Название: Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment
Автор: Brian P. Copenhaver
Издательство: Cambridge University Pres
ISBN: 110707052X
Год: 2015
Страниц: 578
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf
Размер: 81.84 MB

The story of the beliefs and practices called 'magic' starts in ancient Iran, Greece, and Rome, before entering its crucial Christian phase in the Middle Ages. Centering on the Renaissance and Marsilio Ficino - whose work on magic was the most influential account written in premodern times - this groundbreaking book treats magic as a classical tradition with foundations that were distinctly philosophical. Besides Ficino, the premodern story of magic also features Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Aquinas, Agrippa, Pomponazzi, Porta, Bruno, Campanella, Descartes, Boyle, Leibniz, and Newton, to name only a few of the prominent thinkers discussed in this book. Because pictures play a key role in the story of magic, this book is richly illustrated.

This book focuses on the Renaissance, when Europeans worked to recover the ancient culture that had invented mageia and so much else. Because almost all the industrious scholars of the Renaissance were Christian, they inherited Christian preconceptions about magic, along with an earlier deposit of information about it that survived the Middle Ages. They had data and fixed ideas, but they also had the will to unfix their ideas by creating a critical discipline, philology, in its modern phase. When scholars recovered an old world from the stone and parchment ruins of classical antiquity, they also helped make a new world, where science and technology would eventually produce amazing novelties to challenge religion and other endowments of tradition – including magic.