cornelius agrippa’s double presence in the faustian century

7/23/2019 Cornelius Agrippas Double Presence in the Faustian Century

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[This essay was first published in The Faustian Century: German Literature and Culture in the Age of Luther and

Faustus, edited by Jim Van der Laan and Andrew Weeks (New York: Camden House, 2013), pp. 67-91. In that

version the footnotes are abbreviated; here they are given in full.]

[Index: Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, critical humanism, higher education, Hermetism,

magic, Nicholas Cusanus, Marsilio Ficino][Date: 2!"]

Cornelius Agrippas Double Presence

in the Faustian Century

Michael Keefer

1. Double vision in the canon of great men

The Bibliothque Sainte-Genevive in Paris is not merely a great library, and one

of the mid-nineteenth centurys architectural triumphs: it is also, like the Panthon, which

it faces from the north side of the Place du Panthon, a structure visibly devoted to

commemorating the illustrious dead. That commemoration, however, contains one

notable error that offers a point of entry into this chapters subject, which is the peculiarly

redoubled participation of the early sixteenth-century humanist, occult philosopher,

skeptic, satirist, and proto-feminist Cornelius Agrippaor Henricus Cornelius Agrippa

ab Nettesheym, to give his full Latin namein what we are calling in this book the

Faustian century.


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One aspect of that redoubled participation stems from Agrippas place within an

intellectual current of the fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries which celebrated

unconstrained human capacities in a manner some twentieth-century scholarswith a

nod to Goethes Faust, no doubt, and perhaps also to Oswald Spenglers Decline of the

Westidentified as having Faustian qualities. The other has to do with Agrippas

posthumous demonization, which both paralleled and contributed to the development of

the sixteenth-century legend of Faustusa narrative that was itself shaped by wider

currents of religious repression. Taken together, they point on the one hand to a road not

taken in European culture, a pattern of thought and interpretation that, although

influential in art and literature, and viewed by some cultural historians as a defining

feature of the Renaissance, nonetheless remained marginal within the major institutions

of learningand on the other hand, to the forces of repression that ensured its

marginality.

The Bibliothque Sainte-Genevives entire second floor is an immense reading

room, more than eighty metres in length and nearly twenty metres wide. The external

stone facings of this second storey are ornamented with a tall arcade of shallow arches

four on the buildings west side, nineteen across its south face, and another four on the

east sidethat are pierced in their upper part by windows. Below these windows in each

arch are panels inscribed with the names of great writers, thinkers, lawmakers and artists:

thirty under each arch. Beginning on the librarys west side with Moses and Homer, the

names continue in historical sequence across the south face, ending on the last arch of the

east side with figures including Beethoven, Hegel, the astronomer Laplace, the natural

scientist Cuvier, and the writers Chateaubriand and Sir Walter Scott.

The library thus presents to strollers in the Place du Panthon a canonical recital

of human greatness up to the time of its completion in 1851a mighty list of eight

hundred and ten memorable names. But theflneurof pedantic disposition who devotes a

few minutes to skimming over this list will discover a peculiar anomaly: it incorporates,

in fact, only eight hundred and nine distinct people, for one of the names occurs twice.

Under the sixth arch from the right on the south face we find, after LARIOSTE,

and preceding THOMAS MORUS and ERASME, the name of AGRIPPA (qualified in


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smaller letters as DE NETTESHEIM)who reappears under the fifth arch from the right,

sandwiched between LE TASSE and JEAN BODIN. Though the name this time is given

as C. AGRIPPA, it is unquestionably the same person.

The banal explanation of this double appearance in the catalogue of greatnessa

privilege not granted to Plato, Virgil, Dante, or Shakespearemust be that this early

sixteenth-century humanist had fallen into such obscurity that the lists compilers failed

to note the identity of his Latin writings with the vernacular translations and later editions

of his works that earned him continuing notoriety for generations after his death.

Of that mid-nineteenth-century obscurity there can be no doubt. Goethe gave

Agrippas first name, Heinrich, to his Fausta sly tribute, it would seem, to his own

early reading of Agrippa.1But a more juvenile enthusiast for Agrippas writings, Mary

Shelleys Victor Frankenstein, was rebuked at the age of thirteen by his father for reading

such sad trash.2And by the time the Bibliothque Sainte-Genevive was built, Agrippa

had fully descended into the nursery: The Story of the Inky Boys in the 1848 English

rendering of Heinrich Hoffmanns Struwwelpetertells in simple rhymes how three little

racists are punished by tall Agrippa by being dipped into his enormous inkwell, from

which they emerge as black as the boy they have been tormenting.3

1

The intertextual links between Agrippa and Goethes Fausthave long been recognized: see GerhardRitter, Ein historisches Urbild zu Goethes Faust. (Agrippa von Nettesheym, Preussische Jahrbcher141(1910): 300-05, Harold Jantz, Goethes Faust as a Renaissance Man: Parallels and Prototypes(Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 55, 58, 124-27, both of whom are cited by Charles Nauert,Agrippa

and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), pp. 330-31; and also

Rolf Christian Zimmerman,Das Weltbild des jungen Goethe. Bd. 1, Elemente und Fundamente; Bd. 2,

Interpretationen und Dokumentation(2 vols., Munich: Fink, 1969-79), vol. 2, pp. 92-106. Mephistophiles

first appearance in the second and third scenes of Faustin the form of a black poodle is a deliberate echo of

the polemical legends (discussed below) that formed around Agrippa after his death. In my quotations from

early modern texts, u/v and i/j are modernized throughout. I have not otherwise modernized spelling,

punctuation, or accents.2Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. The 1818 version, ed. D. L.

Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (2nded., Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999), p. 68.3See Heinrich Hoffmann,Der Struwwelpeter oder lustige Geschichten und drollige bilder. Nachdruck des

Frankfurter Originalausgabe(Stuttgart: Loewe Verlag, 1986) and The English Struwwelpeter or Pretty

Stories and Funny Pictures for Little Children. After the sixth edition of the celebrated German work of Dr.

Heinrich Hoffmann(Leipsic: Friedrich Volckmar, 1848). In Hoffmanns original 1846 text, the giant

disciplinarian in Die Geschichte von den schwarzen Buben is der groe Nikolas, a stern (and very

much pre-Santa Claus) St. Nicholas. Hoffmanns rhyme conflates elements of different traditions about the

saint (in the Netherlands, Sinterklaas brings children gifts on December 5, the eve of his feast day,

accompanied by Black Peter, Zwarte Piet, who disciplines naughty children; in parts of Switzerland the

saints companion, Schmutzli, is said to carry off bad children in a sack and sometimes to drown them).


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2. Agrippas contexts: life and legend

Strange error though it seems, the Bibliothque Sainte-Genevives double

mention of Agrippa can nonetheless be of some assistance in contextualizing this writer.

Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) was known early in his career as a diplomat and

soldier in the service of the Emperor Maximilian, and a well-traveled humanist of

encyclopedic learning, who had done advanced study in law and medicine. He practiced

both professionsas city advocate and orator in Metz, as civic physician in Geneva and

Fribourg, and as court physician to Louise de Savoie, the mother of Franois I and regent

of France during the kings captivity in Madrid. At the universities of Dle, Cologne,

Pavia, and Turin, he lectured on various subjects (including principally what we might

call, depending on our preconceptions, either theology or theosophy). He secured royal

patronage with the Hapsburgs as well as with the Valois court, but his two main stints of

court service, in the French court at Lyons, and in Antwerp in the court of Margaret of

Austria, who was governor of the Netherlands for her nephew the Emperor Charles V,

both ended badly.4

Agrippas wide circle of correspondents included Desiderius Erasmus and Philipp

Melanchthon, whose names appear with his under the first of the Bibliothque Sainte-

Genevive arches we have noted. So also does that of Marguerite de Valois (better

known as Marguerite de Navarre),5author of theHeptameron, sister of Franois I, and

generous patron of humanist scholars and poets. (Agrippa sought her patronage during

his time in Lyons; the names of two writers whom she thought more deserving, Franois

One can only guess as to why the English translator substituted Agrippa for St. Nicholas; Morleysbiography, which contributed to Agrippas slow return to intellectual respectability, wasn't published until

1856.4See Nauert 1965, pp. 84-103, 105-11.5Also known as Marguerite dAngoulme, then dAlenon (after her first husband), she was married againin 1527, to Henri II of Navarre. This Valois princess (1492-1549) is not to be confused with the later

Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615), the daughter of King Henri II of France and Catherine deMedici, who

became an unwilling consort (La Reine Margot) of the king of Navarre, later Henri IV, and who wrote a

scandalous memoir.


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Rabelais and Clment Marot, appear under the same arch of the librarys facade, and a

third, Pierre de Ronsard, under the next one.)

As his difficulties with royal patrons might suggest, Agrippa was a controversial

figureand combative to boot. In 1509, after lecturing at the University of Dle on the

celebrated German humanist Johann Reuchlins Christian appropriation of the Kabbalah

in his bookDe verbo mirifico(1494), he was denounced in a sermon by the head of the

Franciscan order in Burgundy, Jean Catalinet, as a judaizing heretic. That put an end to

Agrippas teaching in Dlethough not of course to his work as a transmitter of the

Hermetic, Neoplatonic, Christian-Cabalist, and other magical doctrines he imbibed from

Reuchlin, as well as from Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico, Johannes Trithemius, and

others: a first version of AgrippasDe occulta philosophiawas completed in 1510, and

circulated in manuscript in Italy and France.6Agrippa also circulated an angry response

to Catalinet,7which made him an early contestant in the controversies that swirled around

Reuchlin for more than a decade after 1510, pitting humanist scholars against theological

conservatives in the universities and the church hierarchy.

