Cornelius Agrippa Research Articles

From Black Magician to Proto-Feminist: The Reception of Cornelius Agrippa's Oeuvre Through the Centuries

The Renaissance humanist Cornelius Agrippa von Netesheim (1486–1533) left a rich body of works in philosophy, theology, biblical exegesis and occultism. The disparity and internal contradictions of this opus, as well as the ambivalent position of Agrippa on the intellectual map of the epoch, caused the reception of his work to branch out in the most diverse directions. Contemporaries from clerical and Protestant circles branded him as a heretic, whereas humanists recognized his great erudition and devotion to faith. While he considered himself a reformer of Christianity, his followers regarded him as an authority in Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and Esoteric studies. On the basis of tendentious interpretations of his writings, as well as the entire tradition of apocryphal stories that developed around his personality, the church and folk tradition of the 16th and 17th centuries constructed a representation of Agrippa as a servant of the devil. Therefore, he served as a model for the character of Faust, first to Christopher Marlowe and later to Goethe. With the strong development of science and its foundations being linked with occult teachings, in the 18th and 19th centuries the image of Agrippa as a proto-scientist appeared, e.g. in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. However, for the positivist science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Agrippa was, at best, a representative of a barren branch of Western philosophical thought, and at worst, a mere charlatan or mentally disturbed person. Such a perception prevailed until the mid-20th century, when scholars from Warburg Institute in London developed new interpretations of Renaissance humanism, including Agrippa's role in it. Today's science views Agrippa as a representative of the vital religious component of humanism and as a link between ancient, medieval and Renaissance currents of thought. At the same time, in certain segments of New Age, his writings acquire the status of the "bible" of the occultism, and Agrippa himself the status of a kind of New Age guru. Therefore, the literary legacy of Cornelius Agrippa is of significance for the history of ideas, reception studies, imagology, and anthropology of religion as an exceptionally rich case study, and in this paper, we aim to trace the intricate paths of his reception in different epochs and cultural contexts.

Daemones Boni et Mali: The Locus of Evil in Renaissance Hermetic Neoplatonism

Abstract This article deals with the ways evil was conceptualized in the works of Cornelius Agrippa, the most important German representative of the Renaissance humanist current often labelled as Hermetic Neoplatonism. In a heterodox fashion of blending various Christian and non-Christian concepts developed by Marsilio Ficino, Agrippa attempted to further Christianize some aspects of Hermetic and Neoplatonic theology, cosmology and anthropology. This entailed a new interpretation of pagan deities and demons, which Renaissance Neoplatonists in general sought to disconnect from the exclusive domain of evil. A significant aspect of Agrippa’s syncretistic attempt was his interpretation of the origin and locus of evil, which, as I argue, reveals a tense coexistence of the classical Thomist concept of privatio boni and anthropological dualism of possibly Gnostic provenance.

Making Magic in Elizabethan England: Two Early Modern Vernacular Books of Magic ed. by Frank Klaassen

