Thomas Willard How Magical Was Renaissance Magic? During the early modern period in Europe, the word “magic” took on a variety of meanings and associations – not all of them new, but collectively blurring what had been fairly clear lines between religions on the one hand and technologies or sciences on the other. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, magic had long been associated with the ritual use of spells to predict the future or to achieve desired ends.¹ The Oxford English Dictionary makes it clear that the earliest instances of the English word “magic” concerned “ritual activities or observances.”² Mean- while, as more figurative uses of the word were introduced, accompanied by published texts of alchemy and astrology, the ritual element of magic tended to disappear.³ Developments like these are associated with names that “conjure up” images in the verb’s figurative sense – names like Agrippa and Paracelsus.⁴ But given the departure from older associations with conjuring and witchcraft, they raise the question of just how magical the post-medieval magic was. In this chapter, I shall follow the fortunes of magic from the Middle Ages through the various stages of the Renaissance and Reformation, on the Continent and then in England. I Introduction Forty years ago, I began studying what then was known as Renaissance magic or Renaissance intellectual magic. The terms had been around for half a century, but had recently received a good deal of attention thanks to the pioneering  Howard Clark Kee, “Magic and Divination,” The Oxford Guide to Ideas & Issues of the Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 334‒35.  “magic, n. 1” OED Online. Oxford University Press, www.oed.com (last accessed on Sep. 26, 2016).  E. M. Butler, Ritual Magic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), 3 ‒ 4. For the com- plementary view that medieval books of magic continued to find an audience in the early mod- ern period, see Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Also see notes 26 and 31 below.  “conjure, v9c.” OED Online (see note 2) (last accessed Sep. 26, 2016). Thomas Willard, The University of Arizona, Tucson https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110557725-022 Classen, Albrecht, ed. Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time : The Occult in Pre-Modern Sciences, Medicine, Literature, Religion, and Astrology. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, Inc., 2017. Accessed October 5, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. Created from uaz on 2020-10-05 09:59:51. Copyright © 2017. De Gruyter, Inc.. All rights reserved.