Early Modern Science
THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF SCIENCE VOLUME 3 Early Modern Science Edited by KATHARINE PARK LORRAINE DASTON CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 22 MAGIC Brian P. Copenhaver The Middle Ages took magic seriously, though it was not a key issue for that period of European history, as it had been in late antiquity. Many medievaltheologians treated magic with fear or loathing, in fact, and philoso phers were often indifferent to it. But in the late fifteenth century, magic enjoyed a remarkable rebirth, acquiring the energy that kept it at the cen ter of cultural attention for nearly two hundred years, as great philoso phers and prominent naturalists tried to understand or confirm or reject it. Afrer Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499)took the first steps in the renaissance of magic, prominent figures from all over Europe followed his lead, including Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525),Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, ca. 1493-1541),Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576),JohnDee (1527- 1608), Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Giambattista della Porta (1535-1615), Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639),Johannes Baptista van Helmont (1579- 1644), Henry More (1614-1687),and others ofequal stature. Eventually,how ever, as Europe's most creative thinkers lost confidence in it, magic became even more disreputable than it had been before Ficino revived it. Around 1600, some reformers of natural knowledge had hoped that magic might yield a grand new system of learning, but within a century it became a syn onym for the outdated remains of an obsolete worldview.' Before examining I D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic ftom Ficino to Campanella [1958] (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tra dition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964); Brian P.
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