Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician

by Leo Ruickbie

Around the world there are hundreds of nightly performances of Goethe’s Faust as well as actual attempts at soul-selling on eBay. Faustus has rightly been described as an icon of modern culture. But in 500 years no one has written his biography—until now. Faustus is the real story behind the legend. It is the story of a 16th-century scandal, who claimed mastery of the forbidden magical arts and dared rival all of the miracles attributed to Jesus. He evoked uproar and was accused of the worst crimes. But Faustus was not a charlatan, nor was he in league with the devil. To find the real Faustus is to find the real history of his age, and to take a tour from alchemical labs in princely dungeons to war-torn Italy, Martin Luther’s Reformation Wittenberg, and the magnificence of Charles V’s court. The life of the legend becomes as real as any living person.

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Dr Leo Ruickbie is a sociologist and historian specialising in the field of witchcraft, Wicca, magic and the occult. He hold a PhD from King's College, London, for his work on modern witchcraft, and is the author of several books including Witchcraft Out of the Shadows and Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician. In 2008 and 2009 he exhibited on the subject of witchcraft in France. As well as giving public talks and writing articles for Pagan Dawn, Watkins Review and ASANAS, he also runs the WICA (witchology.com) website.

Reviews

[Kirsten Mortensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a peculiar book, in some ways. I loved it. But I am weird.

I picked it up because I've turned back to a novel I'm writing (Scratch) that is a retelling of Goethe's Faust legend.*

And as I've chipped away at Scratch over the past several years, I've read Goethe's Faust a couple times, of course, and Marlowe, and I've poked around the Interwebs. And then I found this book by Ruickbie, and bought it, and stuck it on my shelf (my real shelf, not my Goodreads shelf, there's only so many hours in the day).

And then a month or so ago I started to read it. And I loved every page.

Start with a historical figure, Doctor Faustus, who is with us, today, almost entirely as a myth. He existed. He was a flesh and blood man. But there is scarcely any record of the historical Faust. There are scattered mentions in letters and such, but they are typically little more than a sentence or two. There are published accounts of Faust's life and deeds, but they appeared decades or centuries after his death; they were typically passed off as authentic, but upon close examination can be confidently dismissed as fabrications. We aren't even sure what the guy's real name was.

Enter Ruickbie, who is a historian. And he sets out to write a historical biography of this historical figure, Doctor Faustus. He digs into the correspondence of Faust contemporaries, he digs into legal documents. And he chases down a bunch of "local traditions" that Faust was involved in such-and-such shenanigans in such-and-such a town or inn or house, but when he looks into them, almost all of them appear to have no basis in historical fact.

So now what?

Ruickbie does something that I think is pretty cool: he builds a historical account around what is often an educated guess about where Faust was, what he was up to, and how his contemporaries were reacting (or in some cases would have reacted) to him.

So you don't really get Faust, with this book (I told you it is peculiar!). What you get is tantalizing wisps of Faust -- and then, what you really get is Faust's milieu. And it's very granular and vivid, because Ruickbie knows his stuff and has put in the time to build it out in a very granular but vivid way.

And it was a crazy time, the late 1400s, early 1500s.

And yes, I love history, but I haven't been exposed to a ton of European history from that time period, so for me it was a delight. I didn't know, before I read this book, about the Peasant's War (spoiler: the peasants lost). I didn't know that in 1524 there was a conjunction of seven planets in Pisces (my sign!) and the astrologers of the time predicted massive floods (water sign!) and people panicked. Widespread panic. Half of the population of London at the time fled the city, convinced that if they didn't the Thames was going to rise up and drown them. I didn't know that in 1532, Anabaptists took over the fortified German town, Munster, and were besieged and then Munster fell and the Anabaptist prophets were captured and tortured, yick.

I love history. I love how everything is different and yet everything is the same. It makes my head spin -- in a good way, like when you look up at the stars and realize how big space really is.

Ruickbie is a good writer. It's hard to write history because history is about people and personalities; to write history, you have to introduce the reader to piles of strangers; if you don't make them come alive, your reader won't be able to keep track of them, and the history dissolves into a mash of meaningless and forgettable faces.