In January 1509, Johannes Pfefferkorn, a Jewish convert and a member of the

Dominican order, had launched a scurrilous antisemitic campaign aimed at securing the

confiscation and destruction of all Jewish books in the Holy Roman Empire. When the

Archbishop of Mainz raised objections, the Emperor Maximilian asked Reuchlin, a noted

jurist as well as the leading Christian Hebrew scholar in Europe, to be one of a group of

advisors on this subjectand although Reuchlin was the only one to oppose the

confiscation, the Emperor decided not to proceed with it. Outraged by this result,

Pfefferkorn promptly libeled Reuchlin, whose indignant response led to open warfare

with the Dominican orderinvolving, in short order, a condemnation by the University

of Colognes theological faculty, and legal actions against Reuchlin by the inquisitor

Jacob Hoogstraten, first in Mainz and then in Rome.8

6See Paola Zambelli, White Magic, Black Magic in the European Renaissance: From Ficino, Pico, Della

Porta to Trithemius, Agrippa, Bruno(Leiden: Brill, 2007), p. 129.7See Nauert 1965, pp. 25-29. For the text of thisExpostulatio contra Catalinetum, disseminated in 1510

from England, where Agrippa then was, see Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Opera, ed. Richard H. Popkin (2

vols., c. 1580; rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1970), vol. 2, sig. Hh6v-Iiv(492-98).8English translations of key texts, together with a useful brief account of the Reuchlin affair, are provided


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The controversy developed into what Andrew Gow has called a dirty war, with

vicious slanders on both sides.9However, Reuchlins humanist supporters made at least

one intervention of enduring literary value: Ulrich von Huttens and Crotus Rubeanuss

satiricalLetters of Obscure Men(1515, expanded in 1516 and 1517). This collection of

purported correspondencemost of it featuring the University of Cologne humanist

Ortwin Gratius, who had been involved from the beginning in Pfefferkorns campaign 10

mercilessly lampooned Reuchlins enemies as ignorant buffoons. The hapless Gratiuss

response, a collection of Lamentations of Obscure Men (1518), contains an abusive

exchange of letters between Agrippa Stygianus, a practitioner of sinister demonic rites,

and Georgius Subbunculator, who is anxious about the possibility that (as Marlowes

Doctor Faustus would speculate seventy years later) hells a fable.11 The infernal

implications of Stygianus are obvious enough: people who concern themselves with the

traffic across the river Styx are necromancers. The other name appears to be a derisive

modification of the humanist cognomen under which the self-proclaimed necromancer

by Erika Rummel, The Case Against Johann Reuchlin: Religious and Social Controversy in Sixteenth

Century Germany(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). See also James Overfield, A New Look

at the Reuchlin Affair, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History8 (1971): 167-207, and his

Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), as

well as Charles Zika, Reuchlin and Erasmus, inExorcising Our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and Visual

Culture in Early Modern Europe(Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 69-97.9Andrew Colin Gow, The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200-1600 (Leiden: Brill, 1995),

p. 138. Pfefferkorns initial campaign was clearly antisemitic, but there was also antisemitism on the other

side of the controversymost viciously in the blood libel directed at Pfefferkorn in a pamphlet from

1514/15,Die Geschicht unnd Bekantnu des getaufften Juden / genannt Johannes Pfefferkorn. See Gow,

pp. 138-39, and Heiko A. Oberman, Johannes Reuchlin: Von Judenknechten zu Judenrechten, in Arno

Herzig, Julius H. Schoeps, and Saskia Rohde, eds.,Reuchlin und die Juden(Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke

Verlag, 1993), p. 61, n.82.10

See Gow,Red Jews, pp. 133-35; Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, eds., Contemporaries of

Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, Volumes 1-3(1985, rpt. Toronto:

University of Toronto, 1995), p. 124; and Dietrich Reichling, Ortwin Gratius: Sein Leben und Wirken, eine

Ehrenrettung (Heiligenstadt: Wilhelm Delion, 1884), pp. 41-56.11

For Gratiuss Latin text, see Paola Zambelli, Agrippa von Nettesheim in den neueren kritischen Studien

und in den Handschriften,Archiv fr Kulturgeschichte51, Heft 2 (1969): 280; and for an Englishtranslation, Zambelli, Magic and Radical Reformation in Agrippa of Nettesheim,Journal of the Warburg

and Courtauld Institutes39 (1976): 70. Georgius Subbunculator asks: Si non sunt inferi, si non sunt regna

Plutonis, si Elysium ac Chymeras juxta habemus, quid obsero nobis erit, qui Rege coeli contempto et

virtutibus denique omnibus in exilium missis, inter saxum et sacra perpetuo lamentabimur? There may be

a reminiscence of this text in Marlowes Faustus, who confounds hell in Elysium (Christopher Marlowe,

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus: A Critical Edition of the 1604 Version and of the Censored and

Revised 1616 Text, ed. Michael Keefer [Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2008], I. iii. 60,195), and says (to

the devil Mephastophilis, of all people), Come, I think hells a fable (II. i. 128, 210).


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Georgius Sabellicus Faustus had advertised himself in 1506-07 in what was probably a

printed broadsheet (parts at least of the text are preserved in a letter written in 1507 by

the magician and Benedictine Abbot Johannes Trithemius).12Subbunculator means a

botcher-up of old clothesan apt enough debunking metaphor for Faustuss wildly

eclectic heterodoxy.13Gratius thus seems to have initiated a pairing of Agrippa, the occult

philosopher, with Faustus, the necromancer and diviner, that would become habitual later

in the century.

Shortly after the publication of Gratiuss attack, Agrippa tangled in Metz with a

powerful member of the Dominican Order, the inquisitor Nicholas Savini. Acting in his

function as city advocate, Agrippa secured the release of a woman whom Savini had

tortured on a charge of witchcraft, restored her confiscated property, and accused the

inquisitor of heresy (Savinis claim that the woman was a witch because her mother had

been one amounted, he said, to denying the efficacy of baptism).14At much the same

time, early in 1519, Agrippa was drawn into a controversy in which the leading French

humanist, Jacques Lefvre dtaples, had become enmeshed, over the apparently absurd

question of how many times St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, had been married.

There was in fact a scholarly point to it: Lefvres criticisms, on philological grounds, of

unscriptural legends peddled by preachers had drawn turf-war attacks from the Paris

theological faculty. And Agrippas involvement was evidently unplanned: having

supported Lefvres position in discussions in Metz, he was denounced from the pulpit as

a heretica repetition of his experience with Catalinetand consequently wrote as much

12The letter was addressed to Johannes Virdung von Hassfurt, astrologer to the Elector Palatine atHeidelberg, who had also received a copy of Faustuss text, and had indicated to Trithemius his eagerness

to meet the man. For a reading of Trithemiuss letter (and of Faustuss eclecticism), see Frank Baron,

Doctor Faustus from History to Legend(Munich: Fink, 1978), pp. 11-39.13

See Michael Keefer, Misreading Faustus Misreading: The Question of Context, The Dalhousie Review

65.4 (Winter 1985-86): 528; and Marlowe, p. 66.14

See Nauert 1965, pp. 59-60, and Zika, Agrippa of Nettesheim and His Appeal to the Cologne Council in

1533: The Politics of Knowledge in Early Sixteenth-Century Germany, inExorcising Our Demons, pp.

146-49. InDe vanitate, ch. 96, Agrippa gives an account of the case and of the arguments he used against

Savini; see Agrippa, Of the Vanitie and Vncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, trans. James Sanford [1569],

ed. Catherine M. Dunn (Northridge: California State University Press, 1974), pp. 351-52. Agrippas late

text attacking the witch-hunters,Adversus inquisitores lamiarum, which fell into the hands of the inquisitor

Sisto da Siena and was destroyed, has been reconstructed in Zambelli, Cornelio Agrippa, Sisto da Siena e

gli inquisitori,Memorie domenicane n.s. 3 (1972): 146-64.


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in his own defense as in Lefvres.15

The cumulative effect of these controversies seems to have been to persuade some

factions among the burghers of Metz that Agrippas talents might be better exercised

elsewhereand to convince Agrippa himself that Metz was the stepmother of all good

letters and virtues.16

By the time Martin Luthers concurrent difficulties with Church authorities had

blossomed into an open schism, Agrippas reputation was such that the Strasbourg

humanist and Reformer Wolfgang Capito could recount to him, in a letter written in

1522, a conversation with an admirer of Agrippas encyclopedic learning and brilliant

refutations of sophistry: this person identified him as a forerunner of Luthers, [who]

therefore cannot oppose him: what Luther sees now, he saw long ago.17

Despite Capitos evident desire to bring him onside, and his own early role in

disseminating Lutheran texts, Agrippa never committed himself to the Reformation; his

affinities were rather with what has been called the Radical Reformation,18and after his

death he was harshly criticized by two of the leading magisterial Reformers. Since he

also refused to temporize in the manner of Erasmus with the theologians of the mendicant

orders, it cannot have been altogether a surprise that when he published his two major

works, De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium atque excellentia Verbi Dei

declamatio (1526, printed in 1530; commonly referred to asDe vanitate), andDe occulta

philosophia libri tres(ms. version 1510, expanded version printed 1531-33), the former

was promptly condemned by the theological faculties of Louvain and the Sorbonne,

15Nauert 1965, pp. 61-62.

16Nauert 1965, p. 68, quoting Agrippa 1970, vol. 2,Epistolarum liber II. xxxiii, p. 681.

