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AGRIPPA, Heinrich Cornelius.
The Vanity of Arts and Sciences.
By Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Knight, Doctor of both Laws, Judge of the Prerogative Court, and Counsellour to Charles the Fifth, Emperour of Germany.
Publisher: London: printed by R. Everingham for R. Bentley, and Dan. Brown, 1694
Stock code: 60162
Price: £950 Currency Conversion
Third edition of the second English translation of Agrippa's De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum (Antwerp, 1530), first translated into English by James Sanford (1569, repr. 1575), succeeded by this new seventeenth-century translation in 1676, 1684, and 1694. A highly influential work of Renaissance scepticism, De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum is intended to bring the reader to a position of Christian fideism, though one in which Christian faith is thoroughly infused with Hermetic and Kabbalistic motifs. Agrippa's scepticism about science centres on the point that the senses are too often deceived; therefore "the way of truth is shut up from the senses", and sciences rooted in them are "uncertain, erroneous and deceitful". Appeals to authority are no more acceptable, as the scholastics reply to any questioning of their first principles with torture and execution of so-called heretics. "[A]t the beginning of the era of natural science, it is one of the first testimonials to knowledge of the limits of human understanding" (DSB). "Agrippa's most sustained piece of satirical and polemical writing, this work was frequently reprinted and widely quoted - by, among others, later sixteenth-century religious radicals … Montaigne's scepticism, which represents man as 'naked and empty, acknowledging his natural weakness, apt to receive from above some strange power, disfurnished of human knowledge, and so much the more fit to harbour divine understanding, nullifying his judgment so as to give more place to faith' (1580), is clearly indebted to Agrippa's De vanite" (Routledge encyclopedia of philosophy).
Octavo (183 × 110 mm). Eighteenth-century sprinkled sheep, double green morocco labels, red morocco date label at foot, sides with double blind rules, red sprinkled edges. Engraved portrait frontispiece. Early ownership inscription at head of title ("Strathnaver", courtesy title of the heir of the earl of Sutherland). Spine worn at head, joints starting at foot but holding firm, an excellent copy.