But Ruickbie pulls it off. I suppose it is because, in the end, he has a point of view about everything that was going on, during Faust's life--about Faust, his contemporaries, the religious and political leaders who were alive at the time. So Ruickbie isn't reciting dates and names. He's pulling the covers back, revealing what all those people were probably like, what probably motivated them to do the things they did. A big example, and pivotal to Ruickbies point of view: did the historical Doctor Faustus really make a deal with the Devil? Or was that a slanderous fiction promulgated by Faust's contemporaries who, it turns out, were probably competing amongst themselves for lucrative gigs doing astrology and such for kings and princelings?

And if it was a slanderous fiction, where does that leave us? For Ruickbie, the real story is about the religious tensions of the day. Faust lived at a time when the Renaissance was giving way to the Reformation. Faust, like every other person alive at the time, was caught in the current of history. As are we, today.

Highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys history.

*Sidebar: as I've mentioned somewhere else, blog or someplace, that's not to say I have the chops to pull off a retelling of Goethe's Faust. I'm sure I am not up to it. But it so happens that after this awful year, losing both parents blah blah blah I needed to take a break from the lighter romancy stuff I usually write and do something that, to me at least, passes for Art. So I dropped the Marion Flarey project for now and went back to Scratch for a bit.

[Tony · Rating 2 out of 5]

The problem with this book is that the actual verifiable facts about Faustus would probably not stretch to more than a pamphlet. There are lots of stories, but not a lot of facts. So Ruickbie's book is a tiny amount of facts supported by a lot of intelligent guesswork. And a lot of that guesswork sometimes feels like wishful thinking.

Ruickbie's Faustus is everywhere without ever really proving he was anywhere. It is, in some respects, an admirable bit of detective work but with almost nothing that would stand up in a court of law. And it is hard to see beyond the myths and legends.

What this book do well I think is the 'times' part of a Renaissance Magician. Because the amount of information about Faustus is so limited Ruickbie talks a lot about other subjects. We get insight into that interesting mix of scientific and magical thinking that is often overlooked when talking about the Renaissance. We hear about the wars in Italy, the beginnings of the Reformation, an alchemist's laboratory and how to transform lead into gold. There is lots of information here to give heft to Faustus's story. Because Faustus barely exists.

I also found it a little too long. Towards the end I was struggling to stop myself skipping bits but I think if you look at this book as more the story of a particular - peculiar? - branch of Renaissance/Reformation history than the biography of a single individual it is a better book. I do wonder if I am being slightly more negative because this wasn't the book I expected and therefore I'm 'punishing' not for the book it is but for not being the book I wanted it to be. [This might be one of the ugliest sentences I have ever written.]

It's a book packed full of information and I admire Ruickbie's attempts to free Faustus from all mythological pigeon shit he is cover with but I felt it was dragged a bit. I really wanted to like this book but in the end I can only say it was fine. Could have been better. Could have been shorter.

[R. K. · Rating 2 out of 5]

TLDR summary: genuinely good original research completely overshadowed by the author's frankly bizarre pet theories and personal disgruntlements.

