Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (Magic in History) by D.P. Walker

MJ. Smith

https://www.amazon.com/Spiritual-Demonic-Magic-Cam…

This request is to fill a gap in Christian history in Logos - the intellectual relationship between magic and the Renaissance/Reformation. This is the classic textbook on the period.

Amazon blurb: [quote]First published by the Warburg Institute in 1958, this book is considered a landmark in Renaissance studies. Whereas most scholars had tended to view magic as a marginal subject, Walker showed that magic was one of the most typical creations of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Walker takes readers through the magical concerns of some of the greatest thinkers of the Renaissance, from Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples to Jean Bodin, Francis Bacon, and Tommaso Campanella. Ultimately he demonstrates that magic was interconnected with religion, music, and medicine, all of which were central to the Renaissance notion of spiritus.

Remarkable for its clarity of writing, this book is still considered essential reading for students seeking to understand the assumptions, beliefs, and convictions that informed the thinking of the Renaissance. This edition features a new introduction by Brian Copenhaver, one of our leading experts on the place of magic in intellectual history.

Vote at Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (Magic in History) by D.P. Walker | Logos

Note: yes, this post is the indirect result of another thread. When I went to check some vaguely remembered church history, I discovered that this standard resource is not available.

Donald Antenen (Logos)

There's a lot of interesting scholarly work on this topic. The work of Frances Yates, for example.

Anything from the Warburg Institute is worthwhile and serious. There's a large volume of the work of Warburg himself that is available digitally but no longer in print.

It would be nice also to have the primary sources from the Renaissance from the i Tatti Library, which publishes all of Ficino, along with the Commentaries of Pius II and much else.

Thank you, as always, for the book suggestion.