Reviewed by: Making Magic in Elizabethan England: Two Early Modern Vernacular Books of Magic ed. by Frank Klaassen László Sándor Chardonnens Elizabethan England, Early Modern England, books of magic, sixteenth century, seventeenth century, primary sources, Antiphoner Notebook, Boxgrove Manual, Cornelius Agrippa, Protestantism, Reginald Scot frank klaassen, ed. Making Magic in Elizabethan England: Two Early Modern Vernacular Books of Magic. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 147. Modern practitioners of magic who are interested in older sources can turn to a range of editions by occult presses that cater to their needs. Scholars and students of magic studies, on the other hand, are less well served by these same publications; with some positive exceptions, that is, such as the work of Joseph Peterson. Yet since Peterson cannot be expected to edit all surviving medieval and early modern source texts, it is fortunate that one of the leading scholars in the field of early modern ritual magic, Frank Klaassen, has now turned his attention from merely studying to also editing books of magic from early modern England, starting with the publication of two concise manuals in an effort to expand "our understanding of sixteenth-century magic" (2). Having studied Making Magic in Elizabethan England in detail alongside facsimiles of the two books of magic in question, it is my firm conviction that Klaassen has succeeded in this aim. Making Magic has a general introduction followed by separate introductions to, and editions of, both books of magic; it also includes a set of appendices, a bibliography, and an index. The general introduction outlines the conditions under which magic transitioned from the Middle Ages into Early Modernity, with a focus on ritual magic and charms—two quite distinct forms of magic that were increasingly found side by side in early modern books of magic. The central argument of the general introduction is that early modern magical practices are rooted in medieval customs, but that they evolved under the influence of cultural, religious, and legislative changes in sixteenth-century England. The social backgrounds of the practitioners were, furthermore, more varied than the medieval clerical underworld as a result of social and religious turmoil in the early modern period. Part III of Klaassen's 2013 study The Transformations of Magic devotes attention to the same period, but I find that Making Magic presents the social and cultural dynamics of early modern ritual magic more effectively. [End Page 277] The first book of magic introduced and edited in Making Magic is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Add. B. 1. Introduced as the Antiphoner Notebook, this text was copied in the late sixteenth century onto cuttings from the wide margins of a large fourteenth-century liturgical manuscript. The Antiphoner Notebook innovatively combines charms with conjurations and experiments. Perhaps the work of a cunning man, the Antiphoner Notebook focuses "on the three common areas of activity in this group: healing, thief identification, and treasure hunting" (19). A notable feature of the Antiphoner Notebook is its frequent use of materials from Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), a study of "the irrationality of belief in magic and witchcraft" and Catholicism (24). Scot presented many examples of magical and Catholic practices, which were subsequently reused without the anti-magical and anti-Catholic rhetoric by practicing magicians, such as the scribe of the Antiphoner Notebook, in "a self-conscious process of re-enchantment" (25, emphasis Klaassen's). Another noteworthy component of the Antiphoner Notebook is an experiment with a wax puppet to punish a thief (item 1 in the edition). Klaassen opines that "the use of wax images for harm in necromantic (i.e., demon conjuring) collections is curiously uncommon" (23), in contrast to its frequent appearance in legal contexts and astral magic. Yet the use of wax puppets is anything but uncommon in early modern necromancy. Cursory reading of the surviving sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English necromantic manuscripts yields about twenty texts on the construction of wax puppets for compelling thieves, harming people, and even constraining rebellious spirits. Half of these are analogues to the experiment in the Antiphoner Notebook (London, British Library, Add. MS 36674, fols. 88r, 88v, and 164r–165r (three separate texts), Sloane...

Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany by Tara Nummedal

Reviewed by: Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany by Tara Nummedal Arina Zaytseva Keywords Alchemy, Reformation, Early Modern Germany, Anna Zieglerin, apocalypticism, the Virgin Mary, witchcraft accusations, witchcraft trial, Wolfenbüttel, Protestantism, Paracelsus tara nummedal. Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 285. Modern scholars are used to the image of a male alchemist—an enigmatic, knowledgeable figure, part magician and part scientist, be it John Dee, Cornelius Agrippa, or Paracelsus. Tara Nummedal's book focuses instead on an elusive figure of a woman-alchemist, Anna Ziegler or Zieglerin, who conducted her experiments at the court of Duke Julius of Brunswick-Liineburg in Wolfenbuttel. In this gripping book, Nummedal meticulously recreates the political and social world of sixteenth-century Saxony as well as the private world of Anna Zieglerin, a skillful storyteller and aspiring alchemist. The tale of Anna is truly an unusual one. Even though Nummedal has argued in an earlier article that, contrary to popular perception, women-alchemists were not at all a rare occurrence and could be found at many [End Page 168] courts in the sixteenth century,1 it is safe to say that not many accounts of their art survived to this day. It is the numerous and detailed archival documents left after Anna's trial that make her case so exceptional. Nummedal's book is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter is dedicated to the backstory of Anna Zieglerin, her husband Heinrich Schombach, and their friend, the alchemist Philipp Sommering. Before arriving at the court in Wolfenbuttel, they served at the court of Duke Johann Friedrich II in Gotha. Johann Friedrich's political discord with the Emperor was supported by a renegade knight, Grumbach, and the prophecies of an illiterate boy, Hanschen, who could supposedly converse with angels. Old grudges and false prophecies transformed their animosity into an armed confrontation, which ended in the execution of Grumbach and Hanschen and imprisonment of Johann Friedrich II. Although the trio of alchemists did not participate in Grumbach's plans, the dark shadow of Gotha loomed over them when they decided to move to Wolfenbuttel and marred their reputations. Chapters 2 and 3 describe political, social, and cultural life in Wolfenbuttel, which served as the residence of Duke Julius—a young Protestant ruler, working hard to prove his leadership qualities and develop his realm. At his court Anna, Heinrich, and Philipp would find countless opportunities for the application of their craft and—-just like Julius—would have to prove their wortḥ Chapters 4 and 5 shift the focus to Anna's own alchemical practice and theoretical work. Chapter 4 provides a careful analysis of the intellectual trends in alchemy and theology of the times and traces the sources of Anna's alchemical ideas, while the fifth chapter examines Anna's imaginative rethinking of the connections between one's physical body, the sacred history of Christianity (especially the Apocalypse), and alchemy. This chapter provides the readers with brief yet illuminating forays into contemporary theological debates, which help explain Anna's outrageous claims of becoming an alchemical and Protestant version of the Virgin Mary (123). Chapter 6 examines the demise of the alchemists and the political mechanisms behind their trials, while Chapter 7 expounds on the later transformations of and additions to the story of Anna's life. Nummedal's skillful and careful analysis of historical data and documents pertaining to the cases of Anna Zieglerin as well as her husband Heinrich and their colleague Philipp allow her to recreate the world of Duke Julius's court in minute detail and convey the allure of a courtier's life as well as its perils. Anna's professional and private life becomes the focal point for several [End Page 169] greater themes that defined sixteenth-century Germanic lands: the contested position of alchemy and its practitioners in the sixteenth century, the vulnerability and "porosity" of a nascent court, the precariousness of self-fashioning and the ambiguity of individual identities, the role of luck in one's ascension to power and status (or one's fall from...

