Magus

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.

Author Biography

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.