The Figures
Isaac Casaubon
Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), a Geneva-born Greek scholar working in London under James I, showed in 1614 that the Corpus Hermeticum was written in Greek after Plato and after the Greek Bible, not by an Egyptian sage older than Moses. His case, in De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI, Exercitatio I.10, rests on borrowings, anachronisms and late Greek words. Its language arguments still hold; his Christian forger and his date, soon after the Apostles, did not.
Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) was the Geneva-born Greek scholar who showed in 1614 that the Corpus Hermeticum had been written in Greek in the Christian era, not by an Egyptian sage older than Moses. He did it in eighteen folio pages of a book against a Catholic church history, and his diary marks the start without ceremony. Under 25 August 1612 it reads: “Quædam hodie de Mercurio Trismegisto, sed quæ mox displicuerunt” (some things today on Mercurius Trismegistus, but they soon displeased me; Ephemerides, II, p. 942, our translation). This page follows his case argument by argument: the 1614 page of each, and what later scholars kept or threw out.
A scholar’s life in four cities
Casaubon was born in Geneva on 18 February 1559 (8 February Old Style) to Protestant refugees from France (Pattison 1892, p. 3). In 1581, when his teacher Franciscus Portus died, he was chosen to stand in for him, and he taught Greek at the Geneva Academy from 1582 until 1596 (Campagnolo 2005, p. 717). In 1586 he married Florence Estienne, daughter of the Geneva printer Henri Estienne (Pattison, pp. 27-28); their son Meric, later a prebendary of Canterbury, preserved the diary quoted on this page (p. 89). He and Joseph Scaliger wrote to each other as intimate friends from 1594 until Scaliger’s death in 1609, though they never met (p. 64).
Montpellier followed (1596-1599), then Paris, where Henri IV kept him on a pension and in December 1604 made him keeper of the royal library, in practice a sub-librarian under its master, Jacques-Auguste de Thou (Pattison, pp. 175-178). The editions that made his name came out over the Geneva, Montpellier and Paris years: Strabo (1587), Theophrastus’ Characters (1592), Suetonius (1595), Athenaeus (1597, with a commentary in 1600), Persius and the essay De satyrica Graecorum poesi et Romanorum satira (both 1605) and Polybius (1609) (Pattison, pp. 475-480). Paris also tested his faith. In 1600 the king named him one of the two Protestant judges at the Fontainebleau debate between Du Plessis-Mornay and Bishop Du Perron (p. 139), and for the next decade Du Perron, later a cardinal, kept trying to convert him (pp. 144-145, 188-189).
Henri IV was murdered on 14 May 1610. Three days later Du Perron pressed Casaubon again, and the choice, as Pattison puts it, was now “conversion or dismissal” (p. 268). That October he crossed to England, where the dean of St Paul’s, John Overall, took him in (pp. 274-277); he took out letters of naturalisation, meaning to stay (p. 284). James I wanted him for the Catholic controversy and settled on one target: the Annales ecclesiastici of Cardinal Cesare Baronio (Baronius), a reply Casaubon had been planning since his Paris years (pp. 309, 315). The king also saw to his pay. Two days before the Hermes entry, the printed diary records a letter from the king to Sir Julius Caesar and gives the king’s own line: “Chanceler of my Excheker, I will have Mr. Casaubon paid befor me, my wife, and my barnes” (Ephemerides, II, p. 942).
He died in London on 1 July 1614 (Old Style; 11 July by the Gregorian calendar, then ten days ahead) with the work unfinished. For about a year he had suffered urinary pain his doctors could not explain; the post-mortem found a congenital malformation, a second bladder (Pattison, pp. 415-417). He was buried in Westminster Abbey at the entrance to St Benedict’s chapel (pp. 417-418; Westminster Abbey).
Many readers meet the name first in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872), whose Mr Casaubon is a fictional scholar. The publisher’s description of Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg’s study (2011) mentions him as well: Isaac “is known to us through his pedantic namesake”. The book recovers a side of the real man long forgotten: his Hebrew scholarship.
Where the argument sits: a reply to Baronius
The book is De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI (London: Ex officina Nortoniana apud Ioan. Billium, 1614), sixteen “exercises” on the prolegomena and the first part of the Annales. In the tenth section of the first exercise, Casaubon takes up a paragraph in which Baronius had presented Hermes Trismegistus, Hydaspes and the Sibyls as pagan prophets through whom God announced Christ to the Gentiles (p. 71). Hermes gets most of the section, which runs over pp. 70-87. It is a digression inside a polemic, not a treatise on Hermes.