17Agrippa 1970, vol. 2,Epistolarum liber III. xv, pp. 729-30: Bonus hic vir de te coepit honorificloqui

in itinere: depinxit mihi virum quendam omnium eruditissimum, professione medicum, scientia simul vercyclicum & omniscium, maximautem valentem disputatione, qui levi articulo sophistarum impetusdimoveat. Percontabar de nomine. Agrippa, inquit, est oriundus Colonia, educatione Italus, experientia

curialis, hoc est aulicus, urbanus, civilis. Improviso quidem gaudio ferperturbatus subieci: Quid, inquam,medicus ille de Germanica haeresi sentit, num repugnat Luthero? nne facit cum doctissimisParisiensibus? tum ille, Nihil minus, inquit, nam praeire Luthero potest, resistere non potest, quae modLutherus ille olim vidit. Enemies of the nascent Reformation were by this time attacking Erasmus,

Reuchlin, and Lefvre as precursors of Luther; see A. L. Herminjard, ed., Correspondence desrformateurs dans les pays de langue franaise (9 vols., 1866-97; rpt. Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1965-66),vol. 1, p. 64.18See Zambelli 1976 (reprinted in Zambelli 2007, pp. 138-82).


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while the printing of the latter was interrupted and delayed by more than a year due to

attacks by the Cologne Dominicans19and resulted, according to late and possibly

unreliable sources, in Agrippas banishment from the Holy Roman Empire. 20

Hounded by the mendicant orders, and persecuted by secular authorities as well,

Agrippa died in poverty in 1535. But several of the contemporaries whose names appear

with his under the first of the Bibliothque Sainte-Genevives arches found occasion to

remember him in ensuing decades. The naturalist Conrad Gesner, who had been a student

of Capitos and became a follower of the Zwinglian Heinrich Bullinger, devoted what

Paola Zambelli describes as a long and accurate article to Agrippa in his Bibliotheca

universalis(1545); but while crediting him with resistance on many points to Roman

Catholic doctrine and authority, Gesner also criticized Agrippa for concealing his deep

convictions.21

Other contemporaries, whose comments contain elements of fiction, of polemic,

or of both together, were more unflattering. Franois Rabelaiss Tiers livre des faictz et

dictz Heroques du noble Pantagruel, published in 1546, contains a chapter in which the

court soothsayer Her Trippa, consulted by Panurge about his plans for marriage,

informs him, in a giddy list of more than three dozen forms of divination, that he will

infallibly be a cuckoldall this from one who, while seem[ing] very clearly to see all

heavenly and terrestrial things without spectacles [], was not able with all the skill and

cunning that he had, to perceive the bumbasting of his [own] wife by the lackeys of the

court.22

19Nauert 1965, pp. 108-09, 112-13.

20See Zambelli 2007, pp. 162-63.

21Conrad Gesner,Bibliotheca universalis(Zurich, 1545), fol. 309v; cited by Zambelli 2007, pp. 144-45.

22Franois Rabelais, The Complete Works of Doctor Franois Rabelais[]. Trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart

and Peter Motteux, ed. J. Lewis May (London: Abbey Library, c. 1960), Second Part, p. 62; Tiers livre, ch.

xxv, in Rabelais Oeuvres completes, ed. Pierre Jourda (2 vols. Paris: ditions Garnier Frres, 1962), vol. 1,p. 506: luy un jour parlant au grand Roy des choses celestes et transcendentes, les laquais de court, par les

degrez, entre les huys, sabouloient sa femme plaisir []. Et il, voyant toutes choses aetheres et terrestressans bezicles [], seulement ne voioit sa femme rimballante, et oncques nen sceut les nouvelles. The

layers of satirical fiction and of possible underlying actuality here are impossible to disentangle. While

Agrippas first two marriages were happy, he divorced his third wife in 1535 (Johann Weyer, Witches,

Devils, and Doctors in the Renassance: Johann Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, ed. and trans. George

Mora, Benjamin Kohl, and John Shea [Tempe, Arizona: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998],

II. v, p. 113). Ironically, one possible source for Rabelais extended joke is an epigram of Sir Thomas

Mores that Agrippa quotes inDe vanitate, ch. 31 (see Agrippa 1974, p. 103).


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In the same year, Paulo Giovio (1483-1552), whose name likewise appears beside

Agrippas under the first of the two Sainte-Genevive arches, published an account of

him in hisElogia virorum literis illustriumthat both echoes Ortwin Gratiuss attack and

also prefigures the key features of the legend of Faustus. Giovio writes that Agrippa,

though possessed of a marvelous genius, came to scorn the sciences he had acquired and

the truths of religion, and was in the end exposed as a servant of the devil:

For, having by his unlimited powers of comprehension and his

prodigious memory mastered the principles and inner secrets

and scaled the heights of all arts and sciences, he proceeded to

attack the sciences, to challenge the truth of religious doctrines,

and in his witty discourses to ridicule the labor spent on all

studies. And this he did the more emphatically and effectively

because he supported such novel arguments with the weight of

Holy Writ [].

He died before he reached old age in a mean, dark inn at

Lyons, execrated by many as a wretch suspected of practicing

black art, because they thought he took about with him an evil

genius [Cacodaemon] in the shape of a black dog. Therefore,

when, as death drew near, he was urged to repent, he took off

the dogs leather collar studded with nails in a pattern of magic

symbols and angrily burst out with these last words, Begone,

accursed beast that hast utterly destroyed me! And that favorite

dog, the constant companion of all his journeyings, deserted his

dying master and was never seen again, for with one mad leap

he plunged into the Arar and those who asserted they had seen

the incident think he did not swim out again.23

23Paulo Giovio,An Italian Portrait Gallery: Being Brief Biographies of Scholars

Illustrious within the memories of our grandfathers[], trans. Florence Alden Gragg(Boston: Chapman Grimes, !"#$%, p. !#"& Giovio, Pauli Iovii Novocomensis EpiscopiNucerini Elogia virorum literis illustrium [] (!$', rpt. Basle: Petrus Perna, !$))%,sigs. *v+* (pp. !-+-)%: Quis in Henrici Cornelij Agrippae sedato vultu portenosum ingeniumlatuisse crediderit? Hic enim immenso captu, vastaque memoria, scientiarum artiumque omnium rationes,

arcanaqueintima & summos apices complexus disciplinas convellit, religiones in dubium revocat,


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This narrative appears to have helped to launch the legend of Doctor Faustus, for

two years later, in 1548, the Lutheran pastor Johannes Gast sought to outdo Giovio by

claiming that the necromancer Faustuss dog, and his horse as well, were both devils

and that the manner of his death left no trace of doubt as to his damnation: he was

strangled by the devil and his body on its bier kept turning face downward even though it

was five times turned on its back. God preserve us lest we become slaves of the devil. 24

Giovios story also became part of the generally accepted assessment of Agrippas life,

reappearing, for example, in the preface to James Sanfords 1569 translation of De

vanitate.25

Two much better-known theologians, both Reformers, whose names stand among

Agrippas contemporaries on the Sainte-Genevive faade, disapproved of him no less

violently. Jean Calvin denounced Agrippa in his De scandalis (1550) as one of a band of

Lucianici homines, imitators of the satirist Lucian of Samosata, who in their wild

madness vomited up execrable blasphemies.26

studiorumque omnium labores festiva declamatione deridet: eoque vehementius atque validius, quod tantas

novitatis argumenta sacrarum literarum auctoritate confirmentur []. Excelsit vita nondum senex apudLugdunum ignobili & tenebroso in diversorio, multis eum tanquam Necromantiae suspicione infamem

execrantibus, quod Cacodaemonem nigri canis specie circumduceret, ita vt quum propinqua morte ad

poenitentiam urgeretur, cani collarelloreum magicis per clavorum emblemata inscriptum notis exoluerit, in

haec suprema verba irate prorumpens, Abi perdita bestia, quae me totum perdidisti: nec usquam familiaris

ille canis, ac assiduus itinerum omnium comes, & tum morientis domini desertor, postea conspectus est,quum praecipiti fugae saltu in Ararim se immersisse, nec enatasse, ab his qui id vidisse asserebant,

existimetur. This defamatory story was refuted by Johann Weyer, who had been Agrippas student and

had walked his dog for him. The dogs name was Monsieur (which we can identify as an Agrippan joke:

this was the title in the French court of the Dauphin Franois [1518-1536]); and Agrippa died in Grenoble,not Lyons. See Weyer, II. v, pp. 113-14.24

P. . Palmer and /. P. ore, The Sources of the aust Tradition from Simon !agusto "essing(0e1 2or3: 456ord 7niversit8 Press, !"#%, p. 98, quoting from Gasts Sermonesconviviales, vol. 2 (1548): Canem secum ducebat et equum, Satanas fuisse reor, qui ad omnia errant parati

exequenda. Canem aliquando servi formam assumere, et esculenta adferre, quidam mihi dixere. Atqui

miser deplorandum finem sortitus est, nam a satana suffocatus, cuius cadaver in feretro facie ad terram

perpetuo spectans, etsi quinquies in tergum verteretur. Dominus custodiat nos, ne satanae mancipia

fiamus.

