Paola Zambelli and studies on Agrippa: white magic, black magic

In the second half of the twentieth century, a decisive part of research on Agrippa took place in Florence. Paola Zambelli, a pupil of Eugenio Garin and a teacher of the history of philosophy, devoted dozens of essays to the philosopher of Cologne, beginning in the 1950s. Her work helped to transform Agrippa from a legendary figure into a historically documented author, placed within a precise network of people, cities and religious controversies.

Letters, friends and fellowships

One of the themes on which Zambelli insisted most was Agrippa's correspondence, a very rich source for reconstructing his wandering life between Germany, France, Italy and the Low Countries. The letters reveal friendships with physicians, jurists, theologians and humanists, and the existence of groups of friends bound by shared interests in Kabbalah, Hermeticism and religious reform.

Zambelli studied these fellowships in particular, which Agrippa himself evokes in his youthful letters, seeking to understand whether they were real secret societies or simply circles of study. The caution of her conclusions avoided feeding the myth of an Agrippa at the head of an occult sect, but showed how far Renaissance magic was also a social fact, shared and discussed among friends.

Magic, religion and the Reformation

Another strand of Zambelli's research concerns Agrippa's relations with the religious world of the early sixteenth century: his admiration for Erasmus, his contacts with the circle of Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, his defence of a woman accused of witchcraft at Metz, his polemic against the scholastic theologians. In this light De occulta philosophia and De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum, published in 1530, appear less contradictory than had been thought.

For Zambelli, Agrippa's scepticism towards the human sciences was not a simple retraction of magic, as many readers ancient and modern had thought, but the expression of a religiosity that placed faith and the word of God above all knowledge. Magic itself, in his project, was to be reformed, purged of superstitions and brought back to Christian piety.

Books and comparisons

Among her best-known works are L'ambigua natura della magia, published in 1991, a collection of studies on philosophers, witches and rites in the Renaissance, and the English volume White Magic, Black Magic in the European Renaissance, published in 2007, which follows the theme from Ficino and Pico to Trithemius, Agrippa and Bruno. Zambelli also worked on the Speculum astronomiae, a medieval treatise attributed to Albertus Magnus.

Her work stands alongside that of other scholars who have made a philological reading of Agrippa possible. In particular, in 1992 Vittoria Perrone Compagni published with Brill in Leiden the critical edition of De occulta philosophia, which compares the 1533 printing with the 1510 manuscript preserved in Würzburg and allows us to follow the evolution of the author's thought.

Thanks to these studies, it is now possible to distinguish the historical Agrippa from the legends that accompanied him for centuries, from the black dog to the conjurations recounted by Elizabethan novelists. What emerges is a restless humanist, deeply religious, often in conflict with the authorities, who sought in magic a path of knowledge and reform, and who also saw its limits with clarity.