Publishers Weekly
★ 10/09/2023
Historian Grafton (Inky Fingers) offers a superb account of the astrologers, alchemists, and sorcerers who practiced “natural magic” in Europe from the Middle Ages through early modernity. Grafton demonstrates that, while magical practice was already ubiquitous, what was innovative about these self-styled Learned Magicians was their belief that sorcery worked because of, and not despite, the rational laws of nature. Subjects include the historical Doctor Faustus, a “necromancer” whose exploits would become fodder for Marlowe and Goethe; the Renaissance humanist and reviver of Neoplatonist philosophy Marsilio Ficino; and the occultist and soldier Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. According to Grafton, these practitioners were united by their boosterism and a messianic regard for their vocation; understanding themselves to possess unprecedented technological control over the natural world, they believed they were contributing to an imminent scientific revolution that promised even greater control. Some of the magicians’ pursuits were indeed precursors to modern science, such as Faustus’s use of his “expert knowledge of optics, light and shadow” to conjure figures before a crowd. Grafton combines extensive research with a flair for the idiosyncrasies of biography, spinning charmingly digressive character portraits. (When a critic denounced Faustus at dinner, he threatened to disappear all the man’s household pots and pans.) The result will delight readers interested in the historical intersection of art, science, and religion. (Dec.)
Literary Review - Dmitri Levitin
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.
Richard Kieckhefer
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.
Ingrid D. Rowland
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.
The Guardian - Stephanie Merritt
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.
New Yorker - Adam Gopnik
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.
Wall Street Journal - William Tipper
A richly informative study.
Chronicle of Higher Education - Colin Dickey
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.
Pamela O. Long
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.
New Statesman - John Gray
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.
Lauren Kassell
A new understanding of the Renaissance—and a new understanding of magic—springs to life in this erudite, witty, and eminently readable book.
The Telegraph - Christopher Howse
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.