The Hermes he attacked came from the printed Greek. Its first edition, by Adrien Turnèbe (Turnebus, Paris 1554), printed treatises I-XIV under the title Poimandres, with three excerpts from Stobaeus attached, and XVI-XVIII as the definitions of Asclepius to King Ammon. Its Greek preface by Angelos Vergikios placed Hermes before Pharaoh and so before Moses (Scott 1924, I, pp. 33-34). Casaubon’s own page references fit that edition: the sculptor Phidias stands on its p. 97 and a lyre-player’s contest on p. 98, the pages he cites on p. 86. The Latin of Marsilio Ficino (1463, printed 1471) had spread a similar belief for a century and a half: Ficino took Hermes for a near-contemporary of Moses.
Exercitatio I.10, argument by argument
Casaubon announces his rule on p. 77: a book is examined in two ways, by its matter (res ipsæ quibus de agitur) and by its diction. The table follows his order. Page numbers are those printed in the 1614 folio, each linked to the scan; Latin is quoted as printed, with the long s set as s, and the translations are ours.
| Argument | 1614 page | What Casaubon says | Today |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Christian mysteries were hidden until Christ | p. 70 (summary), p. 72 | Scripture calls the gospel a mystery hidden for ages (Col. 1:26, Rom. 16:25, Eph. 3:9), yet Hermes and the Sibyls state the Trinity, the Word and baptism plainly. Hence: “quo apertiora sunt, eo fieri mihi suspectiora” (the plainer they are, the more suspect they become to me). | A theological premise, not evidence. Mark Pattison (1892, p. 335) thought his doubt about Hermes rested on this ground alone, which fits pp. 72-74, not the philology of pp. 77-87; Walter Scott (1924, I, p. 42) denies what the premise assumes, that the Corpus teaches distinctively Christian doctrine. |
| 2. The old Greeks knew nothing of it | p. 73 | In Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus “and so many others”, of what we admire in Hermes “nullum penitus extat vestigium” (no trace at all survives). | Holds as a clue, not a proof. In Scott’s survey the earliest pagan reader of philosophical Hermetica is Porphyry, writing in the later third century (1924, I, p. 92). |
| 3. The early Church forged books for good ends | pp. 73-74 | “Officiosa hæc mendacia vocabant, bono fine excogitata” (they called these dutiful lies, devised for a good end); Augustine (City of God XVIII.47) already knew such prophecies could be suspected as Christian inventions. | True of the Sibyls, not of Hermes: “This is true of some of the Sibyllina; but it is not true of the Hermetica” (Scott 1924, I, p. 42). |
| 4. Everything was put under Hermes’ name | pp. 75-76 | Iamblichus counts Hermetic books in the tens of thousands; Clement lists 42; Galen dismisses a herbal under his name as rubbish; there are alchemical and astrological Hermes books. Who Hermes was, “aut quando vixerit, omitto hic quærere” (or when he lived, I leave aside here). | Now the starting point. Scott (1924, I, p. 41) notes that Casaubon did not deny a pre-Mosaic Hermes, only that he wrote these books; Garth Fowden (1986, preface) argues that Hermetism “can only be properly understood if the technical and philosophical books are seen as enshrining related aspects of Man’s attempt to understand himself, the world around him, and God”; part II of his book is “The Way of Hermes”. |
| 5. The doctrine is Plato’s, often in Plato’s words | pp. 77-80, pp. 83-85 | Mind as maker from Anaxagoras and the Timaeus; ideas in God’s mind; the double-sexed first humans of the Symposium; the letter to Tat copies Timaeus 28c on God, hard to find and impossible to declare; the doctrine that nothing perishes but only changes is common Greek property (Hippocrates, On Regimen). | Holds. Scott (1924, I, p. 42) explains the overlap with Christianity by Christians and “Pagan Platonists” who “thought and spoke alike”. Ralph Cudworth objected in 1678 that Greek learning came partly from Egypt, so “it cannot be concluded, that whatsoever is Platonical or Grecanical, therefore was not Egyptian” (p. 326). |
