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Rhetorical Play in Cornelius Agrippa: The Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex

John Flood

In the first scene of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the protagonist sums up his aspirations with the announcement that he ‘Will be as cunning as Agrippa was, Whose shadows made all Europe honor him’.1 Although this is the best-known English literary reference to Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535), his reputation as an occultist was such that it is likely that he contributed to the imaginative construction of other fictional masters of shadows including Archimago, who in commanded ‘Legions of Sprites’, or who exercises much of his power through .2 Knowledge of Agrippa’s work and reputa- tion (the latter often biased towards notoriety) was widespread in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England and he was known by John Dee, , Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Nashe and Fulke Gre- ville, amongst others. On the Continent, his influence was to be found in the works of , Dürer, Rabelais, Montaigne and Juan Luis Vives.3 Despite relative obscurity in subsequent centuries, Agrippa’s pres- ence is to be found in authors as various as Goethe, Guillaume Apollinaire

1 Act 1, scene 1, lines 117–18 (A-Text) and 110–11 (B-Text) in Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. David Scott Kastan, Norton Critical Editions (New York, 2005). For Marlowe and Agrippa, see , The Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, Routledge Classics (London, 1979; repr. London, 2001), pp. 135–47. Marlowe may have named his protagonist after Faustus of Milevis, whom Augustine described as having been deceived by the Manichees and who was condemned as a heretic in Heinrich Cornelius Agrip­pa, Henrie Cornelius Agrippa, of the Vanitie and Vncertaintie of Artes and , trans. James Sandford (London, 1569), p. 168r. (Despite its age, this is the best English translation of the work and it is accessible through EEBO, Early English Books Online. Translations have been checked against the Latin original.) See Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick,­ Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford 1991; repr. 1998), 5.13. 2 For both English and Continental writers, see Michael H. Keefer, ‘Agrip­pa’, in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Toronto, 1997); Yates, Occult Philosophy, p. 187. 3 Charles G. Nauert, Agrippa and the Crisis of Thought, Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences 55 (Urbana, 1965), pp. 323–28; Yates, Occult Philosophy (see above, n. 1), pp. 57–70, 74–75, 137–471, 211–12; Kee­fer, ‘Agrippa’ (see above, n. 2), p. 43. 26 john flood and Marguerite Yourcenar.4 This celebrity was due in large part to his De occulta philosophia libri tres (Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 1533). Given this book’s endorsement of ceremonial and account of the summoning of demonic aid, it is unsurprising that Agrippa’s life became entangled with legend, equipping him with a black dog as a demonic familiar.5 However, Agrippa was also renowned (and just as frequently damned) for his treatise De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium, atque excellentia verbi Dei, declamatio invectiva (On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences and Arts, or the Excellence of the Word of God, an Invective Declamation, 1526), in which he condemns occult practices alongside other human learning.6 A shorter work of Agrippa’s has also received considerable attention. His Declamatio de nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, 1529) was originally delivered at the University of Dôle in 1509.7 Although less famous than Agrippa’s works on magic and epistemology, the Declamatio was an influ- ential text in its time. In addition to being reprinted in the Latin editions of Agrippa’s works, in the sixteenth century it appeared in one Polish, two German, two Italian and five French versions.8 In the early seventeenth century, the latter, combined with the work of Christine de Pizan, pro- vided the models for profeminist writing (sometimes to the extent that they were restrictively dominant).9 Agrippa’s was also one of the most celebrated profeminist texts of early modern England, a fact attested by several translations (in 1542, when it was reprinted in the same and in the

4 Nauert, Agrippa, pp. 330–31; Paola Zambelli, White Magic, in the Euro­ pean Renaissance, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions 125 (Leiden, 2007), pp. 115–17. 5 Zambelli, White Magic, Black Magic, p. 139. 6 ‘Invectives’ and ‘declamations’ were terms from Classical referring to types of writing that were essentially suasive. More will be said about declamations below. For invective, see Lindsay Cameron Watson, ‘invective’, in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spaw­forth (Oxford, 2003). 7 The Latin title is taken from the opening of the text of the declamation in Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De nobilitate & praecellentia foeminei sexus . . . De sacramento matri­ monii . . . De originali peccato . . . (Antwerp, 1529), A4r. The title page of this collection omits declamatio. 8 The translations of the work and their influences are summarised in Hein­rich Cornelius Agrippa, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, ed. Albert Rabil Jr., The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 1996), pp. 27–29. 9 Linda Timmermans, L’accès des femmes à la culture (1598–1715), Bi­blio­thèque Littéraire de la Renaissance 3.36 (Geneva, 1993), pp. 246–47.