A Companion to Ramon Llull and Lullism. Amy M. Austin and Mark D. Johnston, eds. Trans. Amy M. Austin, Alexander Ibarz, and Mark D. Johnston. Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition 82. Leiden: Brill, 2019. xxvi + 558 pp. $299.
and the text is a synthesis of various works of ritual magic translated into English. Since it draws on the 1578 edition of Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia, it was clearly written in the late sixteenth century. In using Agrippa to provide some framework for its rituals, the work is fairly typical of its time. Klaassen stresses that, of all the magical texts produced by famous mages associated with the Renaissance, only Agrippa’s work was widely influential among more ordinary magical practitioners. Since Agrippa offered a framework in which magical operations could be understood but did not provide instructive details, it was left to more commonplace works such as this compilation to connect his magical philosophy with actual rites. As Klaassen expertly demonstrates, these two texts exemplify a number of transitions in the practice of magic and in the cultural context surrounding such practices: from Latin to vernacular, from clerical to lay, and from a world in which magical rites (even common charms) were often intimately connected to the rituals and formulas of the medieval liturgy to a world that, in England by the end of the sixteenth century, was becoming solidly Protestant. Through his close textual analysis, Klassen shows how the advent of Protestantism altered some aspects of magical operations but did not fundamentally disenchant the world. Even more importantly, though, he can show what did not change about magic in this period of tremendous intellectual and religious upheaval. With the exception of Agrippa, the great figures of Renaissance magic— Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, or even Dee in England—play no role here. The magic in these manuals, the practices sought out and presumably employed by what Klaassen likes to call ordinary magic enthusiasts, was drawn from late medieval traditions, remade and repackaged for a new world, and did not reflect any aspects of Hermeticism or Cabala that are often seen as constitutive of early modern magic. This is an important conclusion, here brilliantly demonstrated through two ordinary but exemplary texts now accessible to both scholars and students.