SOURCE: "The Historical Faust," in their The Sources of the Faust Tradition: From Simon Magus to Lessing, Oxford University Press, 1936, pp. 81-126.

In the following excerpt, Palmer and More present testimony and hearsay from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries concerning the actual existence and career of Faust; they note that the fantastic nature of the "evidence" increases during the second half of the sixteenth century.

The documentary evidence which is generally advanced for the existence of a historical Faust^[1] is of varying value. The mixture of legendary matter with material that is really authentic is inevitable and increases as we get into the second half of the sixteenth century. Nor is it always easy to sift out the one from the other. Such evidence as we get from Tritheim, Conrad Mutianus Rufus, the account book of the Bishop of Bamberg, Kilian Leib, the Nuremberg and Ingolstadt records...