Undressing the “True Man”: A Philological Look at Cornelius Agrippa’s Anthropology

The author revisits an old scholarly dilemma concerning the thought of Cornelius Agrippa, the famous German humanist and occultist, i.e. the conflict between Christian and heterodox elements in his thought. The author approaches this problem by examining Agrippa’s views on human nature and demonstrates through a philological analysis that the German humanist attempted to integrate the anthropological dualism of Hermetic and Neoplatonic provenance into his understanding of Christianity.

Nostradamus: A Healer of Souls in the Renaissance

This welcome translation of a book first published in 2011 introduces Anglophone readers not only to its subject, Nostradamus, but also to the historiographical methods of its author. Denis Crouzet’s radical approach rescues Nostradamus from marginalization as a prophet of doom, reading his work not as the cryptic prediction of a horrific future but as an urgent call for a renewed consciousness of God. Nostradamus’s enigmatic writing is thus less an invitation to interpretation than a moral lesson, reminding fallen man of the folly of trusting in reason. The Apocalyptic panic his litany of horrors induces is prescribed—much like the laughter of his fellow medic, François Rabelais—to turn despairing readers away from a cruelly violent world and towards hope in God. This re-reading of Nostradamus nuances his religious position, casting him as a non-confessional believer influenced by evangelism. An attractively literary contextualization of Nostradamus’s thought is supported by references to writers such as Maurice Scève, Marguerite de Navarre, Cornelius Agrippa and, particularly, Rabelais and Erasmus. Crouzet concludes by situating his interpretation of Nostradamus within a broad overview of his own work, in which he emphasizes the value of using the collective imagination as a way of understanding the past. This slightly self-indulgent conclusion constitutes an excellent introduction to Crouzet’s works, since this is the first of his books to have been translated into English. For the most part, the translation reads very well: Mark Greengrass has successfully captured Crouzet’s style while adapting and clarifying his expression to suit Anglophone ears, although it is here that a few niggling errors have crept in [authorship of The Praise of Folly (p. 48) and the Iliad (p. 90) has been misattributed, as has the date of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (p. 264); there are some slight mistranslations of quotations from Latin (pp. 16 and 55) and from Nostradamus (pp. 24 and 154), turning the glosses that follow into non-sequiturs; the unidentified ‘follower of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples’ (p. 232) is Gérard Roussel; more careful proof-reading would have kept Nemesis (p. 50) female and seen the ‘reign of the Sun’ (pp. 179–180) logically follow that of the moon]. But these are incidental details in a book that—like its subject—operates cumulatively and at a higher level, providing a new reading of Nostradamus, a valuable insight into the collective imagination of sixteenth-century France, and a robust defence of a very appealing historiographical method.

Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England by Eggert, Katherine

