User:Dbachmann/Renaissance magic
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Johannes Hartlieb (ca. 1400–1468)
- Marsilio Ficino (1433-99)
- Paracelsus (1453-1541)
- Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
- Pico della Mirandola (1463-94)
- Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535)
- Nostradamus (1503 – 1566)
- John Dee (1527-1608)
- Michael Sendivogius (1566 - 1636)
- Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639)
- The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1604)
- Hieroglyphica (discovered 1422)
- C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (OUP, 1954)
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Only an obstinate prejudice about this period could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century. In medieval story there is, in one sense, plenty of “magic”. Merlin does this or that “by his subtilty”, Bercilak resumes his severed head. But all these passages have unmistakably the note of “faerie” about them. But in Spenser, Marlowe, Chapman, and Shakespeare the subject is treated quite differently. “He to his studie goes”; books are opened, terrible words pronounced, souls imperilled. The medieval author seems to write for a public to whom magic, like knight-errantry, is part of the furniture of romance: the Elizabethan, for a public who feel that it might be going on in the next street. [...] Neglect of this point has produced strange readings of The Tempest, which is in reality [...] Shakespeare’s play on magia as Macbeth is his play on goeteia (p. 8)
