Awards

• Winner of PROSE Award in European History 2024 (United States)

Overview

A Seminary Co-op Notable Book PROSE Award in European History “[M]arvellously readable . . . Not for nothing is Grafton renowned as today’s leading historian of Renaissance intellectual culture . . . as erudite as it is enchanting.” —Literary Review “A brilliantly vivid exercise in intellectual history, as told through the biographies of the early modern magi, which will stir the thoughts of everyone who reads it. —New Statesman “Magus offers a rich set of observations on an oft-neglected intellectual tradition during a turning point in Western thought . . . Magic is once again beginning to merit serious study in the academy. —Chronicle of Higher Education In literary legend, Faustus is the quintessential occult personality. The historical Faustus, however, was something quite different: a magus—a learned magician fully embedded in the scholarly currents and public life of his time. And he was hardly the only one. Anthony Grafton recovers this distinctive Renaissance intellectual type, indebted to medieval counterparts as well as contemporaries like the engineer, artist, Christian humanist, and religious reformer. Alongside these better-known figures, the magus had a transformative impact on his society. Magus details the arts and experiences of learned magicians including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. These erudite men were at the center of ethical debates concerning licit and illicit magic, the divine and the diabolical. Over time, they turned magic into a complex art, which drew on contemporary mechanics as well as classical astrology, probed the limits of what was acceptable in a changing society, and promised new ways to explore the self and the cosmos. Resituating the magus in the cultural and intellectual order of Renaissance Europe, Grafton sheds new light on both the recesses of the learned magician’s mind and the world he helped to build.

Full Product Details

9780674301610

Table of Contents

Reviews

Sheds light on the golden age of occult writing…Magic could be made all-encompassing because language, belonging to a shared world view, allowed it to be…Grafton suggests that the mathematical and mechanical magic that allowed Agrippa and Dee to send artificial birds or insects flying over a stage set would develop into the science that produced the machinery of the Industrial Revolution. -- Christopher Howse * The Telegraph * Grafton’s magi are an appealing gang, inasmuch as they turn out to have occupied the liminal space between what was faith and what would become fact. The intellectual fabric that their investigations wove, as Grafton entertainingly relays, was an entanglement of absurd system and authentic discovery, of systematic fraud and startling originality, of obvious nonsense and pregnant novelty. -- Adam Gopnik * New Yorker * Scholarly but marvellously readable…Not for nothing is Grafton renowned as today’s leading historian of Renaissance intellectual culture…as erudite as it is enchanting. -- Dmitri Levitin * Literary Review * [A] richly informative study. -- William Tipper * Wall Street Journal * A brilliantly vivid exercise in intellectual history, as told through the biographies of the early modern magi, which will stir the thoughts of everyone who reads it. -- John Gray * New Statesman * Through the principal magi of the high Renaissance, Grafton examines the often uneasy, sometimes beneficial, three-way relationship that existed between religion, magic and science. -- Stephanie Merritt * The Guardian * Provides a chronicle of the development of magic from the infamous Dr. Faustus to the lesser-known but perhaps more influential Cornelius Agrippa, paying close attention to the lives of the various Early Modern magi as well as the historical milieu in which they functioned. -- Jesse Russell * University Bookman * An engaging collection of marvels. -- Claire Fanger * Metascience * Magus offers a rich set of observations on an oft-neglected intellectual tradition during a turning point in Western thought…Magic is once again beginning to merit serious study in the academy. -- Colin Dickey * Chronicle of Higher Education * A superb account of the astrologers, alchemists, and sorcerers who practiced ‘natural magic’ in Europe from the Middle Ages through early modernity…Grafton combines extensive research with a flair for the idiosyncrasies of biography, spinning charmingly digressive character portraits…The result will delight readers interested in the historical intersection of art, science, and religion. * Publishers Weekly (starred review) * A brilliant reassessment of the magus and the role of magic in the philosophical and practical worlds of Renaissance Europe. Grafton’s eloquent study profoundly expands our understanding of the range and intellectual context of thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino, Johannes Trithemius, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. In the process, it deepens our understanding of an entire era. -- Pamela O. Long, author of <i>Engineering the Eternal City</i> Magus is a thought-provoking study of ‘natural magic’ and its early modern practitioners, the wandering European scholars who were at once praised as divinely inspired and denounced as diabolical charlatans. Carefully presenting these complex, elusive personalities on their own terms, Anthony Grafton’s analysis of the magi is as closely woven as their schemes for calling down the powers that bind the universe. -- Ingrid D. Rowland, author of <i>From Pompeii</i> Grafton brings clarity and verve to the study of Renaissance magicians, placing them in the motley company not only of humanists and Kabbalists, astrologers and necromancers, but also of cryptographers, forgers, and ‘engineers.’ He surveys a world peopled by striking individuals whose magical adventures and speculations are inseparable from the personalities that animated them. -- Richard Kieckhefer, author of <i>Magic in the Middle Ages</i> A new understanding of the Renaissance—and a new understanding of magic—springs to life in this erudite, witty, and eminently readable book. -- Lauren Kassell, author of <i>Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London</i>

Author Information

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

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