25See Agrippa 1974, p. 4.269ean Calvin, #e scandalis $ui%us hodie pleri$ue a%sterrentur& nonnulli etiamalienantura pur Evangeli doctrina(Geneva: 9oannes Crispinus, !$$%, sig. G. iii (p. 53):Quotquot ergo videmus hodie Lucianicos homines, qui totam Christi religionem subsannant; sigs. G iiiv-

Giv: Agrippam, Villanovanum, Doletum, & similes vulgo notum est tanquam Cyclopas quospiam

Evangelium semper fastuose sprevisse. Tandem eo prolapsi sunt amentiae & furoris, ut non modo in Filium

Dei execrabiles blasphemias evomerent, sed quantum ad animae vitam attinet, nihil a canibus & porcis

putarent se differre. Alii (ut Rabelaysus, Deperius, & Goveanus) gustato Evangelio, eadem caecitate sunt

perculsi. Cur istud? Nisi quia sacrum illud vitae aeternae pignus, sacrilega ludendi aut ridendi audacia ante


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And Philipp Melanchthon, who shared Martin Luthers fondness for adapting

patristic and apocryphal narratives to his own needs, incorporated a mention of Agrippa

into his late lectures at Wittenberg in the mid-1550s. Shaping motifs from patristic

accounts of the arch-heretic and necromancer Simon Magus into a parallel narrative

about the magician Faustus, Melanchthon effectively validated his own quasi-apostolic

authority by placing himself in the position occupied by the apostles Philip and Peter in

their encounter with Simon in the canonical Acts of the Apostles. He knew Ioannes

Faustus, who was born, he claimed, in Knittlingen, a short distance from Melanchthons

home town of Bretten (there is in fact good evidence that the notorious Dr. Faustus,

whose Christian name was Georg or Georgius, was born in one or another of the two

villages of Helmstadt in the vicinity of Heidelberg and Wrzburg).27 The Wittenberg

students were solemnly informed that Faustus had, like Simon Magus, attempted to fly;

that he died at the devils hands in the Duchy of Wrttemberg; and that during his life he

had with him a dog which was a devil, just as that scoundrel who wrote De vanitate

artiumlikewise had a dog that ran about with him and was a devil. 28Melanchthon also

emphatically refuted the boast of Faustus magus, a most filthy beast and a sewer of

many devils, that all of Charles Vs victories in Italy had been won by his magic.

This, he says severely, was an utter lie. I mention this for the sake of the young, so

that they may not readily give ear to such vain men.29These concluding remarks indicate

profanarant?27See Baron, pp. 16-18; Marlowe, pp. 64-68.28Palmer and More, pp. 101-02, quoting from Johannes Manlius,Locorum communium collectanea

(1563): Vivens, adhuc habebat secum canem, qui erat diabolus, sicut iste nebulo qui scripsit De vanitate

artium etiam habebat canem, secum currentem, qui erat diabolus. For fuller explanations of the logic of

apostolic validation at work in Melanchthons fabulations about Faustus, see Keefer, Right Eye and Left

Heel: Ideological Origins of the Legend of Faustus,Mosaic22 (1989): 88-89, and Marlowe, pp. 70-74.

We can identify Melanchthons source for two of his contributions to the Faustus legend: his insistence that

the mans name was Joannes and that he had studied magic at Cracow. Melanchthon had known Johannes

Virdung von Hassfurt, the recipient of Trithemiuss 1507 letter about Georgius Faustus: Virdung cast the

young Melanchthons horoscope just a few years later, and he had studied at Cracow. A conflation of

Faustus with Virdung is understandable: both were deeply interested in magic and practiced physiognomic

and astrological divination, and both were associated with the University of Heidelberg, from which

Faustus received his MA in 1490.29

Palmer and More, p. 103, quoting from Manlius: Idem Faustus magus, turpissima bestia, et cloaca

multorum diabolorum, vane gloriabatur de se omnes victorias, quas habuerunt Caesariani exercitus in Italia,

esse partas per ipsum sua magia. Id enim dico propter iuventutem, ne statim talibus vanis hominibus

assentiantur.


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that together with the devil-dog motif, Agrippas brief service in the court of the Emperor

Charles Vemblazoned on the title pages of his bookshad been absorbed into stories

about Faustus.

Reflection on the contemporaries of Agrippas whose names appear with his

under the first of the two arches can thus give some sense of the intellectual currents to

which he belonged, as well as an appreciation of the manner in which the demonizing

tactics of an opponent like Gratius modulated in later decades into a process of polemical

legend-formation intimately linked to the elaboration of the Faustus legend.

In the reappearance of C. AGRIPPA under the next arch of the Bibliothque

Sainte-Genevive, he is surrounded by writers some of whom had scarcely been born by

the time of his death. We need mention just three: the doctor and polymath Jerome

Cardan (1501-1576), who in two books dating from the mid-1550s denounced Agrippa as

a man born to all evil and pernicious to the human race, and called the Abbot

Trithemius, a letter from whom prefaced all early editions of De occulta philosophia,

more mendacious even than Agrippa;30 the political philosopher Jean Bodin (1530-

1596), whoseDe la dmonomanie des sorciers, published in 1580, described Agrippa as

the worst sorcerer of his ageindeed, one of the worst of all time; 31and the lucidly

skeptical Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), whose Essais, first published in the same

year, give evidence in contrast of a serious and attentive reading of De vanitate.32

309erome Cardan, "es livres de 'ierome (ardanus medecin milannois& intitul)s de la

Su%tilit)& * su%tiles inuentions& ensem%le les causes occultes& * raisons d+icelles,trans. /ichard le Blanc (Paris: Guillaume le 0oir, !$$%, sig. Vvv.iii (fol. 365): Agrippa arempli un livre de telles matieres [i.e. poisons], homme ntout mal, & pernicious au genre humain.(Cardan is referring to an apocryphal text attributed to Agrippa that he had encountered in manuscript.) See

also Cardan,'ieronymi (ardani !ediolanensis medici #e rerum varietate li%ri ,-II(Basle: ;. Petri, !$$) %, sig. dD8 (p. 803): Fuit vir paulo ante nostram aetatem mendacior Agrippa[], Abbas Trithemius.31

Jean Bodin,De la dmonomanie des sorciers(Paris: Jacques du Puys, 1580), fol. 219v: Agrippa, le plusgrand Sorcier qui fut onques de son aage; fol. 220: il ny a homme de sain iugement, qui ne confesse apres

avoir leu les livres dAggrippa, que cestoit lun des plus grands Sorciers du monde.32

Echoes ofDe vanitateare particularly apparent in Montaignes Apologie de Raymond Sebond, the

longest of his essays; see Pierre


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The near-concurrent publication of a two-volume edition of Agrippas Opera, a

French translation ofDe vanitate, and a Latin edition of the same work (in 1580, 1582,

and 1584 respectively) indicates that printers thought there to be a continuing potential

readership.33One can see how the compilers of the Sainte-Genevive canon could have

idly taken Agrippa for a contemporary of Bodin and Montaignethough another

reference to him from the same period, had they encountered it, might have alerted them

to his actual place in history. The supposed boast of Faustus so earnestly denied by

Melanchthon three decades previously seems to have undergone a lateral drift: in 1584

the historian AndrThevet felt it necessary to refute the opinion that the military victories

of the Emperor Charles V (who abdicated in 1556 and died two years later) had been won

by Agrippas magic.34

3. From Marlowe to the classical paradigm

On the other side of the English Channel, meanwhile, Agrippa was being read

with interest by writers like Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and the playwright John

Lyly, who in the court prologue to Campaspe(1584) wrote that Whatsoever we present,

we wish it may be thought the dancing of Agrippahis shadows, who in the moment they

were seen, were of any shape one could conceive.35By the end of that decade, the first

canonical form of the Faustus legend, theHistoria von D. Johann Fausten(1587), had

33The 1580 Operais Agrippa 1970; see9ean George ?hDodore Graesse, Tr)sor des livres rareet pr)cieu0 ou Nouveau dictionnaire %i%liographi$ue, ) vols. ( @resden: /udol6=untEa, !-$"+"%, vol. 1, p. 45 and Nauert 1965, p. 337 for notices of the 1582 French translation ofDe vanitate; and see Christopher . ehrich, The "anguage of #emons and Angels:(ornelius Agrippa+s 1ccult Philosophy(eiden: Brill, #%, p. 235 for notice of the 1584edition ofDe vanitate.34

AndrD ?hevet, "es vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres( vols., Paris: Par lavesue . =eruert et Guillaume Chaudiere, !$-'%, vol. 2, fol. 542v-543.359ohn 8l8, The (omplete 2or3s of 4ohn "yly, ed. /. H. Bond., # vols., !" (rpt.456ord: Clarendon Press, !")%, vol. 2, p. 316. (Lyly is not included in the Bibliothque Sainte-Genevive canon.) On Sidneys awareness of Agrippa, see A. C. ;amilton, >idne8 and Agrippa,.eview of English Studiesn.s. ), no. (!"$%; and on Spensers, see =ee6er, >Agrippa, inThe Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. ;amilton (?oronto: 7niversit8 o6 ?oronto Press,!""%.


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been printed, translated into English, and promptly dramatized by Christopher Marlowe.

His Dr. Faustus, appearing on stage for the first time in 1589, announced in the plays

opening scene his ambition to be as cunning as Agrippa was, / Whose shadows made all

Europe honor him.36

The German humanist and occult philosopher is more significantly present in this

play than the mere mention of his name would suggest. Hostile readers of Agrippa like

AndrThevet had understood his claim in De vanitateto be Professinge Divinitee37as

mere hypocrisy: despite the books evangelical orientation, they suspected that its

rhetorical demolitions of the orthodox forms of knowledge were designed to prepare

readers for the magical doctrines espoused inDe occulta philosophia.38(Would to God

he had drowned alone in this gulf of impiety, Thevet added: today we would not have

such a heap of atheists, blasphemers and scoffers as this century has produced.Agrippa

hatched infinite swarms both of magicians and atheists.)39

This pattern of a scoffing doubt that leads directly into a commitment to magic is

echoed in the first speech of Marlowes Faustus. Having earned his doctorate in divinity,

Faustus proclaims himself a hypocrite: he will be a divine in show.40After rehearsing a

sophistical critique of the standard academic disciplines, of which there is no hint in

Marlowes principal source, the Historie of the damnable life, and deserved death of

Doctor John Faustus (1588), or English Faust Book, he bids farewell to divinity.

Proclaiming that These metaphysics of magicians / And necromantic books are

heavenly, he rapturously celebrates the world of profit and delight, / Of power, of

honor, of omnipotence, that magic offers its practitioners41in language that is

paralleled inDe occulta philosophiabut not in Marlowes source.

