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| Collegium Maius, Krakow's Jagiellonian University |
Of all the prophets, wandering
scholars and conjurors produced by sixteenth century Germany – a society
undergoing profound change – few have captured the imagination of later
generations quite so much as Dr. Johann Faust. Marlowe’s play (1592) is based
on an apparently real figure, whom we can just about glimpse in the historical
sources: in decrees issued by city officials, and above all in gossip, letters
and rumours circulating among educated men. This shadowy Faust, trailing from
German town to German town until his reported death in an alchemical explosion
in the 1540s, is described as a trickster, great sorcerer (necromancer) and
blasphemer. But while Faustus may have existed on the margins of recorded
history, and on the margins of acceptable society in his own day (banned from
entering various German towns), his interest in magic was anything but marginal
in sixteenth-century Europe.
Poland, for
example, has its own Dr. Faustus figure – celebrated for centuries in
literature, art and even in the Cold War children’s songs I sang at my Polish
Saturday School in London in the 1980s. He is called Pan (or Mr) Twardowski. Twardowski
was rumoured to be the magician employed by King Sigismund Augustus of Poland
(d. 1572) to conjure the spirit of his late wife Barbara, and this grew into a
bigger story, about a Twardowski who made a pact with the devil and became the
Man in the Moon (one of only two Poles to make it into space so far!). In fact,
the Polish royal capital of Kraków was one of Renaissance Europe’s great hot-spots
of fortune-telling and magic. The first professor of astrology at Kraków was
appointed in 1459, and the predictions of the university’s astrologers were
much sought thereafter, reprinted across the continent. At the Polish court, a
crystal-gazing prayer book (now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford) was produced
for the royal family, which explained how the monarch could summon four
archangels to tell him the future. In an episode reminiscent of Faustus’
reported demise, two Kraków friars were killed in the 1460s in an alchemical
experiment which went badly wrong. In fact, a Central European capital like
Kraków could have such a reputation for magic, that the great Lutheran theologian
Philip Melanchthon asserted that Johann Faust must have been ‘a scholar of
Kraków’, where magic was openly taught.
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| Twardowski with the devil Sketch by M E Andriolli, 1895 |
Historians
pay a good deal of attention to magic and astrology in medieval and Renaissance
Europe, because contemporaries themselves saw it as a serious if problematic
branch of knowledge. In the Renaissance period, European magic underwent a
profound shift. Medieval magic (as numerous well-handled 14th
century manuscripts in the British Library well testify), employed spells derived
from mainstream Christian prayers, typically with the intention of summoning
spirits. A new Renaissance magic was, by contrast, focused on recovering from
the ancient Greek or Jewish past new methods for seeking higher truths: by
practising Kabbalah, or singing the mystical hymns of Orpheus. Figures such as
Faustus and Twardowski have perhaps inspired so many stories since their own
day, because they represent a kind of shadowy last gasp of that older, medieval
form of magic – spells, Christian liturgy said backwards, spirits, demons, in
other words traditional necromancy.
This, as Christopher Marlowe well
knew, was a European tradition in which England very much participated. There
was a legend of a Cambridge student who had made a pact with the devil, in
order to achieve his dream of becoming professor of theology at the great
Italian university of Padua - but was promptly found dead. There is a sea of
scholarship on Queen Elizabeth’s I advisor John Dee (d. 1608/9), occult
philosopher and astrologer. In the seventeenth century, England would produce
in the words of John Maynard Keynes ‘the last of the magicians’, that passionate
pursuer of ancient mystical truths, Sir Isaac Newton (d. 1727). The methods for
doing magic changed, but the dream of acquiring secret knowledge lived on among
the scholarly elites of early modern Europe, very long after the curtain fell
on that first performance of The Tragical History
of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus.