| 6. The rest comes from the Bible | pp. 77-82 | Poimandres, “I am that light”, plays Christ (John 8:12); darkness and the spirit over the waters follow Genesis 1:2; “increase and multiply” are “ipsa Mosis verba in versione [...] Septuaginta” (the very words of Moses in the Septuagint, p. 81); echoes of John 3:16, 12:46 and 14:6; mockers leave the preacher as in Acts 17:32. | Half holds. The Genesis borrowings stand, but Scott says Casaubon “ought rather to have said Judaicam”, Jewish rather than Christian (1924, I, p. 41, n. 2); the Gospel parallels he puts down to a shared Platonist idiom (p. 42). |
| 7. A word from Nicaea: homoousios | pp. 78-79 | Poimandres 10 says the Word was “of one substance” (ὁμοούσιος) with Mind. No Father of comparable antiquity, he argues, used the word of the persons of the Trinity. | Fails. “The word ὁμοούσιος was in use before it was brought into prominence by the disputes with which the Council of Nicaea was concerned”: Plotinus has it, and so do Gnostic texts quoted by Hippolytus (Scott 1925, II, p. 34). |
| 8. Liturgy and sacraments in disguise | pp. 82-83 | The hymn closing treatise I calls God “ἅγιος” (holy) nine times, like the Sanctus of Isaiah 6:3; the hymn of XIII borrows Paul’s “rational sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1); the bowl of Mind in IV is baptism; rebirth comes from Titus 3:5 and John 3:5. | Narrowed, then dropped. Cudworth accepted the charge for I and XIII, at most also IV, and no further (1678, p. 319; p. 327); Scott (1924) made all the authors pagans. Hermetic prayer has since turned up outside the Corpus: a prayer of thanksgiving known from the Latin Asclepius survives in Coptic in Nag Hammadi Codex VI. |
| 9. Justin quotes it, so it is early | p. 78 | “Justin”, at the end of the Exhortation to the Greeks, quotes Hermes, so the author lived “non multo post tempora Apostolorum” (not long after the times of the Apostles). | Fails. Scott dates the Exhortation (Cohortatio ad Graecos) “probably A.D. 260-302” and finds its quotation in a Hermetic excerpt kept by Stobaeus (1924, I, p. 92), one of the three Turnebus had printed with the Corpus (pp. 33-34). “He puts the date a little too early” (p. 41, n. 1). |
| 10. Phidias and the Pythian games | p. 86 | The book names the sculptor Phidias, who flourished about 1,500 years after the supposed Hermes, and tells of a lyre-player whose broken string a cicada replaced in a contest: Eunomus of Locri, says Casaubon from Strabo (book VI), crowned at the Pythian games, founded “multis seculis” after Hermes. | Holds for one treatise. Both passages are in XVIII (XVIII.4 and 6), which Scott’s list of Hermetic writings sets apart in brackets as an “oration by a rhetor” (1924, I, p. 16) and dates “within a year or two of A.D. 300” (p. 29, n.). Scott also brackets the name Phidias as probably not the author’s (p. 276). |
| 11. No patina of age; late words | p. 86 | “Hic nullum penitus vestigium antiquitatis” (here no trace at all of antiquity); words older Greek never used: αὐθεντία for power, ὑλότης (materiality), οὐσιότης (essentiality). | Holds. Scott quotes the passage as part of the first view of the Hermetica “in the main at least, historically sound” (1924, I, pp. 41-42). |
| 12. Greek from the start, not a translation | pp. 86-87 | “Nulla vnquam versio tam feliciter elaborata fuit; quæ peregrinitatem non præ se ferret” (no translation was ever so well made that it showed no foreignness). VIII derives θάνατος (death) from ἀθάνατος (deathless): “quod etsi delirum est commentum; certissime tamen probat, Græce hæc fuisse scripta” (though this is a mad fancy, it proves beyond doubt that the text was written in Greek); IX calls the world κόσμος because it orders (κοσμεῖ) all things; treatise I opens like Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. So the claim of an Egyptian original in the letter to Ammon (XVI) is “falsissimum”. | Holds for the texts we have. Coptic versions of Hermetic works were later copied in Egypt (Nag Hammadi Codex VI), and a Demotic dialogue between a master, perhaps Thoth, and a disciple, published by Richard Jasnow and Karl-Theodor Zauzich (2005) as a “pendant to the classical Hermetica”, shows an Egyptian-language genre beside them. |
Read down the right-hand column and a pattern appears. What he proved from the Greek itself (rows 5, 11, 12) has stood for four centuries. What he inferred about who wrote it and when (rows 1, 3, 7, 9) has not.