In the sixth chapter of Book III, for example, Agrippa writes that the magus who

36Marlowe, I. i. 118-19 (p. 183).37Agrippa 1974, ch. 1, p. 12.38

See for example Thevet, vol. 2, fol. 544 r-v.39

Thevet, vol. 2, fol. 543v: Et, pleut Dieu, que tout seul il se fust noyen ce goulphre dimpiet,aujourdhuy nous naurions un tas dAthees, de mesdisans & brocardeurs, comme ce siecle les nous a

produict. Pour la Magie & Atheisme Agrippa en a enclos une infinite de formillieres.40

Marlowe, I. i. 3, p. 174.41Marlowe, I. i. 50-55, pp. 178-79.


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works through religion can learn to exercise quasi-divine powers:

Our mind therefore, pure and divine, burning with religious

love, adorned by hope, and directed by faith, placed in the height

and summit of the human soul, attracts the truth, and suddenly

comprehending, beholds in the divine truth itself, as though in a

certain mirror of eternity, all the conditions, reasons, causes and

sciences of things both natural and immortal. Hence it comes

to us, who are established in nature, sometimes to rule over

nature, and to accomplish operations so wonderful, so sudden,

and so difficult, whereby the spirits of the dead may obey, the

stars be disordered, the divine powers compelled, and the

elements enslaved: so men devoted to God, and elevated by

these theological virtues, command the elements, drive away

mists, summon winds, collect clouds into rain, cure diseases,

raise the dead.42

Subtract the references to religion and divine truth, and one might be left with something

not unlike Faustuss rhapsody:

All things that move between the quiet poles

Shall be at my command. Emperors and kings

Are but obeyd in their several provinces,

Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds;

But his dominion that exceeds in this

Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man!

A sound magician is a mighty god:

42De occulta philosophia, III. vi; Agrippa 1970, vol. 1, p. 321: Mens itaque nostra pura atque divina,

religioso amore flagrans, spe decora, fide directa, posita in culmine & fastigio humani animi, veritatem

attrahit, omnesque rerum tam naturalium quam immortalium status, rationes, causas & scientias, in ipsa

veritate divina, tanquam in quodam aeternitatis speculo intuetur, subito comprehendens. Hinc provenit

nos in natura constitutos, aliquando supra naturam dominari: operationesque tam mirificas, tam subitas, tam

arduas efficere, quibus obediant manes, turbentur sidera, cogantur numina, serviant elementa: sic homines

Deo devoti, ac theologicis istis virtutibus elevati, imperant elementis, pellunt nebulas, citant ventos, cogunt

nubes in pluvias, curant morbos, suscitant mortuos.


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Here tire, my brains, to get a deity!43

By the time he refers to Agrippa by name, Marlowes Dr. Faustus has already been

emulatingor parodyinghim for more than a hundred lines.

The admiring references to shadows by Lyly and Marlowes Faustus allude to

that kind of necromancy that Agrippa termed scyomantia, divination through the

invocation of the umbrae or shadows of the dead. 44Like Marlowes friend Thomas

Nashe, who in The Unfortunate Traveller(1594) called Agrippa an abundant scholar

who bare the fame to be the greatest conjurer in Christendom, and represented him as

earning this reputation with necromantic displays resembling the one with which

Marlowes Faustus entertained the Emperor Charles V,45these writers identify Agrippa as

not just a theorist of necromancy, but a practitioner. They may have been influenced in

this by a spurious fourth book ofDe occulta philosophia, available by the late 1560s in at

least three editions,46 which contained detailed instructions for rituals of ceremonial

magic, and, as Gareth Roberts noted, was widely read in late-sixteeenth-century England,

along with other magical handbooks like Peter of Abanos Heptaemeron that were

printed with it.47

43Marlowe, I. i. 57-64, p. 179.

44De occulta philosophia, III. xlii; Agrippa 1970, vol. 1, sig. E3 (p. 437). Agrippa contrasts scyomantia

with necyomantia, which involves blood sacrifice and the re-animation of corpses, as in the horrifyingritual of the witch Erictho in ucans Pharsaliaor#e %ello civili, ed. @. /. hac3leton Baile8(tuttgart: ?euIner, !"--%, VI. 637-827. However, Agrippas discussion is confusing. He also refersto the witch of Endors raising of Samuel (1 Samuel28: 11-20), and Kirkes instructions to Odysseus for

obtaining prophetic knowledge from the shade of Teiresias (OdysseyX. 516-30) and the ensuing nekuia

(OdysseyXI. 23 ff). One might assume these to be instances of scyomantia. But Agrippa doesnt appear to

distinguish between these and the rite of Erictho, and Odysseuss rite involved a blood sacrifice. The

concluding paragraphs of the spurious fourth book borrow from this chapter, but omit the literary allusions;

in this text (Agrippa 1970, vol. 1, sigs. M8v-N [pp. 560-61]), as in Agrippas chapter, the words umbrae

and animae are used interchangeably.45?homas 0ashe, The 2or3s of Thomas Nashe, ed. /onald B. c=erro1, revised I8 F.P. Hilson, $ vols., !"$- (rpt. 456ord: Blac31ell, !"% , vol. 2, p. 252; compareDoctor Faustus,IV. ii (Marlowe, pp. 238-41), a scene usually ascribed to a collaborator, but evidently part of the plays

original design.46

In the mid-1550s Cardan stated that this fourth book had not yet been printed (Cardan 1556, sig. Xxx.iv

[fol. 367v). Graesse, vol. 1, p. 45, notes editions of it in 1565 and 1567, as well as an edition printed in 1567

in Paris ofDe occulta Philosophia L. III, quibus accesser[unt] spurius Agrippae liber de Ceremoniis

Magicis, Heptameron Petri de Abano []; the fourth book subsequently appears in editions of AgrippasOpera.47

Gareth /oIerts, >0ecromantic Boo3s: Christopher arlo1e, #octor austusandAgrippa o6 0ettesheim, in (hristopher !arlowe and English .enaissance (ulture,ed.@arr8l Grantle8 and Peter /oIerts (Aldershot: Ashgate, !"""%, pp. 151-55.


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In 1625, Gabriel Naudcriticized those who, condemning Agrippa as a magician

and thereby following the ignorance or the passion of Paulo Giovio and of

demonologists, rather than the truth of history, arrived at so unfavourable and sinister a

judgment of a man who was not only a new Trismegistus in the three higher faculties of

theology, law, and medicine, but who also traveled in body through every part of Europe,

and exercised his mind on all the sciences and disciplines. Naudargued that Agrippa

deserved better than to be abused with stories which would be much more appropriate in

the magical tales of Merlin, Maugis, and of Doctor Faust, than in writings which are (or

rather should be) serious and well-examined.48 But by this time, the patterns of

thought and interpretation that Agrippa had participated in were on the verge of being

permanently displaced by a new paradigm.

Just two years previously, in 1623, a man was burned at the stake in the city of

Moulins in the Auvergne for the crime of merely possessing a copy of De occulta

philosophia.49 Also in 1623, the Minim friar Marin Mersenne published a massive

polemic against occultist, naturalist, and skeptical tendencies in France, in the course of

which he denounced Agrippa as Archimagus50and in that same year made the

acquaintance of the young philosopher RenDescartes, whose reputation and writings

Mersenne would help very materially to advance over the next two decades.

48GaIriel 0audD,Apologie pour tous les grands personnages $ui ont est) faussement

soup5onne6 de magie(Paris: FranJois ?arga,!$%, p. 404: cest plustost suivre lignoranceou la passion de Paule Jove & des Demonographes, que la verite de lhistoire, de faire un jugement si peu

favorable & sinistre de cet homme, qui na pas estseulement un nouveau Trismegiste s trois facultezsuperieures de la Theologie, Jurisprudence & Medecine, mais qui a voulu promener son corps par toutes les

parties de lEurope, & faire rouler son esprit sur toutes les Sciences & disciplines; p. 419: Cette preuve

qui est la plus forte & la moins desguisee que puissent avoir nos adversaires, estant ainsi rendue vaine & de

nulle consequence, il ny a rien si facile que de venir a bout des autres, lesquelles se liroient beaucoup plus

propos dans les Romans magiques de Merlin, Maugis, & du Docteur Fauste, que dans les Escrits serieux& bien examinez, ou qui le devroient estre, de plusieurs Historiens & Demonographes. (Maugis is a

magician who figures prominently in the thirteenth-century chanson de gesteLes quatre fils Aymon,and in

later chapbook versions of the story.)49

See arin ersenne,(orrespondance du P7 !arin !ersenne, ed. Cornelis de Haardet al., (!- vols., Paris: me Paul ?anner8 and Kditions du Centre national de larecherche scientiL*ue, !"#+!"--%, vol. 1, p. 51 n. This burning was not an isolated event; itfollowed the execution in Toulouse in 1619 of the deist Giulio Cesare Vanini, and in Paris in 1622 of the

occultist Jean Fontanier; see A. C. Gra8ling, #escartes: The "ife of .en) #escartes and ItsPlace in his Times($, rpt. ondon: Poc3et Boo3s, %, pp. 119-21.50ersenne, /uestiones cele%errimae in Genesim& cum accurate te0tus e0plicatione&in hoc volumine Athei et #eistae impugnantur(Paris, !#), col. 490.


