Lots of interesting, intriguing info for those who want to know more about how people in the past viewed the world and reality. As an academic text it is somewhat dry at times but that's to be expected.

Grafton traces the evolution of magical thought and practice from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, examining the contributions of key figures such as Faustus and Agrippa. The prose in "Magus" is elegant and accessible, making it a pleasure to read for both scholars and general audiences alike. Grafton's narrative unfolds with clarity and precision, guiding readers through centuries of history with ease and insight.

A fascinating historical examination of the role of the Magus in western culture, especially during the Renaissance. Very readable and our non-fiction book club folks are going to love it. Will definitely order.

I approached this book with interest, but was disappointed. As I'm looking at other reviews, my sense is that those with this field of study really enjoyed it, but those of us interested in, but not familiar with, the topic found it rough going.

Part of the issue is that this is some seriously dense prose. It cannot be read quickly. Adding to that challenge is the fact that the writer doesn't do a lot of signalling of the point or central idea he's trying to convey in different sections. I needed more help from him to follow his thinking, and I didn't get it. Detail after detail after detail is related, and I found myself hard-pressed ro understand the purpose of all these specifics.

If you have a background in this field of study, you may find this a remarkably enlightening book. If you're coming to the field with little or no experience, it's apt to wash over you without leaving much behind.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

If I had to tell someone, "Okay, here are three books you must read to understand the figure of the medieval magician," I would suggest a trio composed of "Magic and Masculinity" by Frances Timbers, "Wizards" by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, and "Magus" by Anthony Grafton. And the last would definitely be in the top spot.

There's no need to dwell on the author's academic background because, well - with someone like him, what more do you need to say? Nor on the quality of all the books published by the publishing house. So, I think I'll focus on the smoothness of the argument, the pleasantness of the prose, and the non-trivial ability to make complex theological and esoteric concepts understandable to a non-specialist audience. "From Faustus to Agrippa" covers a lot of ground in the landscape of high magic, during those same centuries when Europe experienced the phenomena of witch hunts and the Protestant Reformation (which, with its new theological foundations, undermined many of the logical assumptions on which much of ceremonial magic in the Middle Ages had been based). And indeed, there is an abyss between the "model Agrippa" magician and the (self-proclaimed) devout magician that Niccolò Cusano outlined in 1431 in his memorable sermon "Ibant magi," with which the first chapter of this book opens.

Grafton is great at explaining the intermediate stages through which the medieval magician transformed into the Renaissance magician: and he does so with a fluidity that is frankly not taken for granted in such a well-documented and precise text.

I received a complimentary copy of this book via NETGallery in exchange for an honest review, and I am absolutely honest in saying that this is the new release on high magic that, in my opinion, you should bring home this year.

A revelatory new account of the magus—the learned magician—and his place in the intellectual, social, and cultural world of Renaissance Europe.

In literary legend, Faustus is the quintessential occult personality of early modern Europe. The historical Faustus, however, was something quite different: a magus—a learned magician fully embedded in the scholarly currents and public life of the Renaissance. And he was hardly the only one. Anthony Grafton argues that the magus in sixteenth-century Europe was a distinctive intellectual type, both different from and indebted to medieval counterparts as well as contemporaries like the engineer, the artist, the Christian humanist, and the religious reformer. Alongside these better-known figures, the magus had a transformative impact on his social world.

Magus details the arts and experiences of learned magicians including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Grafton explores their methods, the knowledge they produced, the services they provided, and the overlapping political and social milieus to which they aspired—often, the circles of kings and princes. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these erudite men anchored debates about licit and illicit magic, the divine and the diabolical, and the nature of “good” and “bad” magicians. Over time, they turned magic into a complex art, which drew on contemporary engineering 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 exploit the cosmos.

Resituating the magus in the social, cultural, and intellectual order of Renaissance Europe, Grafton sheds new light on both the recesses of the learned magician’s mind and the many worlds he inhabited.

This is a very interesting book about magic and it’s almost legitimate beginning and how it was viewed in the renaissance. And those who were popular defenders and skeptics of the practice. I found this book very interesting as I do most things written about medieval times and was so surprised as to all the names I knew that either dabbles in a straight up against it this is a very good book and one I highly recommend to others who love history especially the McCobb in the different this is a great addition to any library. I want to thank the publisher and net galley for my free arc copy please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.

Reading the history of magic requires some advance thought. Because the more you examine it, the more it devolves into fraud, religion, and fear. It’s inevitable, it seems. So with Magus, by Anthony Grafton. It is an enormously detailed look at the state of magic in the 1500s, from Faustus to Agrippa, and how it got there. And not so much about the magic.

