SOURCE: "Natural Magic, Hermetism, and Occultism in Early Modern Science," in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, edited by David Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 261-302.

In the following essay, Copenhaver discusses the concepts of magic and hermeticism within the context of the scientific revolution.

Hermes Trismegistus and Early Modern Science: the "yates Thesis"

A quarter of a century ago, in 1964, Dame Frances Yates published Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. In the first half of this book, Yates described the ancient sources of her hermetic tradition and their rediscovery and interpretation by such eminent Renaissance thinkers as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. In the second half of her extraordinarily influential work, she depicted the controversial Bruno not as a martyr for the progress of science but as a magus, whose program of religious and cultural reform, rooted in hermetic texts mistakenly dated to...