About RenMagDB
What This Is
RenMagDB is a digital humanities project cataloging a research corpus of 337 scholarly documents on Renaissance magic. The database indexes figures, texts, terms, traditions, and events across the intellectual world of Renaissance magical philosophy — from Marsilio Ficino's translations of the Corpus Hermeticum to John Dee's Enochian angel conversations.
A Note on "Magic"
"Renaissance magic" is a modern scholarly category, not a term most Renaissance figures would have used to describe their own work. Ficino called his project prisca theologia (ancient theology); Agrippa titled his synthesis philosophia occulta (occult philosophy); Dee described his angel conversations as divine revelation. The word magia was more often applied by opponents — Church authorities, rival scholars, inquisitors — to delegitimize intellectual work. We use the term as a scholarly convenience while acknowledging its constructed nature.
For more on this framing, see the project essay "Magic as a Scholarly Category: From Yates to Copenhaver" in the project repository.
Methodology
The database was built using a Python-first pipeline: documents were converted to markdown via PyMuPDF, metadata was extracted via regex and spaCy NER, terms were detected via a 200-term seed list, and topic clusters were generated via TF-IDF. AI-generated content (dictionary definitions, summaries) is tagged with source_method='LLM_ASSISTED' and marked as DRAFT pending human review.
Coverage Gaps
- Arabic/Islamic transmission — Only one dedicated source (Liana Saif) for the entire Arabic pipeline
- Paracelsus — Referenced frequently but no dedicated corpus documents
- Women practitioners — Limited dedicated scholarship in this corpus
- Operative alchemy — Corpus treats alchemy philosophically; see the companion AlchemyDB for practical terms
Technology
SQLite database + Python scripts + static HTML. No frameworks, no JavaScript frameworks, no build tools. Deployed via GitHub Pages.