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Descartes most widely-read texts, the Discours de la mthode (1637) and the

Mditations mtaphysiques (1641), contributed decisively to what Michel Foucault

described as a major shift in the configuration of knowledge and interpretation, a

modification of the fundamental dispositions of the whole pistm of Western

culture51the supplanting of a sixteenth-century pistmbased on similitude and a

system of visible signatures which make manifest the hidden analogies that shape and

resonate through the whole cosmos, by la pense classique, whose key element,

according to Foucault, is a Cartesian critique of resemblance that excludes it as

fundamental experience and the primary form of knowledge, denouncing it rather as a

confused mixture that must be analyzed in terms of identity and differences, of measure

and order.52

The slender evidential basis of Foucaults schema, and its capricious non-

recognition both of an institutionally dominant scholastic-theological paradigm that was

visibly in conflict with the pistmof resemblance and analogy during the sixteenth and

early seventeenth centuries, and also of emergent elements of a classical structuring of

knowledge within sixteenth century culture, have rightly received criticism: none more

brilliant, perhaps, than that of Gary Tomlinson, who after identifying some of Foucaults

major deficienciesand using Agrippas De occulta philosophiaas a corrective to his

distinctly arbitrary structuring of the field of resemblance and analogyconceded

nonetheless that Foucaults paradigm-shift narrative retains a significant degree of

validity.53

While acknowledging that a paradigm shift indeed occurred during the mid-

seventeenth century, we should also admit that it was preceded by a situation of

extraordinary complexity. Tomlinson notes thatas one would expectthere are

significant anticipations of the emergent classical paradigm within the sixteenth century.

51ichel Foucault, "es mots et les choses: 8ne arch)ologie des sciences humaines(Paris: Gallimard, !"), p. 68: toute lpistmde la culture occidentale se trouve modifie dans sesdispositions fondamentales.52

Foucault, p. 66: La critique cartsienne de la resemblance est dun autre type. [.] cest la penseclassique excluant la resemblance comme exprience fondamentale et forme primaire du savoir, dnonanten elle un mixte confus quil faut analyzer en termes didentitet de differences, de mesure et dordre.53Gar8 ?omlinson, !usic in .enaissance !agic: Toward a 'istoriography of 1thers(Chicago: 7niversit8 o6 Chicago Press, !""#), pp. 32-66, 189-90.


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As I have argued elsewhere, there are also textually explicit connections in Descartes

writings between the ad fontesproject of speculative-occultist humanism that underlies

the paradigm of resemblance and analogy, and the Cartesian project of providing

philosophy with a secure foundational structure of existential-metaphysical axioms.54

More to the point, for present purposes, is the fact that most of the sixteenth-century

critics of Agrippa whose comments have been surveyed above were participants, in one

way or another, in the demonizing and demonological discourses of what I have termed a

scholastic-theological paradigm.

A wider-angle interpretive lens is needed, however, if we are to make sense of

Cornelius Agrippas direct and consciousas opposed to his shadowy, penumbral, and

largely posthumousparticipation in the Faustian century.

4. The Faustian paradigm and its contexts

In every aspect of Agrippas intellectual lifewhether we choose to focus on his

participation in a highly self-conscious humanist movement whose leading figures during

the decades of his maturity were Erasmus, Lefvre dtaples, and Reuchlin; on his

lifetime project of a synthesis of magical traditions derived from Hermetic, Neoplatonic,

Kabbalistic and other sources with a Christianity largely purged of medieval accretions;

or on his early sympathy for Luther and his subsequent influence on radical reformers

he was involved with the defining Renaissance project of a return ad fontes, to the

sources.

That project can be understood as having unfolded in three overlapping phases.

The first was primarily philologicalthough its program, exemplified in the fourteenth

century by Petrarch, of recovering classical texts, reviving a classical Latinity, and

emulating the literary achievements of ancient Rome and Greece, revealed in the work of

Lorenzo Valla a century later a capacity to shake dominant orthodoxies.

Admired as a leading scholar and Latinist, Valla also initiated critical

54See Keefer 1996a, esp. 33-63.


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comparisons of the Vulgate New Testament with the Greek original, challenged the

linguistic, metaphysical, and methodological foundations of scholastic Aristotelianism in

hisRepastinatio dialectice et philosophie (1439),55 and frontally attacked the Churchs

claims to temporal power and its corrupt political machinations in hisDe falso credita et

ementita Constantini donatione declamatio (1440). Valla knew that in challenging the

papacys priestly violence (iniuria pontificis), he was risking not just

excommunication, but death. Undaunted by this terrifying, twofold peril (duplex hic

periculi terror)and fortified perhaps by the fact that his patron, Alfonso V of Aragon,

was at war with the Popehe announced in ringing tones the public intellectuals duty to

speak truth to power: With strength of mind, full confidence, good hope, the cause of

truth, of justice, of God must be defended! Nor can one who speaks well be esteemed a

true orator, unless he also dares to speak. Let us then dare to accuse whoever deserves

accusation. And let him who sins against all be censured by one voice on behalf of all. 56

A second phase of the return ad fontesinvolved a restoration, or more properly a

reinvention, of Plato and the Platonic tradition. Two key figures in this were Vallas

contemporary Nicholas of Cusa and, several decades later, the Florentine Marsilio Ficino,

who in addition to providing the first Latin translation of the entire Platonic corpus also

wrote commentaries on some of the major dialogues and on key Neoplatonic texts, as

well as influential expositions of his own magically-inflected Platonism.

Cusa, though he recovered manuscripts of Pliny and Plautus in good humanist

fashion, and anticipated by some years Vallas exposure of the Donation of Constantine,

is principally remembered as a philosopher of striking originality. As Ernst Cassirer

observed, he rediscovered the Platonic concepts of chorismos, the radical and irrevocable

55For lucid expositions of Vallas critique of the presuppositions and procedures of scholastic philosophy

and theology, see Lodi Nauta, Lorenzo Valla, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(June 2009 Edition),

ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lorenzo-valla/and NautasIn Defense of Common

Sense: Lorenzo Vallas Humanist Critique of Scholastic Philosophy(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 2009).56

orenEo


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separation of the super-sensible and the sensible, and methexis, or participation, which he

understood as giving access to a paradoxical knowledge of divine otherness 57envisaged

through various forms of coincidentia oppositorum, among them the relationship of

likeness-in-incommensurability that connects microcosm and macrocosm.

Cusas recognition of chorismoschallenged both the Neoplatonic and scholastic

concern with a hierarchy of mediations between an originary One and the level of

ordinary experience, and also the Aristotelian-scholastic method of syllogistic argument

based on a logic of non-contradiction and the excluded middle.58No less importantly, he

repeatedly expressed his understanding of methexisin terms derived from the supposedly

ancient Egyptian philosopher, priest, and monarch Hermes Trismegistus.59The Hermetic

definition of God as an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose

circumference nowhere recurs in Cusas writings as an expression of the coincidence of

maximum with minimum, and is related to his understanding of the human intellect as

capax Dei.60 Moreover, his sense of man as a microcosm who, Cassirer writes,

includes the natures of all things within himself and is thus the bond that joins the

world,61likewise comes largely from Hermetic sources.

As Cassirer observed, Cusas declaration in De conjecturis(1443) that the human

microcosm is capable of becoming divine, angelic, or beastly62anticipates the famous

57Cassirer notes Cusas insistence that The Truth, ungraspable and inconceivable in itself, can only be

known in its otherness: cognoscitur inattingibilis veritatis unitas in alteritate conjecturali. NrnstCassirer, The Individual and the (osmos in .enaissance Philosophy, trans. ario@omandi (Philadelphia: 7niversit8 o6 Penns8lvania Press, !")%, pp. 29-30, quotingDeconjecturis, i. 2. In Nicolai Cusae Cardinalis Opera, ed. Jacques Lefvre dtaples (3 vols., Paris, 1514;rpt. Frankfurt / Main: Unvernderter Nachdruck Minerva, 1962), vol. 1, fol. xliv, the text differs slightly:Cognoscitur igitur inattingibilis veritatis unitas / alteritate conjecturali. Cassirer also quotes Cusas

concise definition of empirical knowledge: conjectura est positiva assertio in alteritate veritatem uti est

participans (Cassirer 1972, p. 23, quotingDe conjecturisi. 13; see Cusa, Opera, vol. 1, fol. xlviii).58

Cassirer 1972, pp. 8-23.59See Pas*uale Ar6D, >Nrmete ?rismegisto e 0icola Cusano, in 'ermetism from "ate

Anti$uity to 'umanism 9 "a tradi6ione ermetica dal mondo tardoanticoall+8manesimo, ed. Paolo ucentini et al. (?urnhout: Brepols, #%, pp. #+'#.60

See =ee6er, >Agrippas @ilemma: ;ermetic O/eIirth and the AmIivalences o6 #evanitateand #e occulta philosophia, .enaissance /uarterly'! (!"--%: !'+$#. Forone instance of this trope, derived from the late Hermetic textLiber XXIV philosophorum, see

Excitationum, V, ex sermone Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis, Cusa, Opera, vol. 2, fol. lxxxviiiv. This

same passage contains a statement that the human intellect is capax est dei (fol. lxxxix).61

Cassirer 1972, pp. 40, 64.62Regio igitur ipsa humanitatis Deum atque universum mundum humanali sua potentia ambit. Potest


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passage in Giovanni Pico della Mirandolas Oration on the Dignity of Man(1486, printed

1496) in which God tells Adam he is free to fashion himself into whatever shape he

prefersto become vegetative or brutish, or else to be reborn into rational and heavenly,

or into intellectual and angelic forms, or, finally, to attain unity with the divine.63 But

both passages echo the praise of human powers of self-fashioning in the Hermetic

Asclepius,according to which men can adopt the natures of lower species, remain content

with an intermediate position, or else become like daemons or gods: Hence, Asclepius,

what a great miracle is man, a being worthy of reverence and honour! For he passes into

the nature of a god as though he were himself a god; he is familiar with the race of

daemons, knowing himself to have come from the same origin.64In Cusas statements

of an insatiable human desireand capacityfor development into an ever-closer

resemblance to our divine original, Cassirer found the clearest philosophical expression

and [] deepest philosophical justification of what he called the basic Faustian attitude

of the Renaissance.65

In Book 14 of his Theologia Platonica(1484), Marsilio Ficinos exposition of the

ontological importance of the human soul in terms of its capacity to imitate the attributes

of God makes pivotal use of the same passage from the Hermetic Asclepius;66elsewhere

igitur homo esse humanus Deus atque Deus humaniter, potest esse humanus angelus, humana bestia,

humanus leo aut ursus, aut aliud quodcumque (Cassirer 1972, p. 87, quotingDe conjecturisii. 14; Cusa,