Magic used to be real to the general populace. Stories abound of evil events called for by a Magus. Grafton cites the case of Dr. Faustus, the most famous magus of his era, when the city councilors of Ingolstadt made him swear an oath not to take vengeance on the city when he left. It was hardly the first time he had been booted out by a city, and they feared what he could do to them.

The fact that a magus could mingle with the leadership even locally, let alone at the king and emperor level, seems outlandish to us today. But in the 1500s, they were international celebrities - to be feared.

The key to being a magus was mastering a minimum of two domains: astrology and necromancy. Astrology is easy, as the world has a long history of magi and priests making up stories about stars and planets. The juxtaposition of various heavenly bodies is the prime excuse for generalized predictions, especially predictions of the past, which prove the assumptions correct. They could say anything they wanted about two heavenly bodies crossing paths, and they did. And everyone believed it. It was the science of the day. It was particularly easy to look back, see where planets had crossed, and compare it to the events of that year. They were then totally free to claim cause and effect.

One renowned expert cleric, Roger Bacon, maintained there could only be six great religions in the world, because each one had to be governed by a different planet in conjunction with Jupiter. Judaism, he pointed out, is the religion of Saturn, while Mercury announced the birth of Christ and therefore Christianity. Now that we know there are more planets in the solar system, presumably more great religions and gods would be allowed on Earth.

Necromancy, conversing with, or raising up the dead was more difficult and dangerous. It could get the magus in trouble with The Church. It required actual demonstrations, which meant models, conspirators, venues, and so on. But once a reputation was established, stories of past exploits, real or imagined, could carry the day with no further need of proof.

Lower down the scale, magic could come from tricks and healing. Magi could cure anything with compounds of plants. Nothing ever had to be proven, merely talked about as the age-old, bona fide way of curing various conditions. Grafton gives examples such as cutting off a dog’s tongue and placing in one’s shoe, right under the big toe, to prevent dogs from attacking. This sort of thing survives to this day in homeopathy and Chinese herbal medicine, which is the cause of numerous animals going extinct. Thanks to their body parts “curing” diseases and conditions like impotence and weak libido, they are in staggeringly high demand in southeast Asia. It is all magic.

Talismans are another magic trick that survives today. Take a stone chosen for its supposed powers, carve a magic letter or word on it, wrap it with some sort of scent and hang it around your neck. Keeps the bearer healthy. All kinds of scholars criticized this absurd practice. And then did it themselves.

Magnetism was a huge boon to magi. They could make inanimate objects move, or even fly. Magnetism soon made its way into the healing scam, where it thrived for a good four hundred years. Patients, however, did not do as well.

To round out the menu, Grafton lists geomancy, predictions based on the throw of dice, hydromancy, predictions from examining water, aeromancy – the air, pyromancy – visions in fires, chiromancy – palm reading, and scapulomancy, predictions using shoulder blade bones for divination. But he just lists them; he has no accompanying stories.

Anyway, those things are not what the book is about. Rather, it follows Faustus, one of the most famous and despised magi of all time. He was apparently arrogant and obnoxious, scamming his way across Europe. He is the only real practitioner profiled in the book.

The other major characters are Christian scholars and researchers. They were obsessed with documenting and collecting. They wrote books, built whole libraries of collected works, and consulted with royalty, safely (for the most part) separated from the practitioners by their scholarly façade.

Grafton also makes the point that The Church itself had primed the population for this sort of thing with all its own magical practices: “It liturgical, processional, and Eucharistic rituals included many of the practices that magicians and others could appropriate for their own diabolic ends.” So the book is really about the self-induced conflict of religious scholars attempting to document and analyze this demonic phenomenon during a hundred year period from the mid 1400s to the mid 1500s.

This also being the Renaissance period, engineering got sucked into the maelstrom. People marveled at new styles of architecture, and new tools devised through physics. Things like pulley systems, that could multiply the weight one man could manage, were magical. The dome of the Florence Duomo is another such magical engineering feat.

Then there was Trithemius, an abbot who amassed probably the most knowledge and documentation of anyone. A lot of Grafton’s focus on him has to do with cryptography, including steganography – hiding data in images (He wrote the book on it in the early 1500s). Some languages, like Hebrew, assign numeric values to the letters of the alphabet (because there is no other numbering system). This is what led to the ongoing scam called numerology, in which words can be reduced to numbers, and depending on the word, either a lucky or unlucky number. It is also perfect for devising codes to ensure secrecy between sender and receiver. The more time he spent on them, the more sophisticated his own cryptographic codes became. Coding messages is at least as old as the renaissance.

Trithemius had perspective. He understood what he was looking at. It allowed him to write analyses like: “The crowd, which is quick to believe in vice, rages as usual against the innocent. Since it does not know the principles of nature, it ascribes to evil operations whatever it does not understand. The ignorant never realize that the marvelous is possible, and they measure the power of nature by the capacity of their own minds. Hence they are fooled as completely as if they were blind.” Still true.

