Literary Criticism (1400-1800)

Agrippa von Nettesheim, Henry Cornelius | Frances A. Yates (essay date 1979)

Frances A. Yates (essay date 1979)

SOURCE: "The Occult Philosophy and Magic: Henry Cornelius Agrippa," in The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, pp. 37-47.

[Yates is a respected writer and scholar of Renaissance philosophy and literature. Her works include Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972), and Astraea: The Imperial Theme (1975). Here, she posits that Agrippa's brand of magic was "really a religion, claiming access to the highest powers, and Christian since it accepts the name of Jesus as the chief of the wonder-working Names."]

The reputation of Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) has been a survival from the witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which he figured prominently as a prince of black magicians and sorcerers. The black magician of the ages of superstition became, in enlightened times, the absurd...

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