ABSTRACT

The name of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim was literally one to conjure within the sixteenth century. This chapter addresses two large questions about Christopher Marlowe and Agrippa. Many people in late sixteenth-century England did of course know of and read Agrippa. His two best known works were published within a few years of each other. Ideas of magical conspiracy and sedition are ones which Marlowe has incorporated into his play. Marlowe’s play will bear, indeed demands, commentary on its representation of magic, which is more detailed than any other sixteenth-century English play. Its depiction of magic is far more technically precise than that of the English Faust Book which can offer very little as the basis for the play’s detailed imagination of the contents of books of magic. The problematic relationship between the De Vanitate and De Occulta, particularly the seeming paradox of their quite different attitudes to magic, exercises scholars.