Anthony Grafton

The title of Professor Grafton's book on early modern magical thinking and practice is a little misleading. Faustus is mentioned at the beginning of the book only briefly. Although it ends with Agrippa who is dealt with at length, the author reaches back to Roger Bacon to tell his story.

The core thesis may be nothing new - that magical thought was not as irrational as later observers had assumed and was at the cutting edge of the Renaissance and of its concern with technology and show more understanding a reality that had to take account of both classical philosophy and faith.

The book is scholarly and quite dense to start with. It is centred on roughly the mid-fifteenth through to the mid-sixteenth centuries with two chapters (of five) devoted to the contrasting figures of Trithemius and that great synthesiser of magical thought, Agrippa.

The story is complex and detailed (with excellent illustrations of key texts). It would be impossible to summarise the full argument of this excellent work in a relatively short Goodreads review. Each chapter is like a mini-monograph, the whole strung together to make the larger argument.

Grafton begins by exploring the dynamic tension between Catholic Christianity and magical thought. This led to great pains being taken to divide 'bad' magic (essentially folk magic and magic undertaken for corrupt advantage) from 'good' magic which was a precursor to the natural sciences.

We see here a late medieval and early modern discovery of what Arthur C. Clarke would later claim - that magic was just undiscovered science. In a world that accepted miracles from faith, magic was interested in wonder based on reason in that context.

The links between good magic as Christian, explanatory of the world, as a potential mastery of the world (very much like twentieth century visions of technology in science fiction) and actual technological innovation are well demonstrated in the book.

There is another trend that is explored: the discovery of neo-Platonic philosophy which, of course, had to be squared with Christianity. This created the conditions, in the differing thought worlds of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, for a Renaissance form of magic.

We can add to this the discovery of the Jewish Cabala, partially Christianised as Kabbalah, which was seen as an insight into the mind of God through techniques based on the magical use of language and numbers (gematria).

Magic could also call down demons (thus 'bad' magic or at least magic where good magicians must know what they are doing before attempting anything) or angels. This latter reached its latest form in that Enochian exploration of John Dee in the second half of the sixteenth century.

The relevance of Faustus is only that this figure became the model for the misuse of magic and example for those who would condemn charlatanism, manipulation, fraud and association with demons - as also exemplified in literature much later in Christopher Marlowe's 'Faustus'.

However, it is the link to technology or at least to a technological mind set that is most interesting. Grafton recovers astrology as a reasonable 'science' in the context of the time doing no more perhaps than Asimov's Hari Seldon claimed to do with The Foundation.

Some might make similar claims in advance of the 'magical' qualities of quantum AI. If everything is connected (a view held by many today), then those connections should be 'scientifically knowable' (and this would include the connections to Heaven and Hell and so to angels and demons).

Roger Bacon's alleged autonomous talking head, cryptography, engineering, theatre engines, herbal medicine and war machines could be seen as 'scientific' in being functionally effective but also mysterious as to some of the precise mechanisms that allowed them to work.

A lodestone could be both natural (an observable fact in the known world) and implicitly magical insofar as its uncanny properties could not be explained. Of course, engines of war or for courtly masques could be explained but the engineer might not wish to do so and so appear a 'magician'.

When technology worked but with no knowledge of the laws of physics or the findings of modern science then an early modern intellectual might reasonably say that something magical was going on without in any way implying the woo-woo of today. The 'artist' enchanted society.

Magicians and technologists were thus often conceptually interchangeable. The best example in the book of this is Trithemius' cryptographical work. This was simultaneously magical and scientific. It clearly disturbed contemporaries because of its 'secret' or occult implications.

However, it was also technology since encrypting messages within the extensive diplomatic networks of dynastic Europe required secrecy. Many codes could be easily broken once a specialist got hold of the correspondence. Science, technology and magic were all interconnected.

Magic was thus a rational response to what could be known at that time and was in fact 'progressive', creating testable explanatory models or paradigms that were ready-made for alternative explanation with new evidence or the eventual unwinding of medieval Christian faith assumptions.

The fluidity and uncertainty of all this meant that there was no fixed system, no rigid ideology, of magic until Agrippa's great work of synthesis. Even he, despite his huge commitment to his 'Occult Philosophy', seemed to retain a healthy doubt about aspects of what he was drawing attention to.

Both Trithemius and Agrippa, when looked at in the round, evidenced much more rationality and scepticism than we might expect. It is as if intellectuals were determined to understand the world whilst privately knowing that not all magical explanations were sufficient.

We should also remember that intellectuals have to eat. Demonstrating magical capacity (especially astrological prediction) was a fee-earner. The temptation to delude oneself about results or be a charlatan for profit might have been considerable. Faustus was just more obvious at the latter.

On the other hand, the risks in performing 'bad' magic could be considerable. There was a block on any scepticism about God's ordering of the world, necessary for scientific developmen. It was more than discouraged. It was taboo. Thinkers were thus partially trapped into magic by faith.

