Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Medieval History
Episode: Brian P. Copenhaver, âMagic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenmentâ (Cambridge UP, 2015 )
Description: Belief in magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman times, persisted through the Renaissance, and then fell off the map of intellectual respectability in the Enlightenment. What happened? Why did it become embarrassing for Isaac Newton to have sought the philosopherâs stone, and for Robert Boyle to have urged the British Parliament to repeal a ban on transmuting base metals into silver and gold? In Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Brian P. Copenhaver shows that for millenia magic was taken seriously by the learned classes, sustained by a philosophical foundation drawn from Plato, Ar...