SOURCE: "Cornelius Agrippa's De vanitate: Polemic or Paradox?," in Bibliotheque D'Humanisme et Renaissance, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2, 1972, pp. 249-56.

Below, Bowen elaborates on On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences as an example of the literary paradox, a genre popular in the sixteenth century. Bowen's remarks were originally delivered as a lecture in 1971.

Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim (1486-1535), one of the most intriguing figures of the Renaissance, has received a good deal of critical attention but remains a tantalisingly shadowy figure. He has proved most interesting to historians of magic and science, because of his De Occulta philosophia, and to intellectual historians, because of his disputed place in the intellectual development of the Renaissance. He has been curiously neglected by literary specialists, despite his acknowledged influence on Rabelais, Montaigne, Sidney and Marlowe among others. There has been only one full-length study on him in recent years, Charles...