Reviewed by: Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England by Eggert, Katherine Carole M. Cusack Eggert, Katherine, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015; cloth; pp. 368; 11 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$55.00, £36.00; ISBN 9780812247510. Katherine Eggert’s book is a contribution to the study of how at particular times and under certain conditions humans have consciously chosen to not know what they know, or to avow that which they know is not so. Her term ‘disknowledge’ refers ‘the conscious and deliberate setting aside of one compelling mode of understanding the world — one discipline, one theory — in favour of another’ (p. 3). Phrased this way, it appears innocuous enough, but the argument of the book is that the promise of Renaissance Humanism rapidly disappeared and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the language, strategies, and imagery of alchemy, a discredited and discreditable ‘occult science’, was increasingly used to signal the failure of Humanism in the absence of a better, subsequent system. Eggert claims the humanistic ideal that classical learning could be integrated into ‘a Christian knowledge base’ (p. 15) is the second of a three-pronged view of Humanism that also espouses mastery of the Ciceronian rhetorical style, and the commitment to self-betterment and the betterment of society. She notes the anti-humanist sentiments of many humanist-trained figures, such as Luther and Macchiavelli. The next intellectual framework, Baconian empirical science, does not emerge immediately, and Eggert argues that the rhetoric of alchemy fills the gap between Humanism and the rise of Enlightenment science. This is a large claim, and the book is only a partial success. Three case studies and three associated methods of disknowledge are investigated to demonstrate how alchemical rhetoric facilitated the deliberate business of not knowing. First, the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation (which exemplifies forgetting); then Christian readings of Kabbalah (which shows skimming); and last gynaecology (which exemplifies avoiding). The primary method of Eggert’s investigation is literary criticism: in Chapter 2, ‘How to Forget Transubstantiation’, she analyses the poetry of John Donne, concluding that for Donne alchemy is ‘an all-purpose disknowledge system […]. Handy for forgetting about the disputes that were at the heart of the Reformation […] it is also handy for not allowing the new science to challenge cherished humanist presuppositions, however erroneous they may be’ (p. 91). The oeuvre of George Herbert, similarly, wrestles with contemporary matter theory. Whereas Donne is fascinated by ‘exceptional matter’, Herbert’s focus is ‘the ordinary things of this world’ (p. 101). Chapter 3, ‘How to Skim Kabbalah’, traces how Christian writers used alchemy with ‘other esoteric disciplines to rewrite Kabbalah as having been Christian all along’ (p. 115). Figures including Martin Luther, Pico della Mirandola, John Dee, Johann Reuchlin, Cornelius Agrippa, and others [End Page 169] ‘skimmed’ Kabbalah (taking the useful things and discarding everything else). The literary reflections of this practice that Eggert considers include Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a Jewish figure, more specifically, a golem, and Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus. Chapter 4, ‘How to Avoid Gynecology’, examines how sexual reproduction became entangled with alchemy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This led to the notion that the ultimate achievement of alchemy ‘was the creation of the homunculus; a true human, perhaps one that even resembled its maker and was infused with a soul […] grown from heated male semen alone’ (p. 167). Eggert focuses on anatomy books to argue that the reality of female reproductive organs was systematically avoided. This contention is then traced in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. Chapter 5, ‘How to Make Fiction’, argues that as alchemy became separated from Humanism and is linked to fiction, ‘both fiction and alchemy garner, quite paradoxically, more legitimacy and more unqualified endorsement, losing their shared reputation for simply being a bad idea’ (p. 208). The proof texts here are Hamlet, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World. For humanists, literature could change the world; Eggert asserts that Jonson posits literature as a sort of parallel universe alongside...

The Art of Forgetting the Middle Ages: Cornelius Agrippa’s Rhetoric of Extinction

The Art of Forgetting the Middle Ages: Cornelius Agrippa’s Rhetoric of Extinction

Browning’s Bodies and the Body of Criticism

That's last duchess painted on wall Gr-r-r--there go, heart's abhorence! Just for a handful of silver he left us Vanity, saith Preacher, vanity! That second time they hunted me No more wine? Then we'll push back chairs and talk. My first thought was, he lied in every word Oh, Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find! do not let us quarrel any more I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave Karshish, picker-up of learning's crumbs Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak! Let us begin and up this corpse ['Will sprawl, now heat of day is best Stop, let me have truth of that! Now, don't sir! Don't expose me! Just this once! (1) Gentle readers, you've by now caught drift. This issue of Victorian Poetry celebrates bicentenary of Robert Browning's birth. better way to commemorate Browning's beginning than with beginnings of his poems? The list above, first lines might emerge easily from memory, creates a panoply of voices-abrupt, colloquial, direct or seemingly so, demanding. Most of these lines begin monologues published in Men and Women. Though familiarity might dull their freshness, since a seasoned reader almost always recalls next line, taken as group they still have power to arrest. To amuse. To baffle. Who would begin a poem with a bracket and an apostrophe? With a line stopped by three exclamation marks? With an unknown person enjoining us to carry up this corpse? The examples multiply. How strange to commence a poetic career with a long passage from Cornelius Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia, first two words of which are Non dubito. How strange to begin an epic with a question. And yet Browning's beginnings often have a brilliance beyond arresting and strange, since they commonly arrive in a syntactic rush, compelling us forward into next line, next idea. But do not let us quarrel anymore impels us directly into next negative, No, Lucrezia, which in turn compels us toward further negative, our later recognition is both too much Andrea's my Lucrezia and not his at all. The liar--or was he in Childe Roland?--fast becomes that hoary cripple with malicious eye. Karshish, who's already filled our mouth or minds with coinages, plunges on to call himself, in a negative mouthful, the not incurious in God's handiwork. Or take beginning of The Ring and Book: Do you see this Ring? (2) We are supposed of course to answer yes, but, of course, our answer is no. We don't see ring, not really. It isn't described directly, appearing only through a historical narrative of its pedigree (and pedigree of its pedigree and possible circumstances of its manufacture). The poet follows his question with an onslaught of qualifiers and famous--or infamous--knotty metaphor of repristination, with its barely concealed baggage of religious controversy. The verse paragraph begins, Do you see this Ring, ends with a second question, almost offhand: What of it? 'Tis a figure, a symbol, say; / A thing's sign: now for signified. In next verse paragraph, thing signified actually comes as a question too: Do you see this square old yellow Book? Editorial Edifices Browning's poetry, as Herbert Tucker remarked years ago, is radically introductory. It carries with it almost always a sense of inauguration. (3) Or as Tucker more recently said of The Ring and Book, it makes fresh starts. (4) On original publication of Men and Women, John Ruskin called Browning's multiple beginnings ellipses, alluding to semantic gaps, and to meter, rhyme, syntax and punctuation all at once. In his famous letter to poet about a volume caused him considerable struggle, he pronounced Browning's ellipses quite Unconscionable. Before one can get through ten lines, one has to patch you up in twenty places (Selected Poems, p. …

