbers that appear in italics indicate an illustration.

Abulafia, Abraham, 110

Acciaiuoli, Zenobio, 171

aeromancy, 41

Agricola, Georg, 200

Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius: alchemy and, 187; angels and, 180, 182–183, 196–198; astrology and, 182, 186, 190; attacks on traditional theology of, 175; automata and, 205–208, 210; celestial magic and, 197–198; on the Church, 197–198; contents of On Occult Philosophy of, 5, 180–187; critical questions raised by, 188–191, 193–195; criticism of, 175–177, 179; Del Rio on, 176–177; demons and, 180, 182, 197; denunciation in On the Vanity and Uncertainty of the Arts and Sciences of, 188; early career of, 177–179; Hebrew and, 194–196; holy words and, 195–196; human body and, 211, 214, 215; Kabbalah and, 177, 191, 192, 193–194, 196–197, 216–217; knowledge of God and, 186; Leonardo da Vinci and, 214, 216; on mathematical magic, 202–203, 205, 207, 211, 216–217, 219; preparation for celestial magic and, 198; Reformation and, 178; as soldier, 178; structure of magical realm and, 185–187; Trithemius and, 151, 187, 193–194, 197; on work of engineers, 199–205, 211, 214, 216–217

Alberti, Leon Battista, 10; Agrippa and, 205; cryptography and, 74–82, 147; fine arts and, 73–74; Florentine art and, 10, 52–54; nostalgia for classics and, 54–55; power over natural world and, 73–74, 84, 87–89, 88, 204; on the Vatican obelisk, 84, 87

Albertus Magnus, 19–20, 24, 26–27, 29, 47, 148

Albrecht of Hohenzollern, 44–45

Albumasar (Abu Ma’shar), 29, 31

alchemy, 4–6, 55–56, 58–59, 187

Aldus Manutius, 123, 131

Alemanno, Johanan, 109

Alexander the Great, 36

Alfonsine Tables, 33

Alfonso, King of Naples, 49

Aliotti, Girolamo, 106–107

Al-Kindi, 19, 31, 97

amulets, 35, 38, 90, 114, 116–117, 122, 193. See also talismanic magic

anatomy, 61, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215

Andrelinus, Faustus, 12

angel magic, 162–165

angels: Agrippa on, 180, 182–183, 196–197; angel magic, 162–165; ascetic preparations to meet, 118; d’Abano and, 152; names of, 196; as a result of nature, 82–83; as source of inspiration, 66

animals, 181–182

Anthony of Mount Ulm, 33

Antipalus maleficiorum (Trithemius), 132

Apollonius of Tyana, 123–124, 134, 154, 170–171, 205

Apology (Ficino), 122

Apology (Pico), 92, 94, 97, 117, 121

Archimedes, 84

architecture, 82, 87–89, 202, 204

Archytas of Tarentum, 206–207, 218

Aristotle, 4, 36

ars notoria, 162

artificial magic, 218–219. See also engineers

Art of Poetry (Horace), 52

Asclepius, 26, 103, 105

astrology: Agrippa on, 182, 186, 190; Bacon and, 23–24, 26–29, 31–33, 39, 57; Black Death and, 33; efforts to explain past events and, 28–29, 31–32; engineers and, 61; Ficino and, 91–92, 94–95; Flavius and, 116; Fontana on, 66; Great Schism and, 33; human body and, 211; influx of translated texts and, 24; magical practices associated with the study, 34–39; Manetti on, 50; Maximilian I and, 14–15; medicine and, 92, 95; Melanchthon and, 2; Mongol empire and, 37; Nicholas of Cusa on, 17–20, 23–24, 27–29, 33–34; Pico della Mirandola on, 5, 95–96; predicting the coming of the Antichrist and, 33–34, 57; predictions of a second flood and, 190; talismanic magic and, 36–38; Three Magi and, 17–18; Trithemius and, 134, 154

astronomy, 27, 33, 38, 54, 61, 72, 182

Augustine, 121–122, 134

Aventinus, Johannes, 190

Azzolini, Monica, 38

Bacon, Roger: alchemy and, 55–56, 58–59; astrology and, 23–24, 26–29, 31–33, 39, 57; on coming of the Antichrist, 32; denunciations of magic and, 56; magical practices associated with astrology and, 34–39; optics and, 56; on Peter of Maricourt, 57–58; Pico on, 97; science of experiment and, 56–59, 207; on science surpassing nature, 58–59; talismanic magic and, 36–38

