Les Langues occultes de la Renaissance: Essai sur la crise intellectuelle de l'Europe au XVIeme siecle.

Pierre Behar, Paris: Editions Desjonqueres, 1996. 44 illus. + 352 pp. FF 220. ISBN: 2-904227-97-0.

From the twilight of the Middle Ages to the dawn of the modern era, magic, divination, astrology, and other forms of what moderns dismiss as occultism experienced a notable revival in Europe, shaping both elite and popular culture. The last four decades have seen a similar flowering of scholarship, led by, among others, the late Frances A. Yates, that has made considerable progress in distinguishing the main currents of occult thought and practice. These two books contribute in important, if very different, ways to the ongoing search to understand an approach to reality fundamentally alien to that of modern science and to place it in its social and intellectual contexts.

Jan Veenstra has produced a meticulous critical edition of Contre les devineurs, a previously unedited early fifteenth-century treatise against magic and divination. In a fascinating introduction he also provides a valuable reconstruction of the work's socio-historical and intellectual contexts - the Burgundian court during a period of social and political crisis and the late medieval flowering of astrology and divination. In four substantial chapters he demonstrates how "a minor treatise on a major theme" (5), in the hands of a careful scholar, can yield insight into the place of magic and divination in the courtly societies of the early fifteenth century.

Veenstra presents a convincing case that the work's author was the Dominican friar, Laurens Pignon, and that it was written in 1411. Unlike most treatises against magic, Contre les devineurs, dedicated to John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, was composed in response to a crisis; Pignon believed that the civil war of 1411 had been caused by the Burgundian court's involvement in magic and divination. He thus intended his essentially moralistic treatise to provide instruction in the abuses of superstitio or idolatry for a court that had become too friendly with the devil.

Two chapters demonstrate the prominent role magic and divination played in late medieval court life and its impact on the public imagination. Focusing on the period 1390-1411, Veenstra places Pignon in the camp of those who traced the civil war to John the Fearless's role in the assassination of Louis d'Orleans, the concrete result of John's belief that Louis had used sorcery to cause King Charles VI's madness. He argues that the Burgundian court's ambivalent attitude towards magic, alternating between subsidizing magicians and denouncing their practices, enabled magic to become a political tool by which one could incriminate one's enemies. Using several court cases involving accusations of sorcery, the author shows how Pignon's work, understood in its social context, reveals the tensions characteristic of court life. In the chapter devoted to court astrology, the author charts the reciprocal relationship between the Burgundian court and astrology. While the court nourished important patrons of astrology and divination, the astrologers were drawn to John the Fearless whom they believed had a major role to play in history.

The introduction's final chapter elucidates the main theme of Pignon's text, superstitio, through a survey of treatises against magic and divination known in France and Burgundy and their central arguments. Pignon's work is characteristic of scholastic authors who combined rationalistic and moralistic approaches, that is, identifying natural and demonic causes to explain extraordinary occurrences. Not an especially original thinker, Pignon compiled arguments against divination from Scripture and church doctors, especially Aquinas, to demonstrate its fallacy. Veenstra supplements his edition and extensive commentary with three appendices designed to further illuminate the main themes of the treatise and the nature of courtly entertainment. They consist of a court magician's confession, a prognostication on the life of John the Fearless, and two popular divinatory texts, representative of those criticized by Pignon, each accompanied by a useful introduction.

This cursory summary fails to do justice to the richness of this edition or to explain why it was so difficult to put down. Veenstra not only weaves a fascinating tale of magic, madness, and murder, he provides a model of how to reconstruct contexts as a way of understanding a text and, through it, another age.

The fifteenth century's use of magic and divination for political purposes is echoed in Pierre Behar's treatment of sixteenth-century occultism. Behar, a specialist in Germanic literature and language, begins with the premise that the occult way of thinking is rational, if founded on principles radically different from today's "scientific" approach to reality. We have trouble understanding it because its Renaissance practitioners wrote in a syntax and vocabulary we no longer understand. His aim is to decipher the languages employed by Renaissance occultists as a means of better understanding the intellectual crisis that gave birth to modern science.

Behar lays a foundation for his argument with a discussion of origins, in particular the role of Reuchlin in the revival of Cabala and that of Agrippa von Nettesheim in the creation of the various languages that comprised his practical manual, De Occulta Philosophia. He maintains that it was Agrippa's language of practical magic, rather than Reuchlin's theoretical magic, that radiated throughout Europe, and it is this influence that he elaborates on. In an attempt to measure the effects of Agrippa's influence and to penetrate the world of Renaissance occultism, Behar analyzes several examples of applied magic: Catherine de Medici's magical love talisman, John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica, the prophecies of Nostradamus, and the Emperor Rudolph II's extensive collections of art and curiosities. In the latter he sees the summit of Renaissance occultism. Rudolph combined its various languages - Hebrew, Hermeticism, Arab magical squares, Agrippa's figures - and added, through his collection of the archetypes of all creation, the language of practical Cabala. Each case provides support for Behar's argument that Renaissance practitioners of magic used occult languages to control their world.

In the final section, Behar grapples with the reasons for the decline of the occult sciences. Discussing the controversy generated by Kepler's criticism of Robert Fludd, he argues that Kepler, by recognizing the neutral character of mathematical signs, was able to break with the occult vision of which Fludd is the final great example. Thus, Renaissance occultism contained within itself the seeds of its own transformation into the language of modern science which, like its predecessors, humanity employs as a form of power over nature.

Although Behar's perspective, which owes much to Yates and her disciples, is not new, his reading of such disparate examples as Catherine's talisman and Rudolph's collection of curiosities is convincing. Moreover, he weaves his examples into a coherent synthesis that shows the influence of Agrippa's work on the development of Renaissance languages of power and, in Kepler's work, their unintended destruction. Whether readers will agree that occultism gave birth to science, this work provides a useful and engaging introduction to the means through which Renaissance occultists conceived and manipulated their world.

JEANNE HARRIE California State University, Bakersfield