SOURCE: "Magic and Skepticism in Agrippa's Thought," in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XVIII, April, 1957, pp. 161-82.

In the following excerpt, Nauert examines the interrelationship between belief in occult science and skepticism about the limits of human knowledge, suggesting that both elements were present in all phases of Agrippa's work.

From his own age down to the present, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535) has received widely varying evaluations from students of his thought. Some have dismissed him cursorily as an intellectual lightweight or as a wicked familiar of demons. Even those who have valued him highly have often done so for most contradictory reasons. Much of this disagreement results from uncertainty about which Agrippa to believe: Agrippa the credulous magician, author of a widely used magical compilation, De occulta philosophia libri tres, or Agrippa the skeptical doubter, writer of De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum declamatio...