Baptista Mantuanus, 90–91

Baron, Frank, 7

Beatus Rhenanus, 141, 143, 168

Béhar, Pierre, 193–194

bells, 51

Benedict XIII, 43

Benivieni, Antonio, 97

Biondo, Flavio, 82

blood, Christ’s, 126

blood sacrifice, 114–115

Book of Angels, 185

Book of Faust (Faustbuch), 1–2

Book of Raziel, 41

Book of the Three Magi, 41

Bostius, Arnold, 135

Bovelles, Charles, 135, 137

Bracciolini, Poggio, 12

Bridget of Sweden, 21

Brunelleschi, Filippo, 52–54, 63, 67–70, 73, 82–83

Bullinger, Heinrich, 172

Burnett, Charles, 19

Butzbach, Johannes, 122

Buzzetta, Flavia, 118

Bynum, Caroline, 126

Cabala. See Kabbalah

Caius, John, 102

Calixtus III, Pope, 75

Camerarius, Joachim, 9

Campanella, Tommaso, 218–219

cannons, 67–68

Cardano, Girolamo, 143

Catherine de Medici, 193

Catherine of Siena, 21

Catilinet, Jean, 195

Cecil, William, 138

Centiloquium, 24, 26, 28

Chaldaic Oracles, 104

Chamber, Geoffrey, 208

Chapelier, Jean, 153

Charles V, King of France, 36

chiromancy, 41

Christianity: astrology and, 23–24, 26–29, 31–34; clergy as practitioners of magic, 43–44; Council of Konstanz and, 34; distinction between magic and, 43–44; Ficino on relationship of magic to Church and, 98–99; Great Schism and, 33; Hartlieb on distinction between magic and, 43; magic in the rituals of, 21–23; Pico’s Kabbalah studies and, 109–110; stories about Jewish magicians and, 44–45. See also individual Christians; relics

ciphers, 65–66, 74–82, 137–139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145–147, 155

City of God (Augustine), 121–123

City of Life, The, 118

Clavicula Salomonis, 150

Clement IV, Pope, 45, 57

clocks, 51–52, 61

Clucas, Stephen, 158

Collins, David, 47

Commentaries (Ghiberti), 70

compasses, 51

Concordance of Astronomical Truth with Theology (d’Ailly), 34

Copenhaver, Brian, 104

Cosimo de’ Medici, 93, 103

Council of Konstanz, 34

Cranach, Lucas, 22, 23

Cromwell, Thomas, 208

Cross of Burgos, 208, 209, 210

cryptography, 65–66, 74–82, 137–139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145–147, 155

Cusanus. See Nicholas of Cusa

d’Abano, Pietro, 152

d’Ailly, Pierre, astrology and, 31, 33–34

Dati, Leonardo, 74–75, 79, 118

Dee, John, 131–132, 138, 158, 195, 218

De furtivis literarum notis, 143

De Harmonia Mundi (Zorzi), 206–207

della Porta, Giambattista, 3–4; cryptography and, 79; on magic, 122; natural magic and, 4; Pico and, 99; Trithemius and, 143

della Robbia, Luca, 54

della Volpaia, Lorenzo, 119

Del Rio, Martín, 176

demons: Agrippa on, 180, 182, 197; in della Porta’s Natural Magic, 4; Jewish magic and, 116; Kyeser and, 64; love of blood and, 116; magical expulsion of, 19; as source of inspiration, 66; Trithemius on, 129–130

De occulta philosophia (Agrippa). See On Occult Philosophy

devils, 21, 44, 47, 65, 131, 202; mechanical, 66, 206

diseases, 92

Disputations against Divinatory Astrology (Pico), 92, 95

divination: Bacon on, 36; Faustus and, 7; Gaspare of Verona and, 46; Hartlieb and, 39, 40, 41–43, 64, 133; Nicholas of Cusa on, 39; of past works, 12–13; texts associated with, 41; women and, 41

