Profs & Pints Annapolis: The Powerful Magicians of Renaissance Europe

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A woodcut illustration from a 1582 edition of Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia.

A woodcut illustration from a 1582 edition of Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia.

Profs and Pints Annapolis presents: “The Powerful Magicians of Renaissance Europe,” a look at how supernatural beliefs drove leading thinkers in a time of exploration and progress, with Anthony Grafton, professor of history at Princeton University and teacher of courses on art, magic and science during that era.

The decades around 1500 were marked by intense exploration of new ways of life. While some thinkers of that era, such as Machiavelli and Leonardo, remain well known, largely forgotten is another set of individuals who were every bit as brilliant and perhaps as famous in their day. They included monks and medical men, philosophers and inventors, and together they crafted a new set of ways to understand and control the universe. They gave an ancient name, “magic,” to the set of disciplines that they brought together and offered their clients, and they themselves were known as Magi.

Get better acquainted with the Magi with the help of Professor Anthony Grafton, a scholar of the Renaissance whose many books include Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa.

He’ll describe how the Magi were astrologers who drew up horoscopes and believed that the power of the stars directed life on earth at every level. They didn’t just read the stars, however—they devised diets and regimens, talismans and rituals that could make the impact of the stars less harmful. They gave practical advice on investments and relationships, and they were also therapists who could save their clients from the destructive power of madness and melancholy.

Renaissance magic came in many forms. Magi and their helpers talked with angels. They used spells from ancient India and Persia, as well as the Islamic world and the Christian monasteries of their own time, to keep their clients safe on voyages, to make their investments prosper and their children flourish. They learned from the Jewish Kabbalists to see the Hebrew alphabet as a special source of power and knowledge.

Magi startled their audiences with automata, moving figures that took every form from animals and humans to model sailing ships that carried salt and pepper shakers. They scared audiences with lamps that projected frightening images of devils and monsters onto walls. Both their encounters with supernatural beings and their mechanical devices were so startling that many around them feared that they had made pacts with the devil, inspiring the greatest writers and artists of their time to create such unforgettable figures as Prospero and Doctor Faustus.

To help you understand what drove the Magi, Professor Grafton will discuss how it was natural for them to see magic as effective. Scholars at the time agreed that the wisest inhabitants of the earth had been ancient Egyptians and Babylonians—the very people who first created magic. Churches were stocked with sacred relics and images of the saints—physical objects, solid and colorful, which could perform miracles, curing diseases of every kind. Finally, some forms of magic—such as cryptography, which was crucial for secure communication between government and their ambassadors in other states—clearly worked.

In the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Magi lost out to philosophers who rejected magic and created a new vision of nature as made up of soulless matter and forces devoid of heavenly influences. Yet these new thinkers, whose ranks included Francis Bacon and René Descartes, learned important things from the Magi and shared the magicians’ aspirations to alter their world. (Tickets must be purchased online with processing fees and sales tax added. Advance tickets: $13.50. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 4 pm and the talk starts at 5:30 pm.)