Opera, vol. 2, fol. lx).63Cassirer, Paul 4s3ar =risteller, and 9ohn ;erman /andall, 9r., eds., The .enaissancePhilosophy of !an(Chicago: 7niversit8 o6 Chicago Press, !"'-), pp. 224-25; Giovanni Picodella Mirandola,De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno, ed. Eugenio Garin (Florence: Vallecchi,

1942), p. 104.64

Propter quod et prope deos accedit, qui se mente, qua diis iunctus est, divina religione diis iunxerit, et

daemonum, qui his iunctus est. Humani vero, qui medietate generis sui contenti sunt, et reliquae hominum

species his similes erunt, quorum se generis speciebus adiunxerint. Propter haec, o Asclepi, magnum

miraculum est homo, animal adorandum atque honorandum. Hoc enim in naturam dei transit, quasi ipse sit

dues; hoc daemonum genus novit, utpote qui cum isdem se ortum esse cognoscat; hoc humanae naturae

partem in se ipse despicit, alterius parties divinitate confisus (Asclepius5-6, ed. Nock and Festugire, in

Corpus Hermeticum: Edizione e commento di A. D. Nock e A.-J. Festugire; Edizione dei testi ermeticicopti e commento di I. Ramelli, ed. Ilaria Ramelli [Milan: Bompiani, 2006], pp. 520-22).65

Cassirer 1972, pp. 68-69, referring toIdiota, Lib. IIIDe mente, chs. 3, 7, 13; and quotingExcitationum,

V, ex sermone Si quis sermonem meum servaverit: Sicut vis visiva sensibilis est infinibilis per omne

visibile (nunquam enim satiatur oculus visu), sic visus intellectualis nunquam satiatur visu veritatis.

Semper enim acuitur et fortificatur vis vivendi: sicut experimur in nobis, quod quanto proficimus plus in

doctrina, tanto capaciores sumus et plus proficere appetimus, et hoc est signum incorruptibilitatis

intellectus (Cusa, Opera, vol. 2, fol. lxxxiii).66See Paul 4s3ar =risteller, The Philosophy of !arsilio icino, trans.


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he alludes repeatedly to the regeneration tractates of the Hermetic Pimander, which he

had translated in 1463.67My aim in drawing attention to these facts is neither to revive

the troppo facili syntesi, as Eugenio Garin called them, of Dame Frances Yatess

reconstructions of a Renaissance Hermetic-Cabalistic tradition which she saw Ficino as

having initiated with his translation of the Hermetica;68 nor, conversely, to prompt

repetitions of the contrary excesses of some of her critics, who on occasion went so far as

to deny those texts any influence, either philosophical or magical.69 I wish rather to

suggest that the pivotal presence of Hermetic elements in the Platonic revival of the

fifteenth century can help us clarify the differences between this and the ensuing third

phase of the return ad fontes, the Reformation.

While the magisterial Reformers confined the sources to which they wanted to

return and the traditions they wanted to revive to the canonical Scriptures, supplemented

by a selection of patristic interpreters, the revivers of Platonism happily consented to a

radical dispersal of originary authority. Cusa, distinguishing in De pace fideibetween the

unchanging signified of faith and the shifting signifiers of religious rites in Judaism,

Christianity, and Islamsigna autem mutationem capiunt, non signatum70made

allowance for a generous relativism, while Ficino went beyond recognizing Plato as a

(!"'#, rpt. Gloucester, A: Peter mith, !"'%, p. 117.67

See Keefer Agrippas Dilemma, 625, n. 35.68

Eugenio Garin, Divagazioni ermetiche,Rivista critica di storia della filosofia31 (1976): 466; and see

Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964),

and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).69

See Brian Copenhaver, >Astrolog8 and agic, in The (am%ridge 'istory of.enaissance Philosophy, eds. Charles B. chmitt and uentin 3inner (CamIridge:CamIridge 7niversit8 Press, !"--%, p. 281: FicinosHermeticaare not about magic, and whatphilosophy they contain is of small interest. [U]nlike the Neoplatonic systems with which it is often

confused, the corpus Hermeticumhas little to offer to anyone who requires a consistent conceptual and

terminological framework for analysis of the problems it presents. As far as Renaissance magic was

concerned, the chief task of Hermes Trismegistus was genealogical or doxographic. The first of these

sentences is sufficiently refuted by Keefer, Agrippas Dilemma and Keefer, The Dreamers Path:

Descartes and the Sixteenth Century.Renaissance Quarterly49 (1996): 30-76. As to genealogy, Kristeller

devoted a chapter (146-70) to Ficinos ontological doctrine of the primum in aliquo genere (The first in

every genus is the cause of the whole genus [quoted on p. 147]), indicating that Ficino derived this

doctrine in his earlyDe voluptate from Mercurius Trismegistus. There is good evidence that Ficino, having

placed Mercurius or Hermes as the first textually substantive figure in the genus of philosophers, applied

this ontological principle by reading supposedly later philosophical texts through a Hermetic lens.70Cassirer 1972, p. 30, quotingDe pace fidei15 (Cusa, Opera, vol. 2, fol. cxxiv).


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Greek-speaking Moses (as Clement of Alexandria had done in the second century),71and

understood the Egyptian Hermes as a source not just for Plato but also, as he sometimes

daringly insinuated, for Moses.

This genealogy offered the exciting prospect of healing the rift between faith and

reason in European culture (a rift exacerbated in the arts faculties of the fourteenth and

fifteenth centuries by the partial supercession of the Thomistic via antiqua by a

nominalistic via moderna)for, if the texts of Hermes took us back to a common source

of our religious and philosophical traditions, they thereby provided cues for a restorative

reinterpretation of both traditions.

It also gave exalted status to the Hermetic creation myth of the first tractate of the

Pimander (a text recognized in the early seventeenth century, once Greek philology

reached the level that had been attained by Latinists like Valla in the mid-fifteenth

century, as a gnostic midrash on Genesisdating from the early centuries of the Christian

era), and reinforced a Neoplatonic anthropology whose central motif, the recovery of an

originally divine human nature, was expounded in the first, fourth, seventh, and thirteenth

tractates of the Pimander.72Supplemented by the Christian Cabala of Giovanni Pico (who

also wrote the Heptaplus, an exposition of the deep philosophical content supposedly

enfolded by Moses into the creation story of Genesis) and of Johannes Reuchlin (who

claimed that the Kabbalah, the orally-transmitted wisdom imparted to the patriarchs and

to Moses, made possible a reconstitution of the Pythagorean philosophy that was Platos

source), this Ficinian tendency offered to de-centre a culture whose foundational

principles included clear distinctions between sacred and secular canons, as well as

between the sacramental magic of the Mass and other forms of magic, which the Church

regarded either as suspect or as illicit and demonic.

Related to this Ficinian tendency was the work of Lefvre dtaples, who

although he recoiled after the early 1490s from the magical doctrines of Ficino and

Pico,73published the editio princeps of Cusas Operain 1514, and also saw through the

71ariateresa Fumagalli Beonio Brocchieri, Pico della !irandola(!""", rpt. Bari:Nditori aterEa, !!), p. 25.72

See Keefer Agrippas Dilemma, 624-28.73After meeting Pico in Florence, Lefvre wroteDe magia naturalis(1493)a book which, however, he


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press a sequence of humanist retranslations of Aristotle, whom some of his prefatory

epistles intimated could be viewed as a darker exponent of the same prisca theologiathat

Aristotles teacher Plato had inherited from a line of wisdom that could be variously

described, but usually included Pythagoras, Hermes, and Zoroaster.74

In this second, largely pre-Reformation phase of the return ad fontes, we can see

at least the outline of what I am calling a Faustian paradigm of thought and

interpretation. If that outline seems blurred, we might think it a fitting consequence of

faultlines within the paradigm itselfthe rift, for example, between the embrace of magic

by Ficino, Pico, Reuchlin, and Agrippa, and its rejection by Lefvre and his followers; or

between the initiatic elitism of the Florentine Neoplatonists and the potential social

radicalism of Cusas docta ignorantiaa radicalism that is strongly revived in the

concluding chapters of AgrippasDe vanitate, where ordinary unlearned people, or asini,

are exhorted to cast aside human sciences, escape from the darkness of ignorance,

and awaken to the true light.75An effect of blurring might also be appropriately linked

to what Umberto Eco, following Foucaults lead, has called Hermetic driftan

unlimited semiosis resulting from the interpretive habit which dominated Renaissance

Hermetism and which is based on the principles of universal analogy and sympathy,

according to which every item of the furniture of the world is linked to every other

element (or to many) of this sublunar world and to every element (or to many) of the

superior world by means of similitudes or resemblances.76

The earliest moment in the repression of this Faustian paradigm is marked by a

curious coincidence. In 1486, Marsilio Ficino published hisDe vita coelitus comparanda,

neither circulated in manuscript nor printed; he subsequently rejected belief in a supposedly pure natural

magic and denied that any magic could be good; see Zambelli 2007, pp. 50-51.74See Jacques Lefvre dtaples, The Prefatory Epistles of Jacques Lefvre dtaples and related texts, ed.Eugene F. Rice (New York: Columbia UP, 1972), Ep. 6, (p. 21); Ep. 9, (30-31); Ep. 43, (p. 134).