Domenico, 60

Donation of Constantine, 28

Dondi, Giovanni, 61, 72–73

dreams, 182

Duden, Heinrich: engineering and, 203–204; human body and, 217–218; interaction with Agrippa’s text of, 172–173, 175, 181–182, 186, 188, 197; miracles and, 175

du Puy-Herbaut, Guy, 123

Dürer, Albrecht, 130, 183, 184, 185, 205

Eco, Umberto, 139

Eden, Kathy, 146

engineers: advertisement of feats of, 59–60, 61, 63; Agrippa on, 199–205, 211, 214, 216–217; ancient vs. modern debate and, 67–69, 72–73; astrology and, 61; automata and, 205–208, 210; cryptography and, 74–82; emergence of, 50–54; fine arts and, 69–74; intellectual component of work of, 60–61; optics and, 56, 73; power over nature and, 82–84, 87–89; as practitioners of magic, 63–67; science of experiment and, 66–67, 207; self-promotion and, 60–61, 63; texts produced by, 61, 62, 63

Enneads (Plotinus), 103

ensoulment, 105–107, 206

Epiphany, 17

Erasmus, 130–131, 137, 145–147, 178

Ernst, Thomas, 139

Eusebius of Caesarea, 123

exorcisms, 19–20

Faustus: as associated with the devil, 8–9, 15–16; as charlatan, 8–9; conjuring and divination and, 7; as figure of High Renaissance, 16; lost Roman plays and, 12–13; magic lantern projections and, 9–10; Melanchthon and, 1–2; name of, 7–8, 12, 224n25; as powerful, 2, 9; Renaissance humanism and, 10, 12–13; reputation of, 7–8; Simon Magus story and, 12; tradition of scholarship on, 6

Fazio, Bartolomeo, 49–50, 52

female mystics, 16

Fernando of Cordoba, 166

Ficino, Marsilio: as astrologer, 91–92, 94–95; automata and, 206; career of, 92–93; corpus of magical texts and, 103–108; cultural influence of, 92, 120; engineers and, 89, 201; as learned magician, 90–92; on magic as licit practice for Christians, 120, 122–124; magic as self-cultivation and, 103; medical advice for scholars and, 100–102; Pico and, 92–94; Pico’s beliefs vs. beliefs of, 94–100; printing and, 123; world of natural science and, 119–120

Filelfo, Francesco, 75

Fioravanti, Aristide, 87

Flavius Mithridates (Samuel ben Nissim Abulfaraj), 108–112, 116–117, 248n71

Fontana, Giovanni: automata and, 206; ciphers and, 65, 80; contact with spirits and, 118; ensouled statues and, 106; fine arts and, 70; magic lantern projections, 10, 11; mechanical devils, 65–66, 85; natural phenomena and, 82–83; on talismans, 66, 96

Forman, Simon, 187

Formicarius (Nider), 132

Francesco, Giovanni, 116, 123

Frazer, J. G., 21

Freher, Marquard, 167

Friedberg, Peter von, 131

Fürbeth, Frank, 41

Ganay, Germain de, 156

Garin, Eugenio, 13

Garsias, Pedro, 122

Gaspare of Verona, 45–46

Geber, 58, 199

Gentile da Fabriano, 52

Geography (Ptolemy), 51

geomancy, 41

Georg of Helmstadt, 7

Gerson, Jean, 34

Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 54, 67, 69–70, 73–74

Giles de Lessines, 31–32

Giovanni Mercurio, 166

goetia, 121–123

Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 21

Guarino of Verona, 86

Haly, 28

Harkness, Deborah, 16

Hartlieb, Johann, on practices of divination, 39, 40, 41–43, 64, 133

Hebrew language, 114, 194–196

Hermes Trismegistus, 13, 26, 133, 150

Hermetic Corpus, 103–104

Hildegard of Bingen, 165

Hilsey, John, 208

Hinderbach, Johannes IV, 114–115

Hittorp, Gottfried, 176

Holy Roman Empire, 178

Horace, 52

Hsia, Ronnie, 151

human body, 61, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215

humanism (Renaissance), 10, 12

hydraulics, 63

hydromancy, 41

Iamblichus, 103, 105–106

Ibn al-Hatim, 116

Imperato, Ferrante, 3–4, 3

In Praise of Scribes (Trithemius), 158

Inquisition, 4, 43–44, 47–48

intellectual property rights, 68–69

Isidore of Seville, 41

Jardine, Lisa, 159

Jewish magicians, 44–45

Jews, 107–112, 114–117, 119, 151. See also Hebrew language

Joachim of Brandenburg, 149–150, 156, 161, 167

Joan of Arc, 21

Juvenal, 45

Kabbalah: Agrippa on, 177, 191, 192, 193–194, 196–197, 216–217; association with mysticism, 112, 114; Christian Kabbalism, 119; cryptography and, 138–139; Flavius Mithridates and, 109; Pico and, 93–94, 109–112

