SOURCE : "Magic, Science, and Witchcraft in Renaissance England," in Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare, University of Nebraska Press, 1989, pp. 73-112.

In the essay below, Mebane provides an overview of the debate over rival theories of the natural and supernatural worlds in Renaissance England.

The immediate context of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays on magic was an intense and wide-ranging controversy concerning the uses of knowledge, the status of traditional authorities, and the limits of the human personality. In addition to those who were influenced directly by the works of Ficino, Pico, and Agrippa, there were technologists, mathematicians, Paracelsian physicians, and many others who argued throughout the sixteenth century that received opinion should be tested by the light of experience, in order that a more firm foundation be established for progress in both theoretical and practical knowledge. Social...