The date he gave, and why it was too early
Casaubon gave no year for the book. He placed its author “not long after the times of the Apostles” (p. 78), which Scott renders as “about the end of the first century after Christ” (Scott 1924, I, p. 41). The anchor was a quotation in the Exhortation to the Greeks, then read as Justin Martyr’s. Scott dated that work probably to 260-302, long after Justin, and its Hermes passage is not from the seventeen treatises at all: it is the first of the Hermetic excerpts preserved by Stobaeus, which opens “To conceive God is hard, to speak of him impossible” (the Stobaean fragments, SH 1; our translation). Turnebus had printed it with the Corpus, so Casaubon read it as part of “the book”.
Scott’s own verdict: “He puts the date a little too early; most of the libelli of the Corpus were probably written in the third century, some perhaps in the second century” (p. 41, n. 1). The window this site uses for the seventeen treatises, Roman Egypt about 100-300 CE, keeps Casaubon’s direction and moves his date later.
Who doubted before him
Ralph Cudworth called Casaubon “the first Discoverer” (1678, p. 319). It is not quite right. Martin Mulsow’s volume Das Ende des Hermetismus (2002) documents an intense debate about the date of the Hermetica in Venice and Padua in the 1580s, a generation before 1614 (publisher’s summary); Mulsow’s own chapter on it is “Reaktionärer Hermetismus vor 1600?” (pp. 161-188). Essays in the volume by Frederick Purnell Jr. and Anthony Grafton reconstruct earlier attacks by Gilbert Génébrard and Johannes Goropius Becanus and a quarrel between Francesco Patrizi and Teodoro Angelucci (Bergengruen 2004); Mulsow elsewhere adds Matthieu Béroalde to the sixteenth-century doubters (Mulsow 2005, n. 9). What Casaubon added, in Scott’s judgement, was the first account of the Hermetica “in the main at least, historically sound” (1924, I, p. 41), from the man his contemporaries admired as the greatest Hellenist of his time (Campagnolo 2005, p. 718).
Who pushed back: Cudworth in 1678
The Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth accepted the method and contested the reach. He agreed that Christian hands had touched the Hermetica, named the Poimandres (I), the bowl (IV) and the sermon on rebirth (XIII), and judged “those Three whole Books, or at least the First and Last of them” suspect (p. 319). He refused the rest. Casaubon, he wrote, rested his claim that the philosophy was “merely Platonical and Grecanical” on a single doctrine, that nothing in the world perishes, and that doctrine, in Cudworth’s view, Pythagoras had brought from Egypt (p. 326). He preferred the judgement of Iamblichus, “much better skilled” than Casaubon in Egyptian learning, that these books “really contain the Hermaick Opinions, though they spake sometimes the Language of the Greek Philosophers” (p. 327). He also reports that the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher defended “with much zeal” the genuineness of all the Hermetic books (p. 320).
Others agreed with Casaubon outright. Thomas Gale, in his 1678 edition of Iamblichus, saw in the Hermetic writings nothing but adaptations of Scripture and older philosophers (Scott 1924, I, p. 43, n. 1). Scott adds that from 1630 to 1854 no reprint of the Greek text appeared (p. 43): the books lost their readers once they lost their age.
What later scholarship corrected
Walter Scott’s Oxford edition (1924) settled the main correction. The authors were pagans; “apart from a few interpolated words”, the likeness to Christian doctrine comes from a time when Christians and pagan Platonists “thought and spoke alike”, so “a number of Pagan writers” must replace Casaubon’s “Christian or semi-Christian” author (I, pp. 42-43). On p. 75 Casaubon had called the book “semichristiani merum figmentum”, the mere invention of a half-Christian. With that correction, Scott wrote, his account of why the name of Hermes was used “may be considered to hold good” (p. 43).
