Magia bianca, magia nera nel Rinascimento (review)

This is an intensely personal book by a major scholar of Renaissance European philosophy. With one exception, its five essays and two appendices reprint or revise contributions previously published in journals or volumes of acta.

Professor Zambelli's selection emphasizes the ambiguous, contested boundary between the two varieties of Renaissance magic: "black," necromantic or demonic, and "white," natural or (as often alleged) protoscientific. A unifying introduction expounds affinities and continuities among the essays. Together, they explore discussions by Renaissance philosophers — from Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola to Giordano Bruno — of magical theories and practices that, through manipulating symbols, supposedly exploited purely natural affinities or sympathies among the animal, vegetable, mineral, planetary, and intellective realms. Defending these ideas and practices was largely a matter of demonstrating — or at least arguing — that they did not depend upon invoking demons, much less interacting or cooperating with them.

As she has done for a half-century, Professor Zambelli illuminates the problem with incisive analysis and deep erudition. She insists rightly that the social and political climate, and the material conditions of authorship between 1400 and 1600, still have much to teach us about the rhetorical and textual strategies adopted in Renaissance magic treatises. Ficino, Pico, and many (but not all, as Zambelli shows) of their followers denied that natural magic involved demons, in part because contemporary guardians of Christian orthodoxy condemned all ceremonial magic as witchcraft. Yet "natural magicians" discussed demons (and daemons), and some of them were clearly invoking suprahuman beings.

Renaissance magi often undermine their own distinctions between natural and demonic magic, particularly when describing rituals. D. P. Walker observed the ambiguity of Ficino's Orphic singing and invocations, while Zambelli repeatedly exposes Trithemius's duplicity: denouncing books of necromancy, he argued for their conservation and wrote the overtly demonic Steganographia. His historiographic forgeries, especially the infamous "Hunibaldus," corroborate Trithemius's elastic concept of truth. Dissimulation may have been common: Zambelli argues that circulating one's magical works in manuscript rather than in print was often not authorial perfectionism but a precaution against censure, or worse. Moreover, Zambelli hypothesizes that several magi probably transmitted their dearest ideas only in person, through ritual initiation. Proof of such initiations is unlikely to surface, as she admits.

The book gives insightful analyses of Hermetic, magical, astrological, and Neoplatonic syncretists from Ficino to Bruno, and is especially informative about Trithemius, Reuchlin, Heinrich Agrippa, Charles de Bovelles, and other northerners. There are useful reassessments of their indebtedness to medieval precursors such as Picatrix and Albertus Magnus. The transcription of Trithemius's bibliografia necromantica (Appendix, 117-29) is invaluable.

I have called this a deeply personal book for two reasons. A scholar's anthology of her own previously published articles, it has the advantages and drawbacks of the genre. It increases readers' access to studies otherwise scattered and possibly difficult of access, yet there is considerable repetition, sometimes verbatim; variations raise unanswered questions. More radical revision and coordination would produce a rich monograph.

A second characteristic is more problematic. Throughout the essays, Professor Zambelli adopts a highly personal voice, projecting a vivid authorial persona through rhetorical as well as scholarly means. She is unafraid of the first-person singular and fond of the dramatic interjection, from the occasional half-humorous ahimè to theatrical asides; unfortunately, the latter are frequently ad personam. Some of her criticisms are merited; others may well be, but the relentless sarcasm often vitiates the scholarly point. This is especially notable in the final essay, "Qualche interpretazione. Magia e ermetismo da Tocco a Corsano, da Yates a Ciliberto." Reviewing the major interpreters of this topic, Professor Zambelli provides illuminating assessments of illustrious predecessors, especially Walker, Yates, and Garin, along with some touching personal reminiscences. Recent scholars are generally assessed impersonally, but negative judgments of their scholarship — one case in particular — devolve into personal indictment. Whatever the scholarly merits — and Professor Zambelli's judgments often compel assent — criticism too frequently yields to dismissiveness...