Any sign of atheism could lead to dire consequences as Giordano Bruno found. He was burnt at the stake even though nearly everyone else who slipped over the approved social and clerical line could generally draw back quickly with a carefully worded retraction

We suspect, on the basis of what we read in the book about Trithemius and our own awareness of the Socinian movement, that thoughts that might have been interpreted as cynicism or scepticism about the received Word were far more general and took place far earlier than we might expect.

Once some people started to think as an intellectual class across borders, the power of faith was ultimately doomed but a long transitional period had a lot of very intelligent people working very hard to square divinity with observation and technological creation.

There is not much in the book about 'bad' magic except in terms of exhortations about charlatanism and that is probably because not a lot of demonic magic was actually going. If it was it was simplistic incantation and talismanic magic and what was mostly happening was deliberate fraud.

One insight though is how the debate, from the point of view of those determined to justify 'good' magic, about what was 'bad' magic helped to institute the fear and anxiety that led to the atrocious wave of witch trials that disfigured Europe and North America in the subsequent century.

If magic becomes established as undiscovered science and is taken seriously then intent (as with atomic power or genetic engineering or AI) becomes a subject of concern and debate. If all is connected, those who would summon demons from hell become as real as those summoning angels.

This excellent book adds a great deal of meat to the bones of our understanding that magic (whatever happened to it later) was part of the process of discovering reason in the world and so a step towards our modern conception of science.

It is a highly recommended book with, incidentally, very interesting material on the curious dynamic betweem Judaism and Christianity. The occult tale here is of the emergence of an early attempt, using many new sources, at scientific and philosophical investigation of reality in an age of faith.

Magic was thus a sound working model in this context even if it would be overtaken as an intellectually acceptable form of knowledge a hundred years after the high point of Agrippa's 'Occult Philosophy'. Today it seems to be just an adjunct to traditionalism and a form of psychotherapy. show less

A wonderful introduction to the artes historicae, books from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries that told historians how to practice their craft. It was a genre that reflected the changing times and often encouraged historians to make their histories more objective. This book introduces many thinkers of the era and has a lot of detail which some readers might not appreciate, but which I enjoyed. It was a short book though and not a drag. Of interest to me, it also included some Christian show more ideas about history that have generally fallen by the wayside - the Four Monarchies theory taken from the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament - and the dating of the Noahic Flood by some that was corrected by the annals of Egypt (by Egyptian priests, Berosus and Manetho) and by Chinese history (which civilizations were dated before the Flood). As European knowledge grew to include more of the world and as written sources burgeoned, history became more complex, and the artes historicae became dated as Grafton notes in the final chapter of his book. A great book to learn more about ancient and early modern historiography and what made history what it was. show less

This is and isn't about footnotes. Grafton ranges more broadly into the use of primary and archival sources by historians, and documentation practices including in-text references and appendices as well as footnotes. There is much on modern historiography in general. Grafton begins with and gives the lion's share of space to Leopold von Ranke (so much of the scholarly world used to revolve around nineteenth-century Germans!). Then he works backward through Edward Gibbon, Jacques-Auguste de show more Thou, Athanasius Kircher, and Pierre Bayle. Others make cameo appearances, such as Richard Bentley and David Hume. There are lots of interesting odds and ends (I hadn't known that Ranke once studied with the great philologist Gottfried Hermann).

As usual with Grafton, there are some wonderful asides and even zingers:

"One who wishes to learn how a sixteenth-century classroom differed most pungently from a modern one should not only examine Petrus Ramus' popular textbooks, but also ponder his biographer's statement that he bathed once a year, at the summer solstice."

"the German exile Karl Benedikt Hase, a brilliant lexicographer and deft forger whose diary, in classical Greek, affords unique guidance through the brothels and cafés of Balzac's Paris"

And on Ranke himself:

"He composed his text as a whole. Only then did he search his books and notes, extracts and summaries, for the evidence to support it: he used a salt-shaker to add references to an already completed stew."

Who knew that the slovenly research practices of modern undergraduates (and not a few professors) are in the direct tradition of the great Ranke! show less

I approached this book with interest, but was disappointed. As I'm looking at other reviews, my sense is that those with this field of study really enjoyed it, but those of us interested in, but not familiar with, the topic found it rough going.

Part of the issue is that this is some seriously dense prose. It cannot be read quickly. Adding to that challenge is the fact that the writer doesn't do a lot of signalling of the point or central idea he's trying to convey in different sections. I show more needed more help from him to follow his thinking, and I didn't get it. Detail after detail after detail is related, and I found myself hard-pressed ro understand the purpose of all these specifics.

If you have a background in this field of study, you may find this a remarkably enlightening book. If you're coming to the field with little or no experience, it's apt to wash over you without leaving much behind.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own. show less