Kassell, Lauren, 38–39

Keefer, Michael, 188

Kieckhefer, Richard, 43

Kirchner, Carl Christian, 6

Klaassen, Frank, 48

Klibansky, Raymond, 185

Koran, Nicholas of Cusa and, 28

Kramer, Heinrich, 132

Kyeser, Konrad, 60–61, 63–64

Lang, Andrew, 21

Lange, Johann, 116

Latin language, 2

Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques, 141, 143, 178

Leonardo da Vinci, 61, 211, 213, 214, 216

Leo of Rožmitál, 208, 210

Lercheimer, Augustin. See Witekind, Herman

Libanius, 160–162, 166–167

“living saints,” 16, 21

Lomazzo, Gian Paolo, 214, 216

Long, Pamela O., 68, 82

Lorenzo de’ Medici, 92, 94

Louise of Savoy, 190

Ludolf of Saxony, 18

Lull, Raymund, 79

Luther, Martin, 1–2, 8–9, 44–45

mageia, 121–123

magic: Albertus Magnus’s distinctions of, 19–20; as ancient, 3–4; Aquinas on, 19–20; association with the devil and, 15; astrology and ceremonial practices of, 34–39; blood, associated with Jews, 114–115; celebrities of, 3–4; Church rituals and, 19; clerical scrutiny and, 14; distinction between Christianity and, 43–44; as element of self-cultivation, 100–103; emergence of a Renaissance discipline, 2, 4–5; goeteia vs. mageia debate, 121–123; Hartlieb on distinction between religion and, 43; Hebrew language and, 114; influence of alchemy and, 6; influx of text into Latin translation of, 35; interconnectedness of high and low in Middle Ages, 46–47; modern science and philosophy and, 13; principles of in Renaissance, 5; science of experience mimicking, 58–59; sixteenth century and, 44. See also cryptography; individual practitioners of; individual types

magicians, Trithemius on, 133

magic lantern projections, 10, 11

magic squares, 183, 184, 185

Magni, Nicolaus, 34

Mahal, Günther, 7

Malatesta, Sigismondo, 68

Malleus maleficarum (Kramer), 132, 182

Manetti, Giannozzo, 49–52, 55, 64–65, 82, 84, 89

Manlius, Joannes, 2

Marr, Alexander, 209, 216

Masaccio, 54, 73–74

Masha’allah, 24, 30

mathematical magic, 202–203, 205, 207, 211, 216–217, 219

mathematics, 182, 186, 202–203, 205, 207

Maurus, Hrabanus, 145, 165

Maximilian I (Holy Roman Emperor), 14–15, 131–132, 133, 147, 157, 159–160, 226n69

mechanized cipher wheel, 77–78

medicine, 97, 100–103, 180

Melanchthon, Philip, 1–2, 9, 12

Melencolia I (Dürer), 183, 184, 185

Mercurius, 148–149

metallurgy, 200

mining, 200

Monfasani, John, 166

Muffett, Thomas, 102

Müller-Jahncke, Wolf-Dieter, 194

Mutian, Conrad, 123–124, 146, 152

mysticism, 21–22

Nanni, Giovanni, of Viterbo, 168, 170

Natural Magic (della Porta), 3–4

natural philosophy, 100

Nauert, Charles, 188

necromancy, 7, 15, 39, 41–43, 153

Nepiachus (Trithemius), 153–154

Newman, William, 165, 187

Niccoli, Niccolò, 54

Niccolò di Antonio degli Agli, 70–72

Nicholas of Cusa: association of all magic with the devil and, 20–21; astrology and, 17–20, 23–24, 27–29, 33–34; on Bacon’s work, 58; commentary of, 28; on contemporary magi, 18–19; on divination, 39, 41; on magical licit practices, 48, 50; on magical practices associated with astrology, 34–35, 38–39; magical rituals of the Church and, 21; on natural magicians, 19; sermon on Three Magi of, 17–19

