In 1519, the German scholar Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa intervened to secure the release of a poor woman accused of witchcraft by a zealous inquisitor, who claimed that such women conceive children by demons. “Is this how theology is done nowadays, using nonsense of this sort to put innocent little women to the rack?” Agrippa demanded. The incident is recounted in Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa, Anthony Grafton’s dense and fascinating study of the evolution of magic through the 15th and 16th centuries, and it illustrates some of the contradictions and divisions that made the understanding and pursuit of hidden knowledge so fraught at the time. Grafton, a professor of history and the humanities at Princeton University, shows that “magic” was a vast umbrella term encompassing everything from love philtres and homespun remedies involving the bones of toads, to proto-scientific disciplines such as cryptography, optics and engineering. When practised by women and unlettered people (not to mention those of other faiths), it usually led to accusations of witchcraft, but articulated and published by learned men, it resulted in books that became the international bestsellers of their day.
Not that the learned men wholly escaped censure by the religious and civic authorities for their determination to test the boundaries of human knowledge. Agrippa – whom Grafton calls “the greatest magus of the 16th century” – had to fight to get his magisterial three-volume work On Occult Philosophy past the censors by appealing directly to the bishop of Cologne; although the book immediately went through three printings, it was widely banned and, according to Grafton, effectively ended its author’s writing career. The Jesuit demonologist Martin Del Rio published a collection of tabloid-style anecdotes accusing Agrippa of practising diabolic magic: “When he and Faustus travelled together, Del Rio claimed, they paid their bills in inns with coins that seemed genuine but turned into bits of horn after a few days.”
