Doctor Faustus and the Printer’s Devil

Abstract

The German legend of the sorcerer Doctor Faustus is the primary source for Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy of the same name, but to what extent was Marlowe, and late-sixteenth-century English culture generally, influenced by confusion with the Doctor Faust or Faustus who appears in early histories of the printing press? This essay explores the historical connection between print technology and magic, specifically focusing on humanist encyclopedic books and their supernatural resonances, suggesting that such a dark side of the print revolution, alive in the early modern English imagination, influenced ideas about authorship and reading.