Nicholas V, Pope, 49

Nider, Johannes, 132

900 Theses (Pico), 92, 111–112

Nissim abu l-Faraj, 116–117

“Nobility and Excellence of the Female Sex, The” (Agrippa), 194–195

On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Letters (Alberti), 54

On the Art of Building (Alberti), 82, 204

On the Art of the Cabala (Reuchlin), 139, 191, 194

On Calling Life Down from the Stars (Ficino), 105–106

On Ciphers (Alberti), 74, 82

On the Dignity and Excellence of Man, 49

On Faust the Charlatan (Kirchner), 6

On the Harmony of the World (Zorzi), 194

On Life (Ficino), 92, 95, 97, 100, 119–120

On the Mysteries of the Egyptians (Iamblichus), 103

On Obtaining Life from the Heavens (Ficino), 100

On Occult Philosophy (Agrippa): authorship and, 172, 174; contents of, 180–187; critical questions regarding, 188–191, 193–195; engineering and, 201–202; permission to publish, 179; Trithemius and, 187

On Painting (Alberti), 54, 74

On Statues (Alberti), 79

On the Vanity and Uncertainty of the Arts and Sciences (Agrippa), 179, 187–188, 197, 200, 202–203, 207

On the Wonder-Working Word (Reuchlin), 177, 196

Oosterhoff, Richard, 141

Operai of the Florentine cathedral, 69

optics, 56, 73

Opus maius (Bacon), 34, 37

Opus tertium (Bacon), 55

Oration (Pico), 92, 94, 98, 100, 109, 111, 121

Oresme, Nicole, 20, 33

Origen, 114

palm reading, 41

Panofsky, Erwin, 16, 185

Paris, Matthew, 38

Pastoureaux, 37–38

patents, 68–69

Pelacani, Biagio, 55, 83

Pelagius, 160, 162–166

Pereira, Benito, 99, 123

Perrone Compagni, Vittoria, 189

perspective, 73–74

Petrus Galatinus, 119

Petrus Peregrinus. See Peter of Maricourt

Peutinger, Conrad, 88–89, 88, 126, 204–205

Pfefferkorn, Johann, 151

Philostratus, 123, 170–171

Picatrix, 35, 41, 43, 95, 107, 152

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni: career of, 93–94; corpus of magical texts and, 103, 107–112; cultural influence of, 92, 120; denunciation of low Jewish magic, 117–118; Ficino and, 92–94; Ficino’s beliefs vs. beliefs of, 94–100; Flavius Mithridates and, 108, 111, 248n71; goeteia vs. mageia and, 121–123; Hebrew language and, 114; on high vs. low magic, 96–97; Kabbalah and, 93–94, 109–112, 114, 191; as magician, 5, 90; on magic as licit practice for Christians, 120–124; magic as self-cultivation and, 100–103; printing and, 123; Trithemius and, 151; world of natural science and, 119–120

Pitti, Buonaccorso, 60

Platonic Theology (Ficino), 206

Pliny the Younger, 180–182

Plotinus, 99–100, 103, 105–106

Poliziano, Angelo, 94, 119

Polygraphia (Trithemius), 139, 140, 141, 143, 145, 155

Porphyry, 103, 105, 121–122

Price, Sophie, 43

Proclus, 104–105

Psellus, Michael, 103–104

Pseudo-Dionysius, 165

Ptolemy, 27

pyromancy, 41

Raimundus de Puteo, 43–45

Recanati, Menahem, 110

Reeds, Jim, 139

Reformation, 22, 178, 210–211

relics, 22–23, 23, 44, 91

Reuchlin, Johannes: Agrippa and, 177, 191, 193, 195–196; on Jews, 116, 151; Kabbalah and, 119, 139, 191, 195; name of God and, 196; Pico and Ficino and, 92