75Agrippa, vol. 2, pp. 311-12: proiectis humanis scientiis, omnique carnis & sanguinis indagine atque

discursu, qualescunque illae sint []. Amovete ergo nunc, qui potestis, velamen intellectus vestri, qui

ignorantiae tenebris involuti estis [], evigilate ad verum lumen. Paola Zambelli has remarked that

Socratism, or a re-evaluation of the intelligence of simple, uncultured men, who are able to understand

what eludes scholastics and erudite men [] is a strong thread uniting Nicholas of Cusa, Erasmus, Lefvre,Bovelles, Agrippa, Sebastian Franck and other Renaissance thinkers (Zambelli 2007, p. 97).76

7mIerto Nco, >7nlimited emiosis and @ri6t: Pragmaticism vs. OPragmatism, inThe "imits of Interpretation(!"", rpt. Bloomington: ndiana 7niversit8 Press, !""'),p. 24; quoted by Lehrich 2003, pp. 23-24.


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and Giovanni Pico his famous Conclusionesand later in the same year two Cologne

Dominicans, Heinrich Kramer (or Institoris) and Jacob Sprenger, published the notorious

Malleus Maleficarum. This was of course a master-text in the coming darkness, since its

appearance marked the point at which all of the gradually-assembled elements required

for a full-scale witch-craze were at last in place: belief in a divinely-permitted satanic

conspiracy deploying human agents against humankind; a conviction that witches met

with one another and their demonic master in periodic sabbats; and a persuasion, contrary

to the long-accepted Canon Episcopi, that their powers included transvection as well as

sorcery and physical transformations.77

Paola Zambelli has noted that Ficinos De amore, a commentary on Platos

Symposiumthat deals centrally with magic, was received without a stir in 1469while

in 1486-87, in contrast, Pico and Ficino were forced to writeApologiaefor their theses

on magic, which form the core of (respectively) Picos Conclusionesand FicinosDe vita

coelitus comparanda. Picos defence of the thirteen of his theses that had been declared

to savour of heresy was promptly condemned by Pope Innocent VIII, who shortly

thereafter was induced by Kramer to issue his famous bull against witches [.], the

Summis desiderantes affectibus, [which] was included as a preface to Malleus

maleficarumin 1487the Popes stamp of approval.78

Just ten years previously, in 1476, one of the more noteworthy messianic peasant

insurgencies of the fifteenth century had occurred in southern Germany. Hans Bhm, a

young shepherd who was born at Helmstadt in Franconia (possibly the same Helmstadt

that would also produce, just a few years later, the historical Dr. Faustus), and who lived

in the village of Niklashausen, was told in a vision by the Virgin Mary to give up his

playing of fife and drum, and instead to preach to the peasantry a message of radical

social equality and of leveling contempt for the clergy and nobility. When peasants began

to assemble in tens of thousands to hear the inflammatory message of this Holy Youth or

Drummer of Niklashausen, the Prince-Bishop of Wrzburg intervened decisively: his

cavalry abducted Bhm one night and took him to his fortress (named, ironically, the

77The classic account of the development of the witch-stereotype is that of 0orman Cohn, Europe+sInner #emons(!")$, rpt. ondon: Paladin, !")%.78Zambelli 2007, p. 21.


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Marienberg), where the Holy Youth was burned at the stakesinging hymns to the

Virgin in his vernacular, the Abbot Trithemius callously informs us, until the heat of the

flames reduced his words to incoherent howls.79

One of the more persuasive causal explanations of the European witch-craze of

the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries is that of the anthropologist Marvin Harris, who

speculated that it developed as the clerisys response to upheavals of this kind. However

illusory the hopes that the messianism of prophets like Bhm inspired among working

people, it correctly identified their oppressors and moved them toward collective action.

The witch-craze, in contrast, fragmented and disempowered the populace, subjecting

them to the double terror of an imagined enemy of appalling power, combined with the

very real repression of chain-reaction torture-denunciations that could be activated at will

by inquisitorial agents of the religious and civil authorities, whose terroristic

interventionsto compound popular bewildermentwere represented as the only

recourse within human power against the afflictions of famine, disease, sexual impotence

and sudden death brought on by the devil and his human servants.80

This is, in part, what the late nineteenth-century historian W. E. H. Lecky was

referring to when, in more abstract terms but with the commendable frankness of his age,

he termed the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a period of religious terrorism, 81and

judged that a train of developments culminating in the Reformation diffused through

Christendom a religious terror which gradually overcast the horizon of thought.82

79Joannis Trithemii [] Annalium Hirsaugiensem [.] Complectens Historiam Franciae et Germaniae,Gesta imperatorem, regum, principum, episcoporum, abbatum, et illustrium virorum, ed. J. G. Schlegel (2

vols., St. Gall, 1690), vol. 2, pp. 490-91: Cm autem ligaretur ad palum comburendus, carmina quaedumseu Rhythmos de Domina nostra in lingua theutonica compositos altvoce canebat. Inter astantes fueruntplures, qui hominem incombustibilem fore credebant, propter meritum sanctitatis, quo dignum esse

censebant, qui Dei Parente servaretur illaesus. Unde propius stare metuebant, formidantes, ne forsamignis divino furore dispersus consumeret intuentes. Alii vel daemonis operatione, vel quolibet maleficio

defensum adolescentem non posse comburi timebant. Unde & spiculator eo metu laborans, omnes pilos

eius feceret abradi, ne quod maleficium sive daemonium in eis latere potuisset. Ligatus ad stipitemadolescens suas personabat cantilenas, qui mox ut igne submisso sensit ardorem, flebili voce terticlamabat: VVeVVeVVe. Interclusque ignibus voce nihil deinceps loquebatur, sed voracibus flammisconsumptus, in cinerem resolutus est. Nihil in his omnibus miraculorum apparuit.80

See arvin ;arris, (ows& Pigs& 2ars& and 2itches: The .iddles of (ulture(0e1 2or3:/andom ;ouse, !")'%, pp. 225-40, esp. 239-40.81

W. E. H. Lecky,History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe(2 vols. 1865;

rpt. New York: D. Appleton, 1888), vol. 1, pp. 37-38, 79-82.82Lecky, vol. 1, p. 81.


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One can see why Ficino and Pico were anxious to defend their own magical

practices as natural and licitand what courage, on the other hand, it took for scholars

like Agrippa to confront the witch-hunters directly. There is a certain pathos to the fact

that what appears to have been his most extended text on this subject, Adversus lamiarum

inquisitores, is known to us only through comments on it, written several decades after

Agrippas death, by the inquisitor Sisto of Siena.83

5. Conclusion

Exponents of the current of thought and interpretation that for present purposes I

have labeled the Faustian paradigm were not wholly excluded from positions in the

institutions of higher learning. Some undoubtedly achieved positions during what has

been called the humanist tide in German universities during the first decade of the

sixteenth century;84and two disciples of Ficino, Leonico Tomeo and Francesco Cattani da

Diacetto, held appointments in the early sixteenth century at Padua and Pisa respectively

(though their official teaching was devoted to expounding the works of Aristotle). 85

Francesco Patrizi, a thinker of major stature, was appointed to lecture on Plato at Ferrara

in 1578 and at La Sapienza in Rome in 1592; 86and Giordano Bruno taught from 1586 to

1588 at Wittenberg, which appears for some years to have tolerated work in the line of

Ficino and Pico.87Perhaps more typical, however, is the situation Bruno encountered at

83See Zambelli, 1972 and Zambelli, Scholastiker und Humanisten: Agrippa und Trithemius zur Hexerei,Archiv fr Kulturgeschichte 67 (1985): 41-79.84

Overfield 1976, 417.85

Zambelli, 2007, p. 1.86See Fred Purnell, >Francesco PatriEi, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Fall- Ndition%, ed. Nd1ard 0. Qalta.http:MMplato.stan6ord.eduMarchivesM6all-MentriesMpatriEiM.87One sign of this would be the publication at Wittenberg of the Hungarian humanist Petrus Monedulatus

Lascoviuss re-hash of Pico in hisDe homine magno illo in rerum natura miraculo, et partibus ejus

essentialibus lib. II (Wittenberg: Heredes Iohannis Cratonis, 1585). Lascovius began his studies at

Wittenberg in 1578, visited Geneva in 1580 and 1583, and published there his Theorematum de puro et

expresso Dei verbo, tam scriptis quam viva voce tradita (1584). See?hDodore de BREe,(orrespondance de Th)odore de B;6e, ed. ;ippol8te AuIert et al. (#' vols., Geneva:@roE, !"+!%, vol. 22, pp. 105-06, n. 3.
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/patrizi/http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/patrizi/


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Oxford when he delivered a lecture there in 1583: a hostile audience he described as

made up of pedants contained at least one member whose private reading of Ficino

enabled him to identify with precision a passage of which Bruno was making

unacknowledged use.88

Surprisingly, perhaps, analogous patterns of exclusion persist within

contemporary scholarship. Historians of humanism, for example, have tended to exclude

speculative humanists like Reuchlin and Agrippa from full membership in the tribe, 89

while confessional and disciplinary boundaries have produced similar deflections within

the historiography of the Reformation: Paola Zambellis illuminating work on the

Agrippan links between magic and radical reformation remains under-appreciated

perhaps, as she ruefully suggests, because of the great distance still existing between the

history of philosophical thought and the history of religious ideas and movements in the

sixteenth century.90It may indeed be the case, as Christopher Lehrich has suggested, that

some reconfiguration of our own structures of knowledge will be needed before we can

adequately make sense of the magical discourses of the Renaissance. 91

Our difficulties may to some extent be eased by a recognition of suggestive

analogies between certain recent tre

cornelius agrippa’s double presence in the faustian century

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