Robert Browning’s Debut: Ambition Expressed, Ambition Denied

When Robert Browning published Pauline in 1833, he both made--and avoided making--his poetic debut. The poem was launched into the literary world in slender volume, between drab paper-covered boards, with simple title: Pauline; Fragment of Confession. The poet's name is notably absent from the title page. Anonymous publication was, of course, common in the early nineteenth century for first volumes of verse. Most famously, Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798) appeared without authorial signature, and other nineteenth-century poets used pseudonyms or generic names as they launched their careers: lady for Felicia Hemans's The Restoration of the Works of Art Italy (1816); two brothers for the adolescent Poems (1829) of Alfred, Frederick, and Charles Tennyson; and A for Matthew Arnold's The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems (1849). In publishing Pauline anonymously, though, Browning was not just modestly following convention, but allowing himself the possibility of making, revoking, and multiplying poetic debuts. As he acknowledged W. J. Fox, when asking for review in the Westminster, by keeping authorship of Pauline secret, he kept a loophole ... for backing out of the thing if necessary. (1) Browning's anonymity registers both anxiety and ambition at the start of literary career. This essay will emphasize ambition, especially as expressed in the paratexts of Pauline--those fringe[s] of the printed text which in reality control one's whole reading of the text, as Gerard Genette explains in seminal Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Paratexts work to put high value on the text without antagonizing the reader by too immodestly, or simply too obviously, putting high value on the text's author. (2) Browning, like other young authors, used the paratexts of Pauline signal its value and subtly raise the as-yet-unknown poet's status. In lieu of authorial signature, another poet's name appears on the title page: Clement the early Renaissance poet whose lines supply its epigraph: Plus ne suis ce que j'ai ete, Et ne le scaurois jamais etre. (3) [What once I was I am no more, And nevermore shall find it. (4)] Marot's name, I will argue, substitutes for Browning's and signals the reach of ambition, offering model from literary history express what Browning hoped achieve. The other names that appear in the paratexts-Cornelius Agrippa, Pauline, and the volume's publisher, Saunders and Otley--represent checks on that ambition. Browning builds into the poem, by means of text and paratexts, pendulum of self-assertion and self-denial, pattern of claiming large and fearing the results. Over all of these names but one Browning exercised control--that is, he chose quote Marot and Agrippa and call addressee 'Pauline,' but he had little control over the publisher's name. Although he may not have realized it in 1833, he soon learned that this name was more important than he had anticipated and perhaps represented the strongest check on ambition. Pauline's paratexts--its epigraph from Marot, its Latin preface from Cornelius Agrippa, its interruptive French commentary by Pauline, its closing signature, and its bibliographic code--provide frames through which read Browning's early career. They signal, I believe, poet less guilty about Shelleyan defection or overwhelmed by predecessor's achievement, than someone ambitious inaugurate modern renaissance in poetic art. Ambition Expressed: The Epigraph from Marot Browning scholars have long read Pauline as psychological account of Browning's devotion Shelleyan ideology, falling away from its high ideals, attempt restore himself with the help of Pauline's love, and hope that he might regain place as priest and prophet as of old (l. 1019). (5) For Harold Bloom, Shelley is the spirit of imaginative reproach in Pauline; for Michael Yetman, only with Sordello (1840) does Browning manage a radical shift away from earlier conceptions of poetry and an achievement of his own identity as poet. …

Alternative Saints: Eucherius, Paulinus of Nola, and Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillans

(2011). Alternative Saints: Eucherius, Paulinus of Nola, and Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillans. The Seventeenth Century: Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 264-278.