The second correction came from Egypt. Scott still agreed with Casaubon that native Egyptian thought was rare in the Hermetica (I, p. 41, n.). In December 1945 Coptic codices came out of the ground near Nag Hammadi, and Codex VI held three Hermetic works, one of them unknown before (the Nag Hammadi Hermetica). Jean-Pierre Mahé edited them with their Greek and Latin parallels (1978-1982). Garth Fowden’s The Egyptian Hermes (1986) sets the Hermetica in the meeting of Egyptian and Greek ways of thought in the Nile valley under the Ptolemies and the Romans (preface), and Christian Bull (2018) presents Hermes as an Egyptian priestly figure teaching Hellenized wisdom. Casaubon was right that the texts were written in Greek. Whether the people who wrote them came from Egyptian temples is a question his method could not reach.
The third concerns the size of the event. Frances Yates called Casaubon’s dating “a watershed separating the Renaissance world from the modern world” (Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 1964, p. 398). For Giordano Bruno, burned in 1600, the Hermetic books had still been the wisdom of the Egyptians in which Moses was schooled. Mulsow’s volume answers that the end of Hermetism began well before 1614. Esteban Law (2023) gives Casaubon a Catholic ally, Dionysius Petavius (1583-1652), whose contribution was “on a par with Casaubon’s” (abstract). Anthony Grafton’s article on the critique (1983, reprinted 1991) is the place to follow it further.
What still holds
Three findings stand on the evidence above: the treatises were written in Greek, not translated; they draw on Plato and on the Greek Bible; their language belongs to the Roman empire, not to the age of Moses. Two did not survive: the Christian forger and the date soon after the Apostles. One has been reopened: what in these texts is Egyptian. The letter to King Ammon warns that Greek would drain an Egyptian teaching of its power, and Casaubon called that claim false. His verdict on its language holds; what Egyptian teaching stands behind it is still argued.
His method is the part anyone can use. Ask when a text is first quoted and by whom; look for a word, a name or a custom it could not have known; ask whether it reads like a translation. The same questions, applied to sayings that circulate today, are the method of Ask for the date and Is it really ancient?
| Born | 18 February 1559 (8 February Old Style), Geneva |
|---|---|
| Died | 1 July 1614 (Old Style), London; buried in Westminster Abbey |
| Posts | Greek at the Geneva Academy (1582-1596); Montpellier (1596-1599); keeper (sub-librarian) of the royal library in Paris under Henri IV (from 1604); London under James I (1610-1614) |
| Main editions | Strabo (1587), Theophrastus’ Characters (1592), Suetonius (1595), Athenaeus (1597; commentary 1600), Persius (1605), Polybius (1609) |
| The critique | De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI (London, 1614), Exercitatio I, section X, pp. 70-87 |
| Edition he read | The Greek editio princeps of Turnebus (Paris, 1554), to judge by his page references |
| His date for the Corpus | “Not long after the times of the Apostles”: about the end of the first century CE (Scott 1924) |
| Diary | Ephemerides, in his hand from 18 February 1597 to 16 June 1614 (the last two entries, 17 and 18 June, in another hand; the volume for January 1604 to July 1607 is lost); printed Oxford, 1850 |
Fair questions
Who was Isaac Casaubon?
A Geneva-born Protestant classical scholar (1559-1614) who edited Strabo, Theophrastus, Athenaeus and Polybius, was keeper, in practice sub-librarian, of the royal library in Paris under Henri IV, resisted years of pressure to become a Catholic, and spent his last years in London under James I. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. The Mr Casaubon of George Eliot’s Middlemarch is a fictional character who shares his name.
What did Casaubon prove about the Corpus Hermeticum?
That it was written in Greek, after Plato and after the Greek translation of Genesis, and not by an Egyptian sage before Moses. He argued it from borrowings, anachronisms such as Phidias, late Greek words and Greek puns in De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI (London, 1614), Exercitatio I.10, pp. 70-87.
Was Casaubon the first to doubt Hermes Trismegistus?
No, though Cudworth (1678) called him “the first Discoverer”. Martin Mulsow’s volume (2002) documents a debate on the date in Venice and Padua in the 1580s, and Génébrard, Goropius Becanus and Béroalde had already doubted the books. What Casaubon added, in Walter Scott’s judgement (1924), was the first account of the Hermetica “in the main at least, historically sound”.
Was Casaubon right?
On the language, yes: the treatises were composed in Greek and draw on Plato and the Septuagint. He was wrong that a Christian forged them: Walter Scott (1924) showed the authors were pagans. His date, “not long after the times of the Apostles”, rested on the misattributed Exhortation to the Greeks and was too early.
