Description
Book SynopsisAnthony Grafton explores the art and influence of an opaque historical figure: the magus, or learned magician. A distinctive intellectual type in Renaissance Europe, magi contributed to the humanistic currents of the time and had a transformative impact on public life, influencing advances in sculpture, painting, engineering, and other fields.
Trade ReviewSheds 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 *
A richly informative study. -- William Tipper * Wall Street Journal *
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 *
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 *
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
Engineering the Eternal CityMagus 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
From PompeiiGrafton 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
Magic in the Middle AgesA 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
Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London