Hypocrisy was an inherent condition of this sort of magic. Agrippa, the subject of the final chapter, actually denounced astrology as a fraud in his book published in 1530, which was a pretty bold thing to do. Yet a year later, he was busy devising new rules for the conjunction of Earth with comets. Oh well; it’s a living.

Agrippa was big on the Christian Cabala, which several of the scholars profiled in the book made up to compete with the Jewish Kabbalah. It is pure mysticism, based in nothing whatsoever. But Christianity has always been about keeping up with the other great religions, as can be seen in its holidays and myths, mostly derivative when not simply copying.

The thing of greatest value that I learned here was that disinformation is nothing new. It has merely changed shape with the media available for it. In the 1400s, you could not read a historic book and assume what you read was correct or even the author’s words. Scholars had to visit multiple cities and look up facts in each city’s copy of the same book. Because books were hand copied, and human copiers could alter text, especially in translation. They could and did add paragraphs and chapters of their own, and/or delete those of the original author. When a scholar found a difference from one copy of the same book to the next, he had to decide how to play it: explain them both, ignore them both, or pick one and maybe mention that idea was only available in the version found in the library in Cologne, but not Oxford, for example. Which one was the truth: the one with the added paragraph, or the one with paragraph missing? It makes today’s social media disinformation positively quaint and charming by comparison.

Unfortunately, the book is very dense with detail. Not of magic, but of authors. There is far too much detail, too much background color on them, and too much context. And not much magic. It doesn’t help that single paragraphs can go on for more than a page, never isolating their main thoughts. The overall effect is not so much that of an enchanting topic, but of drudgery in reading. Sooner or later, the reader must realize s/he can skip over endless descriptions of people and relationships, because they are entirely forgettable and usually unhelpful. Magus is needlessly hard work.

David Wineberg

This was a very interesting book.

It focuses on learned magic tracing its roots from Medieval times up up to Renaissance, following the scholars who were passionate about it and who extensively wrote and debated about it. It is filled with interesting pieces of information, context and world views and it has been an enriching read, though it's probably best appreciated by those who usually enjoy reading about the subject and the times featured. An interesting read, nevertheless .

I received a copy of this in order to share my view on it.

Back more than half a century ago, when I was in graduate school, I became fascinated by figures such as Philip Melancthon (Marti Luther's successor) John Dee, Pico della Mirandola, Agrippa, Ficino, Trithemius and a host of others who were basically working hard on what we would call now Unified Field Theories. I eventually moved away from that--too much human and animal suffering, especially of women, all heat, little light.

But I retain enough lingering interest to grab this book when it came up at NetGalley. And it's definitely worth reading.

This is a vast area of study, which Grafton attempts to grapple with in a single volume. Just one focus alone could fill fascinating books, as thinkers of the time attempted to tease astronomy from astrology. That meant not only figuring out the "truth" of observation, but separating out the threads of classical Greek thinkers, current religious thought, and goals: this person wants alchemical knowledge (lead into goal the usual suspect) that one a cure-all for disease, another a form of energy that doesn't involve burning wood or coal. And one of those ways surely had to be through magic. Only what was true magic, and what was the nonsense of charlatans?

Oh, and there was always the lure of automata.

Grafton does a good job of covering vast surfaces by focusing on the individuals whose studies led in so many directions. Angelic cryptology, steganography, the Kabbalah, divination, codes and secrets as well as experiments of those claiming to be magi and those skeptical of magi are only a few of the subject covered.

The notes, which take up thirty percent of the book, are absolutely packed with detailed data and references. For those alone I'd pay the price of the book.

Magus, a book that describes the development of magic during Renaissance Europe, was both fascinating and in a way, mind-bending. I found the information presented to be fascinating and in the progression that was used, it showed the changes in people's thinking during the Renaissance as well as the people who were involved in magic. On the other hand, I did not find that there was any real flow in the book. I found myself confused in places whereas the initial point of reference was not clear due to lack of connection. Also, though I understand that ferry people were chosen, there seemed to be no obvious reason for the choices due to what I perceive to be a,lack of connection (and flow). I'm wouldn't necessarily recommend this book as,something to read, but as a,book with useful information - if someone were to ask me about information on magic in Renaissance Europe, then I would suggest this book.

A compelling case for the "learned magician" as a member of renaissance society on equal footing with the roles we are more familiar with. Magus is thorough and well-researched while remaining engaging and accessible. The kind of book I would introduce to undergrads if this was a topic they were interested in, and a useful read for the committed layperson as well.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

I love reading about magic, witches, sorcery, etc, especially in historical context. I’ve never really had the chance to learn about the “magus” or learned magic user in renaissance times, so this book was very exciting and informative.