APPENDIX I.
THE FAUST-LEGEND.
So many references have been made, in the foregoing Notes, to the various forms of the old Faust-legend, that a brief account of its origin and the changes in its character introduced by successive narrators is all that need now be added. The reader who is specially interested in the subject will find no difficulty in prosecuting his researches further:[1] no legend of the Middle Ages has been so assiduously unearthed, dissected and expounded.
The slow revival of science in Germany, France and Italy, furnished the ignorant multitude with many new names which passed with them for those of sorcerers, and gradually displaced the traditions of Virgilius, Merlin, and others who had figured in their lore for many centuries. Raymond Lully, Roger Bacon, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, the Abbot Tritheim (Trithemius), and many other sincere though confused workers, were believed by the people to be in league with evil spirits, and their names became nuclei, around which gathered all manner of floating traditions. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from the movements in human thought which they brought forth, were naturally rich in such stories, for even the most advanced minds still retained a half-belief in occult spiritual forces. Melancthon, himself, is our chief evidence in relation to the person and character of the Faust of the legend.
- ↑ The collection of narratives given by Scheible in his Kloster, and the accounts in Düntzer's and Leutbecher's commentaries on Faust, may still be easily procured.
