%0 Journal Article
%A Stephen Penn
%D 2025
%C Berlin, Germany
%I Peter Lang Verlag
%J Mediaevistik
%@ 2199-806X
%N 1
%V 37
%T David J. Collins, S.J., Disenchanting Albert the Great: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2024, 207 pp., 7 monochrome ill.
%R 10.3726/med.2024.01.73
%U https://www.peterlang.com/document/1672658
%X The title of this new study describes Albertus Magnus in a rather arresting way. Though many will know something of Albert’s work in the magical arts, he is typically celebrated for his central contribution to scholastic philosophy and theology, his significance as an Aristotelian commentator and interpreter, and most famously for his mentorship of the young Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, Markus Führer, whilst acknowledging that the doctor universalis bore his title with complete justification, does not use the word ‘magic’ or any of its derivatives even once in his contribution on Albert to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Even in Irven Resnick’s important Companion to Albert the Great (Leiden: Brill, 2013), magical and astronomical thought are together treated as an aspect of Albert’s philosophical project. There is a clear sense, then, in which Collins is calling for a shift in perspective on Albert the Great, asking for us to understand him as a magician first and as a philosopher and a theologian second. For many, this will be something of an uncomfortable change in perspective, and a question that lingers uneasily over the study is whether it is necessary to reinvent Albertus Magnus in such a radical way to offer a meaningful interpretation of his contribution to the magical arts. Such a gesture ostensibly threatens to obscure what makes Albertus Magnus worthy of the title ‘great,’ in his own time or subsequently: few would question his greatness as a scholar, but would any of his contemporaries have regarded him a great magician? The modern resonances of the term sadly do little to make Collins’s choice of label any more appealing.
%K david, collins, disenchanting, albert, great, life, afterlife, medieval, magician, university, park, penn, state, press