SOURCE: "Agrippa and the End of a World" and "Fact and Fantasy: Agrippa's Position in Intellectual History," in Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought, University of Illinois Press, 1965, pp. 292-321, 322-34.

In the following excerpt, Nauert discusses the influence of Agrippa's works, emphasizing the ways in which they "helped shatter the rational and orderly worldview of the great medieval intellectual syntheses" and pointed the way toward the scientific revolution.

Despite Agrippa's failure to carry through consistently the exposition of his magical world view, and despite the fact that pessimism about human reason dominated his thinking even in his early years, the universe portrayed in De occulta philosophia is an orderly one. If man is unable by reason to comprehend all its secrets, Agrippa felt, still he may be able to find in the divinely revealed traditions of ancient sages, especially of Hermes and the cabalists, the key...