1. Bertrand Russell probably speaks for many philosophers when he says, “what we firmly believe, if it is true, is called knowledge… what we firmly believe, if it is not true, is called error.” The Problems of Philosophy (London, 1912; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 ), p. 81.
2. A. J. Ayer. The Problem of Knowledge ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956 ), p. 25.
3. On Faustus, see Michael Keefer, Christopher Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus”: A 1604-version Edition (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1991), pp. xxxvii-xlv: and loan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. M. Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), chap.10. On Simon Magus and Ham, see Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 337–338, 341–342. On forbidden knowledge, my “Forbidding Knowledge,” The Monist 79 (1996): 294–310.
4. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum I, CXXIV; Paolo Rossi, “Truth and Utility in the Science of Francis Bacon,” Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. S. Attanasio çNew York: Harper Row, 1970 ), pp. 160–161.
5. On magic and religious deviance, see C. A. Faraone and D. Obbink, ed. Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. vii. On magic and the Royal Society, see Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994 ), pp. 332–350.