Look, I really wanted to love this book. The author has some genuine, quality original research.  I know how hard tracing anything to do with figures from this era is, and especially someone about whom there's so much written and relatively little factually known. 
I am also, generally, willing to allow for a lot more credulity of supposed magical feats of this era than most. Alchemy could produce some legitimately fascinating effects, and combine that with a bit of flair for the dramatic and you have a recipe for dramatized retellings later on. However. This leads us to my two biggest issues with this books.
First: the padding. Realistically, the amount of new research here is enough for a paper or a feature magazine article, not a book. Thus we end up with deeply pointless anecdotes. Early on, there's a description of the various places Faustus could have possibly taught, followed up with the fact that of course, they're all modern buildings so it could have been none of them. There was no real purpose to this paragraph. A quick search indicates nobody seems to be claiming it was any of those buildings, so it wasn't like this was debunking a claim. There's a ton of similar material throughout.
Second: the author's weird issues with any of the contemporaries that criticized Faustus. The author takes a bizarre amount of relish in mocking other prominent figures of the time who critized his subject, and sometimes even when they applied less than flattering adjectives. Yes, often their perspectives were harsh or unfair. You can just... say that, instead of writing weird fan fiction about how they must have been so angry and miserable at his success. Also, if every letter seems to describe him as boastful or prideful, it's very possible he just... was. A person can be unfairly maligned AND have negative traits. As it happens, it seems to me that if he was in fact boastful or prideful, that would make it easier for people to unjustly believe the more sensational claims made about him. 
Third: the weird insistence that he might have been doing this stuff. As I said above, I have a lot more tolerance for the idea that Faustus and his contemporaries were performing actual feats than the average reader. There is, however, a point where basic historical comprehension and common sense must win out. At one point a description is given of Faustus conjuring a summer garden in winter, complete with produce and such. The author, correctly, lists several pre-Faustus depictions of this feat, depicted almost the same, which indicates that this is an earlier tale being attributed to Faustus. And then takes it straight off the rails and says we "cannot overlook the possibility" that Faustus really did this, as "the principle of refrigeration had been known since at least 1000BCE in China". I'm sorry, I really wanted to like this book for the original research,  but this is where I lost all faith in the author. No, we can overlook that possibility.  Yes, a lot of what was attributed to Faustus was in fact possible by a clever alchemist. This? Absolutely not. I'm frankly baffled that this claim made it past an editor. 

Review cross-posted to Storygraph.

[Jon Kaneko-James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great book -- the main thing that makes it three stars is out of the author's control: the publishers have gone for thin paper and a tiny font, which I found physically very hard to read. As an author myself, I do hate to raise these things as issues, but they significantly affected the readability of the book for me (I aborted reading it twice, and only got through it because I got a writing job where I would have been remiss not to have read Ruickbie's work).

As a piece of work, I really like it. Ruickbie does the very best he can with the materials at hand -- the job of reconstructing Faustus is complicated by holes in the information, and where Ruickbie is telling us what might have happened rather than what did happen, he's very clear. Ruickbie's approach and structure has also genuinely taught me a few things that I was happy to learn in preparation for a bit of biographical writing I hope to tackle in a few years, which is a huge accolade for any book.

The main thing I'd say to anyone starting this book is not to be put off by the slightly purple prose at the start. It doesn't pervade the volume, and the bulk of Ruickbie's writing is both clear and engaging. I don't quite agree with the beef he seems to have against Abbot Trithemius, but I can see where it comes from. I suppose you cannot love Trithemius and Faustus both.

With the single reservation that it's an awkward shape, and their print/paper choice made it difficult to read, I'd recommend this to anyone who has an interest in Faust. It ISN'T the same sort book as Butler's Fortunes of Faust but as a microhistory, it does give us an insight not only into George Faust/Helmsetter, but into the possible life and genesis of the Renaissance magus as a whole.

[Alex Kurtagic · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is incredibly challenging to piece together the life of someone who lived five centuries ago, about whom so little is known, and whose life became the subject of gossip, vituperation, and legend, captured in archaic language and printed in gothic script, out of which have proliferated thousands upon thousands of creative works. Leo Ruickbie accomplished an extraordinarily difficult task, and, although he was necessarily forced to deduce, infer, and speculate, his process is sound, meticulous, and methodical—as much as it is possible to be with what is available. The prose was enjoyable and informative, but the enjoyment of reading it was partially destroyed by the publisher's decision to compress a four-hundred page book into two hundred pages by means of microscopic font—a font size that, even by today's nearly intolerable standards, was small. Seriously? With a subject that has inspired so many for so long—20,000 books, 700 paintings, 600 operas or musical works—a biography of the man behind the myth would hardly scare anyone interested in the subject by a higher page-count or a higher price. Maybe one day I'll have the chance to publish a new edition the way it ought to have been done!

[Travis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Never really got into this book. The author does a lot of supposing on what "may" have happened, since there aren't a lot of verifiable facts to really flesh out a whole book. Also, he goes off on these long tangents that sometimes tie into the story and sometimes they don't.

[Michael Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the book, it's easy to read and easily allows you to put yourself into the story of Faust.