Did Casaubon’s 1614 critique end Hermeticism?
Not at once. Frances Yates (1964, p. 398) called his dating “a watershed separating the Renaissance world from the modern world”, but Cudworth in 1678 still defended most of the books as containing Egyptian doctrine, and he reports that Kircher defended them all. Even so, from 1630 to 1854 no reprint of the Greek text appeared.
Sources & further reading
- Isaac Casaubon, De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI. Ad Cardinalis Baronii Prolegomena in Annales (London: Ex officina Nortoniana apud Ioan. Billium, 1614), Exercitatio I, section X, pp. 70-87; Internet Archive (Google Books scan).
- Mercurii Trismegisti Poemander, seu de potestate ac sapientia divina. Aesculapii definitiones ad Ammonem regem, ed. Adrien Turnèbe (Paris: Turnebus, 1554), the Greek editio princeps, pp. 97-98; Internet Archive (Johns Hopkins University, Bibliotheca Fictiva).
- Isaac Casaubon, Ephemerides, ed. John Russell, 2 vols (Oxford: University Press, 1850), vol. II, pp. 942, 1064-1065; Internet Archive (University of Toronto copy).
- Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 1559-1614, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), pp. 3, 27-28, 64, 88-89, 139, 144-145, 175-178, 188-189, 268, 274-277, 284, 309, 315, 335, 415-418, 475-480; Internet Archive (Cornell copy). On p. 417 Pattison gives the Gregorian date of death as 12 July; with the ten-day gap of 1614 it is 11 July. Burial: Westminster Abbey, “Isaac Casaubon” (consulted 31 October 2026).
- Matteo Campagnolo, “Isaac Casaubon étudiant de Théodore de Bèze”, in «Koryphaioi andri»: mélanges offerts à André Hurst, Recherches et Rencontres 22 (Geneva: Droz, 2005), pp. 717-726; Droz.
- Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London: Richard Royston, 1678), book I, ch. 4, pp. 319-327; Internet Archive.
- Walter Scott (ed.), Hermetica, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), pp. 15-16, 24, 29, 33-34, 41-43, 92, 276; Internet Archive.
- Walter Scott (ed.), Hermetica, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), p. 34, note on Corpus Hermeticum I.10; Internet Archive.
- Anthony Grafton, “Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983), pp. 78-93, doi:10.2307/751115; reprinted in his Defenders of the Text (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 145-161. Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, with Alastair Hamilton, “I have always loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011); publisher’s page, whose description is quoted on this page (also at Labyrinth Books).
- Martin Mulsow (ed.), Das Ende des Hermetismus. Historische Kritik und neue Naturphilosophie in der Spätrenaissance, Religion und Aufklärung 9 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), with Martin Mulsow, “Reaktionärer Hermetismus vor 1600? Zum Kontext zu den Debatten um die Datierung von Hermes Trismegistos im Veneto”, pp. 161-188 (title and pages from his list of publications); publisher’s page. Reviews: Maximilian Bergengruen, “Ende ohne Ende”, literaturkritik.de, 1 July 2004; Martin Mulsow, review of Ralph Häfner, Götter im Exil, IASLonline, 11 July 2005, n. 9 (copy).
- Esteban Law, “Die Kritik am Corpus Hermeticum im 17. Jh. und die Folgen”, Bochumer Philosophisches Jahrbuch für Antike und Mittelalter 26 (2023), pp. 152-180, doi:10.1075/bpjam.00105.law (abstract in English).
- Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), ch. XXI, “After Hermes Trismegistus was Dated”, p. 398; French translation by Marc Rolland, Giordano Bruno et la tradition hermétique (Paris, 1988), pp. 465-466, where Campagnolo 2005 quotes the passage.
- Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), preface and part II, “The Way of Hermes”; publisher’s description.
- Jean-Pierre Mahé, Hermès en Haute-Égypte, 2 vols (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1978-1982).
- Richard Jasnow and Karl-Theodor Zauzich, The Ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth: A Demotic Discourse on Knowledge and Pendant to the Classical Hermetica, 2 vols (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005); new translation, Conversations in the House of Life (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014), publisher’s page.
- Christian H. Bull, The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus: The Egyptian Priestly Figure as a Teacher of Hellenized Wisdom (Leiden: Brill, 2018), doi:10.1163/9789004370845.