Richard de Fournival, 29

Robichaud, Denis, 105

Rood of Boxley, 208

Rossi, Paolo, 13

Rucellai, Bernardo, 79

Rucellai, Cipriano, 118

Ryan, Michael, 38

Sabellicus, Marcus Antonius, 12

Sacrifices and Magic (Proclus), 104–105

Sallust, 87

Santa Francesca Romana, 21

Santi, Giovanni, 70–72

Sassi, Panfilo, 48

Savini, Nicolas, 179

Savonarola, Girolamo, 92–94

Saxl, Fritz, 185

scapulomancy, 41–42

Schenk, Georg, 7

science of experiment, 56–57, 207

Secret of Secrets, 26, 36–38, 232n64

Sefer haBahir, 110

Sefer Yetzirah, 110

Sforza, Costanzo, 70–72

Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor, 63

Simonetta, Marcello, 75

Sitcamber, Rutger, 125

Sixtus IV, Pope, 91, 108, 110

sleight of hand, 55

Smith, Pamela, 61

Soter, Johannes, 177

Spiegel, Jacob, 167

spirits, 20, 64, 118, 135, 138, 197. See also angels; demons; devils

Stabius, Ioannes, 126

Stappervenne, Goswin, 203

Steganographia (Trithemius), 135, 136, 137–138, 155, 157

Stoeffler, Johannes, 190

Strasser, Gerhard, 145

suffumigations, 19–20, 150, 185

Summa contra gentiles (Aquinas), 20, 96, 105

Summa theologica (Aquinas), 20, 122

syphilis, 92

Taccola, Mariano, 61, 62, 63–64, 70, 211, 212

talismanic magic: Agrippa on, 182–183; amulets, 35, 38, 90, 114, 116–117, 122, 193; Aquinas on, 20; astrology and, 36–38; Ficino on, 96; Fontana on, 66, 96; Jewish magicians and, 44–45; Nicholas of Cusa on, 20; Pelagius and, 164; Pico and, 90; Trithemius on, 133, 150

Tetrabiblos, 24, 26

Tetzel, Gerard, 208, 210

theatrical machines, 70–72

theurgy, 121–122

Thomas Aquinas, 19–20, 96, 105–106, 122

Three Books on Life (Ficino), 152

Three Magi, 17–18

Tranchedino, Francesco, 75, 77

Treatise on the Art of Painting (Lomazzo), 214

Trithemius, Johannes: Agrippa and, 151, 187, 193–194, 197; astrology and, 134, 154; Bovelles and, 135, 137; Church reform and, 125; correspondence of, 146, 160–161, 167–168; cryptography and, 137–139, 141, 142, 143, 145–147, 155; defense of, 122; demonology and, 129–133, 152–153, 155; Emerald Table and, 165; Erasmus and, 145–147; as expert of supernatural, 129–133; expulsion from Sponheim and, 161; Faustus and, 7–8, 12–14; history of forgery and, 125–126, 168, 170–171; history of the Franks of, 125–126, 168, 169, 170–171; Jewish books and, 151–152; Jews and, 151; letters of, 134; magical community of, 155–156; mentorship and, 159–162, 166–167; miracles in the time of, 126–128; natural magic and, 153–154, 160–161, 165–166; on necromancy, 153; Pelagius’s beliefs and, 162–165; printing and, 130–131; relationship with magic of, 147–150, 152–155, 157, 161–162, 165; on witches, 132, 158–159; women and, 129–130

Trivia senatoria (Alberti), 80–81

Truitt, E. R., 59, 205

Ulrich of Strasburg, 47

Utopia (More), 131

Valla, Lorenzo, 51–52

Valturio, Roberto, 67–68, 68

van der Weyden, Rogier, 52

Vatican obelisk, 84, 86, 87

Vaughan, Thomas, 187

Virdung, Johannes, 8, 161

Walker, D. P., 139

weapons, 83–84

Weisskunig, 15

Wier, Johann, 9

William of Auvergne, 19, 24, 97, 175, 206, 217

Wirszubski, Chaim, 108

Wirt, Petrus, 127–128

witchcraft, 47, 115, 132, 158–159, 179–180

witches, 15, 132, 158–159, 182

Witekind, Herman, 1–2

women, 41, 46, 47, 114–115, 129–130, 194–195

Wotton, Henry, 75

Yates, Frances, 13–14, 120, 193, 197

Zambelli, Paola, 131, 133, 197

Zika, Charles, 179, 193, 199

Zöllner, Frank, 211, 214

Zopello, Michele, 75, 141, 144

Zorzi, Francesco, 119, 191, 206–207, 211, 214

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First published in the USA by Harvard University Press 2023
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2024

Copyright © Anthony Grafton, 2023

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ISBN: 978-1-802-06437-7

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