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Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: toward a Historiography of Others. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1993, xvi + 291 pp.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Penelope Gouk
Penelope Gouk
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Early Music History , Volume 13 , October 1994 , pp. 291 - 306
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 The literal meaning of the word ‘occult’ is ‘hidden’ (Lat. occultus). It had always borne the sense ‘hidden from public view’ with its negative connotations, and this of course is the predominant meaning of the word at the present time; this has only been true, however, since the seventeenth century. It had earlier carried the principal sense of ‘hidden from the human senses’; as such it was juxtaposed in scholastic philosophy with the concept of ‘manifest’. See Hutchison, K., ‘What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?’, Isis, 73 (1982), 233–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Henry, J., ‘Occult Qualities in the Experimental Philosophy: Active Principles in Pre-Newtonian Matter Theory’, History of Science, 24 (1986), pp. 335–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Magic and Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeeth Centuries’, A Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. G. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie, M. J. S. Hodge and R. C. Olby (London and Chicago, 1990).

2 Bedini, S. A., ‘The Role of Automata in the History of Technology’, Technology and Culture, 5 (1964), pp. 24–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yates, F., The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eamon, W., ‘Technology as Magic in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance’, Janus, 70 (1983), pp. 171–212Google Scholar; Gouk, P. M., ‘The Harmonic Roots of Newtonian Science’, Let Newton Be! A New Perspective on his Life and Works, ed. Fauvel, J., Flood, R., Shortland, M. and Wilson, R. (Oxford, 1988), pp. 101–25Google Scholar.

3 ‘To defend Kingdomes, to discover the secret counsels of men, to overcome enemies, to redeem captives, to increase riches, to procure the favor of men, to expell diseases, to preserve health, to prolong life, to renew youth, to foretell future events, to see and know things done many miles off, and such like as these, by vertue of superior influences, may seem things incredible; Yet read but the ensuing Treatise, and thou shalt see the possibility thereof confirmed both by reason, and example.’ Extract from ‘Judicious Reader!’, Translator's Introduction to the Three Books of Occult Philosophy, written by Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Translated out of the Latin into the English Tongue, by J.F. (2nd, enlarged edn, London, 1987), p. viiiGoogle Scholar.

4 See Walker, D. P., Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London, 1958), pp. 75–84Google Scholar, ‘General Theory of Natural Magic’; Hansen, B., ‘Science and Magic’, Science in the Middle Ages, ed. Lindberg, D. C. (Chicago and London, 1978), pp. 483–506Google Scholar; Webster, C., From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge, 1982)Google Scholar.

5 The identification of both women and non-Western men with ‘magical’ or ‘primitive’ beliefs and actions in contrast to the use of ‘analytic reason’ well illustrates this latter tendency. See for example Austern, L., ‘“Sing Againe Syren”: the Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature’, Renaissance Quarterly, 42 (1989), pp. 420–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 de Tyard, Pontus, Solitaire second ou rose de Ia musique (Lyons, 1555), pp. 113–15Google Scholar; Walker, D. P., ‘Musical Humanism in the 16th and Early 17th Centuries’, Music Review, 2 (1941), pp. 1–13, 111–21, 220–7, 288–308Google Scholar; 3 (1942), pp. 55–71.

7 An interesting question which might be raised here is whether the formation of the magical canon, the works of great (male) magi, follows a course analogous to that observed in the case of music.

8 For some examples of different ways of classifying magic, see Thorndike, L., A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York, 1941)Google Scholar, especially vols. v and vi, ‘The Sixteenth Century’.

9 Foucault, M., The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, 1970; first published in French 1966)Google Scholar; Lévi-Strauss, C., The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966)Google Scholar.

10 Walker, , Spiritual and Demonic Magic, pp. 36–44Google Scholar; Copenhaver, B., ‘Astrology and Magic’, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Schmitt, C. B., Skinner, Q. and Kraye, J. (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 264–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Natural Magic, Hermetism, and Occultism’, Reappraisals of the Scientfic Revolution, ed. D. C. Lindberg and R. S. Westman (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 261–301; idem, ‘Scholastic Philosophy and Renaissance Magic in the De vita of Marsilio Ficino’, Renaissance Quarterly, 37 (1984), pp. 523–54; Ficino's Three Books on Life, ed. and trans. Kaske, C. V. and Clark, J. R. (Binghamton, NY, 1989)Google Scholar.

11 Hollander, J., The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry 1500–1700 (Princeton, 1961)Google Scholar; Palisca, C. V., ‘Scientific Empiricism in Musical Thought’, Seventeenth-Century Science and the Arts, ed. Rhys, H. H. (Princeton, 1961)Google Scholar.

12 He draws here especially on Ginzberg, C., The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1985)Google Scholar, and de Martino, E., La terra del rimorso: contributo a una storia religiosa del sud (Milan, 1961)Google Scholar.

13 In addition to the articles already cited in note 1, see also Moran, B. T., The Alchemical World of the German Court: Occult Philosophy and Chemical Medicine in the Circle of Moritz of Hessen (1572– 1632) (Stuttgart, 1991)Google Scholar. For example, rather than trying to identify a once-and-for-all shift from a ‘magical’ to a ‘non-magical’ mode of thinking, historians of science are now attending more precisely to what were understood to be appropriate ways of generating scientific knowledge in the period. Many features of natural magic (including the emphasis on technical power, the ability to reproduce particular effects, the use of instruments to extend the range of the senses, and the conception of a universe where the same laws operated at both the macrocosmic and microcosmic levels) became part of the ‘new natural or experimental philosophy’ in the course of the seventeenth century. The emphasis that was placed on demonstration and effects bears close comparison with the development of opera in this very period. See Katz, R., ‘Collective “Problem-Solving” in the History of Music: the Case of the Camerata’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 45 (1984), pp. 361–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Readers who want to know more about the relevance of this to Monteverdi are advised to consult Tomlinson's, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Oxford and Berkeley, 1987), especially pp. 151–242Google Scholar.

15 Vickers, B., ‘Analogy versus Identity: the Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580– 1680’, Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Vickers, B. (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 95–163CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Hoopes, J., ‘Objectivity and Relativism Reaffirmed: Historical Knowledge and the Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce’, American Historical Review, 98 (1993), pp. 1545–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. According to Hoopes, authors tend to simply cite names such as Derrida and Foucault (for example) ‘as if their having stated their convictions was also a proof of them’ (p. 1550).

17 For example, Stone, C. J., ‘Witch way Out of here’, The Guardian (29 01 1994)Google Scholar, ‘Weekend’ section, p. 10, contains a report on a suburban couple practising spells and using incantations. Tomlinson describes an ‘early modern culture that at all levels was capable of viewing music as a window on divine or spirit realms, again much in the manner that many non-European cultures continue to do’ (p. 147) as though this is emphatically not the case in modern European culture.

18 An alternative to searching for ‘real reasons’ underlying historical actors' conduct is proposed by the ethnomethodologist Michael Lynch, who suggests that scholars might describe ‘the situated modes of practical reasoning, including vocabularies of motive and methods of motive ascription, used by members of historical communities’ (The Achievement Project Newsletter, 3/2, autumn 1993, p. 2Google Scholar). In other words, the sort of language that people use to explain things changes over time and place, and explanations that are generally deemed convincing in one culture will not be so in another.

19 In the chapter on ‘The Expressive Value of Intervals and the Problem of the Fourth’, Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance (London, 1978), pp. 63–80Google Scholar, D. P. Walker reminds us how the moods associated with particular intervals have quite clearly changed over time (see especially the table on p. 71).