Tra Medioevo e Rinascimento: il De mirabilibus mundi

This article examines the attention given by Cornelius Agrippa and Giordano Bruno to De mirabilibus mundi, a late scholastic text, probably written in the thirteenth century. Its focus is Agrippa’s attitude, expressed in De occulta philosophia, toward the secrets of nature examined by De mirabilibus sources, such as Liber aneguemis. In addition, the article discusses how Giordano Bruno in the De magia mathematica attempts to explain the causal mechanisms of different types of extraordinary properties, first with a Hermetic book, Alexander De septem herbis, and then with a synthesis of the Avicennian thesis on the transitive imagination and Al-kindi’s astrological theories, expressed in De radiis. Finally, it shows how Agrippa and Bruno tried to resolve the problem of “quid sit magia” using De mirabilibus mundi sources.

Renesansowa koncepcja duszy w ujęciu H. C. Agrippy von Nettesheim na podstawie "De occulta philosophia"

In my article I present the conception of soul of Cornelius Agrippa based on his greatest work "De occulta philosophia" which is a kid of summa of natural and occult philosophy, hermeticism, cabbala, astrology, humanistic theology, medicine, and alchemy. Henricus Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535) was a famous renaissance philosopher, cabalist, astrologer and theologian whose contribution in renaissance philosophical deliberations is significant but still unknown in Poland. Agrippa's notion of soul is very important for his own project of new pure magic which is described in his opus magnum. Therefore agrippian magic contains and perfects three kinds of knowledge: phisics, mathematics and theology. In the similary way Agrippa divided whole Cosmos in to three worlds. First and the most inferior world of the threefold Cosmos is the world of four elements of substance in Aristotle's meaning. The second one is the world of celestial bodies which comprises planets, stars and laws that rule them, and which is above the first world. The third one is the divine world of angels, soul of the world with platonic ideas and other intelligibilities. The three kinds of knowledge which Agrippa also called "regulative philosophy" are very useful for human in studying of each of three agrippian worlds. From this point of view also notion of humanity is very important for Agrippa. By the similarity between the macro- and microcosmos which appear in Agrippa's thought also human soul is threefold. Thus human soul contains in hierarchical order three parts viz.: idolum (which is the most inferior), ratio (being the middle part) and mens (which is on highest position in human soul). Each part has its own function which can be fully activated by God's light received by mens. In describing of functions of threefold soul Agrippa receives inspirations from prior philosophers like Aristotle, Awicenna or Awerroes. Another cause which emphases a great role of the agrippian conception of the soul is its connection with oryginal concepts of phantasy and threefold melancholy which is similar to the treepartite soul. Those two concepts are the examples of the influences of celestial powers which source is in stars and planets.

Better than Magic: Cornelius Agrippa and Lazzarellian Hermetism

Hermetism's influence on early modern magic has frequently been challenged since the pioneering work of Frances Yates. This article argues that hermetic ideas did exert significant influence over early modern magical systems, particularly through the figure of Cornelius Agrippa. Rather than borrowing from hermetism's approach to magic, however, Agrippa was influenced by certain hermetic ideas of gnosis.

Occult Retraction: Cornelius Agrippa and the Paradox of Magical Language

Recent work on the relationship between rhetoric and magic has tended to pivot around the issue of magic's perceived identification of signifier and signified and what that might mean for its relationship to larger theological, empirical, and rhetorical approaches to language. This article seeks to problematize the assumptions underlying this issue through an examination of the work of Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), the author of what is commonly regarded as the European Renaissance's most influential magical text, De occulta philosophia libri tres (1533). In investigating the rhetorical strategies contained in Agrippa's famously ambiguous retraction of his occult works we may uncover an equally polysemic stance toward the ability of language to deal with both the everyday world and the realm of the sacred, a stance that uses textual instantiations of paradoxes of self-reference to forcefully undermine the apparently paradigmatic magical identification of signifier and signified.

Gnosis in Aemilia Lanyer's "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum"

