ABSTRACT
Early modern occult practices attracted various overlapping explanations, notably the legal (criminal fraud), the theatrical (generally benign human deception), the medical (psychological and pathological causes) and the religious – their actual agent was demonic rather than human. They were so closely associated with performance that, as the renowned professional commedia dell’arte actor Nicolò Barbieri complained in 1628, ‘simple folk only have to hear you mention actors to think you are discussing witches and sorcerers; and in certain regions of Italy they think that actors make rain and tempests, and are more or less masters of the order of nature’.1 Practitioners of magic commonly drew on medical or theatrical practices, or both, as with magical impotence, the occult practice here chosen as a case-study.
