Anthony Grafton is the author of The Footnote, Defenders of the Text, Forgers and Critics, and Inky Fingers, among other books. The Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University, he writes regularly for the New York Review of Books.

‘The magi were tricksters and con artists, unemployed students or priests, members of monastic orders, artists and occultists who shared the belief that knowledge could transform the world. They were the crucible in which science was formed … Magus is a brilliantly vivid exercise in intellectual history, as told through the biographies of the early modern magi, which will stir the thoughts of everyone who reads it … The implication of Grafton’s mind-changing book is that our age of science may be one of the most extreme periods of magical thinking in history’

Anthony Grafton is the author of The Footnote, Defenders of the Text, Forgers and Critics, and Inky Fingers, among other books. The Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University, he writes regularly for the New York Review of Books.

‘The magi were tricksters and con artists, unemployed students or priests, members of monastic orders, artists and occultists who shared the belief that knowledge could transform the world. They were the crucible in which science was formed … Magus is a brilliantly vivid exercise in intellectual history, as told through the biographies of the early modern magi, which will stir the thoughts of everyone who reads it … The implication of Grafton’s mind-changing book is that our age of science may be one of the most extreme periods of magical thinking in history’

Anthony Grafton is the author of The Footnote, Defenders of the Text, Forgers and Critics, and Inky Fingers, among other books. The Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University, he writes regularly for the New York Review of Books.

‘The magi were tricksters and con artists, unemployed students or priests, members of monastic orders, artists and occultists who shared the belief that knowledge could transform the world. They were the crucible in which science was formed … Magus is a brilliantly vivid exercise in intellectual history, as told through the biographies of the early modern magi, which will stir the thoughts of everyone who reads it … The implication of Grafton’s mind-changing book is that our age of science may be one of the most extreme periods of magical thinking in history’