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INTRODUCTION
g,o back to the middle of the fourteenth century. At
tImes ecclesiastics-even a Pope-are to be found
am~ng the magicians of these legends (the Devil
habItually disguising himself a-s a monk in order to
carryon the necessary negotiations); but more frequently
the heroes of the stories and of their luxuriant
outgrowths are astrologers and alchemists of celebrity,
and with them the true scientific enquirers, whom
popular ignorance and delusion placed in the same
class. Such above &ll was Roger Bacon, the famous
Oxford thinker of the thirteenth century, who was
so much greater than his times, and with the remembrance
of whom and of his like there was mingled
a ,mass of unsifted anecdote about astrologers, alchemIsts,
mechanicians, and other men of science of
various periods. The tremendous irony of Roger
Bacon's fame, which in Marlowe's day was still such
as ,to induce his fellow-playwright Greene to turn the
Fnar's exploits into a sort of dramatic parody of those
of Dr. Faustus, seems to have remained hidden even
from a more recent generation of sightseers.
As the Middle Ages drew to a close, this farrago of
crude beliefs, wild superstitions, and abject terrors
wa-s stirred into fermentation by the daring spirit of
the Renascence, and again rendered thick and slab
b;9' an infusion of Reformation principles and prejudices.
In Italy, the earliest home of the Renascence,
a new and wholly unprecedented impulse was communic~ted
to it by the study of Greek, of which the begin­
~gs were facilitated by the collapse of the Eastern
~pire. One of the consequences of the spread of
thl~ study was the revival of ancient philosophical
trams of thought which viewed the world as an emana­
~lOn of the Deity; and these philosophical speculations
mvested with a new force and significance the old
notions of magic, and the practices, including the
~angerous excursions in astrology and alchemy, which
Rad been suggested by them, At the same time, the
ebrew Rena.scence, a kind of offshoot of the Greek,
OCcupied itself with the cabbalistic or secret books
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