The problem of introducing Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum into literary history, Marshall Grossman poses, is that “if, as appears to be the case, Lanyer’s publication had, in fact, no historical consequence, failed to cause anything at all, in what sense (if any) was it a literary historical event?” (“Gendering” 128). This question pierces the center of Lanyer scholarship: if Lanyer did not participate “in any great way in the construction of English literature” (Grossman, “Gendering” 129), what do we do with her? Reconstructing the historical and cultural situation with hopes of discovering her place in the literary community has been one avenue. Another has been using her work to help in the task of negation: “to allow us to hear differently and for the first time the heretical voice that the canonical form suppresses” (Grossman, “Gendering” 140). I utilize biblio-historical research with the intention of “doing” something with Lanyer that is specifically not placing her work within the canon. Instead, her work resides within a literary tradition of sorts, one embracing a counter hermeneutic that undermines the Christian reading of the Bible undergirding English literature. Though Lanyer’s work might not qualify as a literary historical event within the confines of the canon, it participates in the coun ter-religious tradition Gnosticism that has been a subversive force in the literature of Christianity, constructing an alternative to the narrative of Christendom. Kari McBride and John C. Ulreich have convincingly demonstrated that one of the most important influences on Lanyer’s work was Henricus Cornelius Agrippa’s De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex), which helps account for Lanyer’s radical arguments in favor of women’s superiority and a reversed sex-gender system as opposed to an egalitarian model. Agrippa’s De nobilitate was birthed from his philosophical skepticism and conviction that every argument can be overturned with a stronger argument to the contrary. The claim of women’s inferiority could be reasonably overturned with arguments for women’s superiority because, for Agrippa, science and reason could not lead to truth, only to opinion and arbitrary custom. Whether he actually believed his arguments that became extremely influential on the development of the

Composing What May Not Be "Sad Trash": A Reconsideration of Mary Shelley's Use of Paracelsus in "Frankenstein"

THOSE WHO HAVE ADDRESSED THE SIGNIFICANCE OF VICTOR FRANKENstein's reading in Albertus Magnus (c. 1200-1280); Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535); and Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better and more conveniently known as Paracelsus (1493-1541), have typically downplayed importance that reading. Of Victor, Samuel Holmes Vasbinder observes, clearly rejects works Albertus Paracelsus, and Agrippa in favor men who wrote and experimented with new (1) Anne K. Mellor takes note Victor's misguided and self-taught education in theories medieval and renaissance alchemists, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus, education that brings Victor to point being suddenly forced to acknowledge ignorance these pseudo-scientists.... (2) James Rieger, writing in introduction to his 1974 edition 1818 text Shelley's novel, goes so far as to characterize scientific knowledge that Frankenstein supposedly imbibes at Ingolstadt as switched on magic, souped-up alchemy, electrification Agrippa and Paracelsus. (3) And U. C. Knoepflmacher, although not naming any actual or would-be scientists in particular, apparently concurs, stating that, Science in Frankenstein is, course, pseudo-science. (4) Generally speaking, critical commentary concerning significance Victor Frankenstein's three objects youthful quasi-scientific study has followed apparent lead novel's interior voices. Alphonse Frankenstein, Victor's father, observes Victor avidly reading Agrippa and responds cautioning, 'do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash.' (15) At University Ingolstadt, M. Krempe, Victor's initial choice for mentor, upon learning that Victor has been reading three, asks incredulously, 'Have you ... really spent your time studying such nonsense?' (Frankenstein 26). M. Waldman, Victor's ultimate choice for mentor, is more charitable than other two respondents: he characterizes work Albertus, Agrippa, and Paracelsus as 'the labours men genius, however erroneously directed,' and credits those labors as 'ultimately turning to solid advantage mankind,' which has been able 'to give new names, and arrange in connected classifications, facts which they in great degree had been instruments bringing to light' (Frankenstein 28). But Waldman questions projects three even as he credits their labors, associating them implication with those 'ancient teachers this science [i.e., chemistry, who] ... promised impossibilities and performed nothing' in attempting to transmute metals and to create elixir life (Frankenstein 27). In fact, Victor attempts on his own to distance himself from Albertus, Agrippa, and Paracelsus, even before leaving home to attend university. After seeing powerful bolt lightning reduce an old and beautiful oak to a blasted stump and thin ribbands wood, Victor asks his father to explain the nature and origin thunder and lightning. Alphonse, with little help from Benjamin Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751), constructed small electrical machine, and exhibited few experiments; he made also kite, with wire and string, which drew down that fluid from clouds. Victor concludes, This last stroke completed overthrow Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus and Paracelsus, who had so long reigned lords my imagination (Frankenstein 23). Perhaps Victor overstates case. But, he adds, by some fatality did not feel inclined to commence study any modern system.... He opts out series lectures on chemistry that he has agreed to attend out respect for his father's wishes that he do so, attributing his absence from them to [s]ome accident. And when Victor begins attending, near end series, he finds discourse of potassium and boron, sulphates and oxyds, terms to which [he] could affix no idea, thoroughly incomprehensible and confesses, I became disgusted with science natural philosophy, although still read Pliny and Buffon with delight, authors, in my estimation, nearly equal interest and utility (Frankenstein 23). …

Wonders of Mathematical Magic: Lists of Automata in the Transition from Magic to Science, 1533–1662

This essay examines lists of automata that appear in five texts from the Renaissance and the early Enlightenment period with the purpose of not only identifying the items that have captured the imagination of both Hermetic magicians and early modern scientists, but also of elucidating the various symbolic and philosophical uses they were made in different historical and intellectual contexts. The author begins by pointing to the odd situation of similar groups of wondrous objects used to support ideas that are commonly regarded as antithetical, namely spiritual magic and empirical science, and links it to recent scholarship on the transitional period of the seventeenth century that sees a closer connection between Hermetic thought and the origins of modern science. The fascination with automata gives evidence to interest in what we call applied science shared by Renaissance Hermetics and early modern natural philosophers. The authors of the texts are Cornelius Agrippa, John Dee, Tommaso Campanella, John Wilkins, and Florentius Schuyl.

