Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment by Brian P. Copenhaver (review)

Brian Copenhaver has reached down into the erudition cultivated over a career spent studying magic, particularly that of the European Renaissance, to produce his own marvel, the book Magic in Western Culture. The full title suggests it will be a history of Western magic from late Antiquity up to the eighteenth century, but that is not quite what Copenhaver has given us. Instead, his book offers a historical look at the magical traditions Copenhaver has examined in his years of scholarship, and though that does yield a subject stretching from Plotinus in the third century to Leibniz in the early eighteenth, there is no attempt to be comprehensive over that whole span of time. Working from his strengths, Copenhaver emphasizes the magic of Neo-platonic circles of late Antiquity and the Renaissance as well as that of natural philosophers in the early modern period, while medieval magic is reduced practically to what we can glean from the testimony of Thomas Aquinas. Furthermore, these are magical traditions of the educated elite. There is nothing here of the magic or sorcery of the European populace at large. And that is, indeed, exactly as Copenhaver wants it. From the very beginning he sets himself against the classic attitude of James George Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, for whom magic was a primitive, or we might say unreflective, practice or art. Copenhaver insists that for the period he is examining, magic was embraced by the learned. Indeed, the magic he is interested in was thought about or practiced only insofar as it could be supported by philosophy. As Copenhaver has always maintained, magic was for most of the history of the West an accepted and sometimes even dominant part of the culture of society’s upper strata.

As for what magic means for Copenhaver, here the reader will look in vain for a definition. Copenhaver argues forcefully that the student of magic is better served by adopting an entirely empirical approach. The noted English anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard provides his model in this regard, in the famous Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande presenting his reader with a summary of his observations free of any essentialist notions of what magic ought to be. As for Copenhaver, he accordingly lays before the reader the examples of learning and practice referred to by his sources as magical, or, if there is no explicit reference, to material congruent with what is called “magic” in another source. For the most part, this strategy works well. Yet there are occasions where, to this reader’s eyes, more than the magical has been included in the subject. For example, toward the very end of the book Copenhaver draws in the matter from Burchard of Worms’s Corrector that provides the basis for the second part of the Canon Episcopi. These are the stories of the gatherings of the ladies of the night, flying through the sky in the train of Diana. I would prefer to see these as a part of folklore but not magic. Here at least a nominal definition of magic might help in clarifying if not settling the disagreement.

Regarding the substance of Copenhaver’s book, though the material generally coheres quite nicely over the work’s 450 pages of text, with ample cross-references, the argument can be made that it works even better to see the whole as made up of three quite separate pieces, each corresponding to one of the book’s designated parts, excluding Introduction and Conclusion. The first piece or part consists of a sort of history of ancient Greek (and a bit of Scholastic) magic as seen through the eyes of the great fifteenth-century Florentine Neoplatonist, Marsilio Ficino. Here the important guide for Copenhaver is Ficino’s Three Books on Life. Plotinus introduced Ficino...