“Magical Imagination, or Instrumental Aesthetics from Sidney to Shakespeare” is the title of the dissertation of Genevieve Guenther, a graduate student in the Department of English. Guenther argues that poetry and magic were bound together in Renaissance England because the very qualities we see as aesthetic are those that the Renaissance saw as having social and even material effects. Hence discourses that enable the conflation of the beautiful and the instrumental-- Neoplatonism, rhetoric, musicology--also provided the intellectual and pragmatic assumptions that underlay the practice of Renaissance magic. Given this perspective, Guenther argues, it is necessary to revise characterizations of magic either as an esoteric brand of contemplative philosophy or as a misguided form of proto-science having no application to social life.