"The Birthday of Typography": A Response to Celeste Langan

Wordsworth's last quarto, by the way, is bigger Than any since the birthday of typography, A drowsy frowzy poem, call'd the `Excursion,' Writ in a manner which is my aversion. (Don Juan 3.94)(1) WHAT MIGHT WELL BE CALLED APPLIED LANGAN. IN RESPONDING to Understanding Media in 1805: Audiovisual Hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel I will do little more than place a frame Langan's brilliant suggestion that need to unravel the Lay as an allegorical history of the transformation of poetry by the book--that is, by the print (63). I will play out her meditations on the connection between blank verse and print by returning with her to the first blank verse in English, and then moving beyond Scott to Keats and Byron, closing with a brief discussion of the role of Coleridge in the publication of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The heart of Langan's provocative reading of the Lay is a complex set of claims about the relationship between print and blank verse, the oral and the written, sound and silence: If the poem leaves untold the story of blank verse's origin, it suggests how blank verse--invented to translate the dead letters of Latin poetry into vernacular language--comes to define a literary vernacular that signals, evokes, or mediates, rather than records, the aural component of poetry. We fully understand the point of Scott's nostalgic evocation of an oral poetic tradition, in other words, only in recognizing how the print medium turns all verse into a blank and silent screen. (63) A dazzling extension from the seemingly gratuitous appearance of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey within the song of the fictional bard Fitztraver in Canto Six of the Lay enables Langan to seize the vision of his beloved Geraldine that the alchemist Cornelius Agrippa offers Surrey in Fitztraver's song as both a historical point de depart and a tour de force of a conclusion. If the raptured line of her beloved that seemed her inmost soul to find as Geraldine, alone in her midnight chamber, pensively reads, points to Surrey's contributions to the sonnet, as Scott's notes direct, Langan's bravura commentary points to another singular contribution to the history of English literary forms: he is, we recall, usually considered to be the inventor of English blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter (66).(2) To illustrate Surrey's strange meter, as the original publisher, John Day, called it, the Norton Anthology fortuitously excerpts from his posthumously published translation of Book IV of the Aeneid fifty-odd lines from the episode of the hunt (Virgil's lines 129-68). The choice is apposite for Langan's argument, because the full passage, recording the fateful meeting of Dido and Aeneas in the cave, contains all the elements that her account associates with blank verse: secrecy, inwardness, mystery, and delusion, for if to Dido her Juno-contrived union with Aeneas is wedlock (52) it is, tragically, no such thing to Aeneas. Most pertinently, the spectacular romanticism of the scene joins to lightning skies (51) the sound effects on which Langan concentrates: the final paragraph of the excerpt begins, In the meanwhile the heavens gan rumble sore and ends with the marvelously resonant line: And the nymphs wailed from the mountain's top (43; 53).(3) An audiovisual hallucination indeed. The model for the blank verse of Scott's day was Milton's Paradise Lost, particularly the invocations, where Milton's speaking of himself descended through the introspective poetry of Akenside and Cowper to Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. The provenance suggests that Langan's pinpointing of a shift around 1800 needs the supplement of a precursor. The prefatory note to Paradise Lost bears extensive citation: The measure is English heroic verse without rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; rime being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre. …

Augurello's Chrysopoeia (1515)-a Turning Point in the Literary Tradition of Alchemical Texts1

AbstractIn this article, new important instances of the favourable reception of Augurello's Chrysopoeia (1515) are discussed: a) the 21 editions of the poem, but especially the 1518 edition of Froben, and the Chrysopoeiae compendium paraphrasticum of 1614; b) the marginal notes of Aegidius de Vadis, Giulio Camillo Delminio, and an anonymous author in (manuscript) copies of Augurello's work; c) Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum declamatio inuectiua (1531), chapter XC on alchemy; and finally d) Ioannes Agrippa, Vellus aureum (1560). It is shown that the Chrysopoeia was read on account of both its contents and elegant language and style. This fortunate combination explains the 'classical' status the poem has acquired within alchemical literature.