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Hello in 1461 one of the powerful Medici families many agents carried a mysterious

manuscript into his master's house in Florence

It purported to be the work of an ancient Egyptian priest king and magician called Hermes Trismagistus

When Cosmo de Medici saw the new discovery he ordered his translations of Plato by Vichino to be stopped

So that work could begin on the new discovery at once

Hermes promised secret knowledge to his initiates and claimed have spoken with the spirits and turned base metal into gold

His ideas propelled natural magic into the mainstream of Renaissance intellectual thought as scholars and magi

Vide to understand the ancient secrets that would bring statues to life and call the angels down from heaven

But why did magic appeal so strongly to the Renaissance mind and how did the scholarly magus who became a feature of the period

managed to escape prosecution and relate his work to science and the church

With me to discuss Renaissance magic is Peter Forshaw lecture in Renaissance philosophies at Birkbeck University of London

Vile Rérys Renaissance Historian and a translator of Vichina's letters and Jonathan Sorday professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde

Let's begin with this extraordinary figure Hermes Trismagistus be to Forshaw. Who did the Renaissance scholars think he was and when did they think he was writing?

Okay, there are various

Ideas that we find in Renaissance texts about who he was and some people for example suggest he was the son of Prometheus

Others that he was a grandson of Abraham

Essentially he was a legendary figure

Who became the representative of

Egyptian mysteries and Egyptian truths

You mentioned Marcilio Fichino who was the first person to really translate that the main hermetic corpus of texts and

...