<p>A revelatory new account of the magus―the learned magician―and his place in the intellectual, social, and cultural world of Renaissance Europe.\nIn literary legend, Faustus is the quintessential occult personality of early modern Europe. The historical Faustus, however, was something quite 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.\nMagus 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.\nResituating 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.</p>

Magus

History

Anthony Grafton

Europe

Penguin

Leon Battista Alberti

Biographies & Memoirs

Penguin Books, Ltd.

The West: A New History (Volume 2)

David A. Bell

W.W.Norton

West A New History

The Footnote: A Curious History

Harvard University Press

<p>Devoted entirely to the history of the footnote, this quirky but academic study emphasizes the importance of the footnote in offering empirical support for the stories we live by. Its own story is neither so simple nor so reliable as it might seem, the footnote being the creation of a varied and talented group which includes almost as many philosophers as historians. It numbers among its celebrated practitioners Swift, Pope, Gibbon, Rank, Hume and Hegel.</p>

The Footnote : A Curious History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Faber Paperbacks

From Humanism to the Humanities

Lisa Jardine

Duckworth Publishing

This new publication, the second in our Theory Series, engages metaphors of the hive in contemporary cultural life and encompasses an interdisciplinary approach that spans contemporary art, curatorial studies, and literary criticism. This publication is edited by Aaron Levy and Thaddeus Squire, with essays by Anthony Grafton and Thomas Keenan and audio and visual contributions by Michael Zansky. The publication also includes a complimentary companion DVD, "in which the thinking man finds himself in a gigantic orphanage...," directed by Aaron Levy, with a monologue adapted from Thomas Bernhard's Gargoyles and read by Gary Indiana, which explores the archive in disarray. "The Revolt of the Bees artfully celebrates a set of images and associated practices that dominated the world of high culture for centuries. [...] This collection of evidence and the imaginative and sometimes subversive way in which it is displayed make a distinctive contribution to the new field of history of books and reading—an interdisciplinary study currently in an explosive phase of expansion." - Anthony Grafton "The hive is a living organism, and the living organism is a metaphor for the American organization, which is both the embodiment of and emblem for contemporary cultural practice. Every hive is constituted of thousands of bees: small organisms of finite lifespan subject to an inexorable cycle of life and death. The hive as a whole, however, provides an architecture for overcoming death by possessing a different sustainability-one wrought through continuous cycles of generational passing and reemergence, for which death is not a consideration. Extending the metaphor of the hive into the cultural realm suggests new and more hopeful visions of the cultural organization. Can we imagine our organizations operating without consideration or fear of fragility and sustainability as they envision their futures?" -- Aaron Levy and Thaddeus Squire

The Revolt of the Bees: Wherein the Future of the Paper-Hive is Declared

Thomas Keenan

Aaron Levy

Thaddeus Squire

Slought Books

Codex in Crisis

Crumpled Press

How to Build a Life in the Humanities

Garrett A. Sullivan Jr

Springer Nature

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Books by Anthony Grafton