Eugenio Garin: magic and astrology in Italian Renaissance culture

Before Frances Yates popularised the «Hermetic tradition» in the English-speaking world, a historian of philosophy in Italy had already argued that magic and astrology were not a dark appendix to the Renaissance but an essential part of its culture. He was Eugenio Garin, born in Rieti in 1909 and died in Pisa in 2004, professor in Florence and later at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. His studies shaped generations of researchers, including those who have worked on Agrippa.

Humanism as philosophy

Garin made his name with L'umanesimo italiano, published first in German in 1947 and then in Italian in 1952. In it he argued that the humanists were not mere men of letters and philologists, but thinkers who had developed a new idea of man, active, free and responsible for his own condition. In this vision, the magician's aspiration to act upon nature could be read as one of the expressions of that new confidence in human possibilities.

In 1954 the collection of essays Medioevo e Rinascimento contained pages devoted precisely to magic and astrology, considered as keys to understanding the passage between the two ages. Garin insisted that authors such as Ficino and Pico could not be understood without taking seriously their interest in the stars, spirits and correspondences.

Texts, editions and school

Garin was also a great promoter of editions. Between 1946 and 1952 he edited Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, the great humanist attack on judicial astrology. In 1955 he directed, with a few young collaborators, a volume of humanist texts on Hermeticism that included writings by Ludovico Lazzarelli, Francesco Giorgio Veneto and Cornelius Agrippa.

Around him grew a school of scholars who explored Renaissance philosophy in all its directions, including the magical one, often neglected by earlier historiography. Among them were Cesare Vasoli, a scholar of Llull, dialectic and prophecy, and Paola Zambelli, who would devote an important part of her research to Agrippa, publishing essays in Italian, English and German.

The zodiac of life

In 1976 Garin published Lo zodiaco della vita, a book devoted to the controversy over astrology from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. In it he showed how the discussion of celestial influences touched fundamental problems: human freedom, the relation between nature and grace, the possibility of foreseeing historical events. Astrology thus appeared as a language through which the Renaissance thought about its relationship with the cosmos and with time.

Later, in 1988, he gathered some of his studies in the volume Ermetismo del Rinascimento. Garin was always careful not to exaggerate the weight of magic, which he regarded as one component among others of a complex and contradictory culture. This caution distinguishes him from some bolder readings and has made his work particularly lasting.

Garin's legacy, for those who study Agrippa, lies above all in his method: reading magical texts in their philosophical and religious context, without reducing them either to superstition or to a prophecy of science. De occulta philosophia, from this perspective, becomes a precious document for understanding the hopes and anxieties of an entire generation of European intellectuals.