 In most encyclopedias over the centuries, Giovan Battista Porta is remembered for particular inventions—for instance, the telescope (Reeves 2008; Saito 2011; Balbiani 2008). This tendency to decontextualize Porta’s (vast) oeuvre by treating it as a quarry of ideas actually dates back to his contemporaries: scholars and theologians as varied in temperament and intellectual inclination as Francis Bacon (1561–1626), William Gilbert (1544–1603), Athansius Kircher, S.J. (1602–1680), Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–89) or Georg Philipp Harsdörfer (1607–1658). Thus, Bacon discusses and transforms many experiments form Porta’s Villae in his Sylva sylvarum (Rees 1990 Rusu 2020). In very different ways Kircher, though overtly condemning Porta, knowingly plagiarized his segreti (Vermeir 2012). William Gilbert (1544–1603) felt it necessary to take issue with the animistic theories that Porta used to explain magnetism (Kodera 2014). Tommaso Campanella (at that time still a faithful disciple of Bernardino Telesio (1508/9–1588) had already deplored Porta’s lack of method, which precluded the development of a new metaphysics of nature (Eamon 1995). For several decades after his death, Porta’s name remained tied to witchcraft on both sides of a controversial debate. Thus Bodin’s indictment of Porta’s naturalistic explanation of the sabbath was repeated in Martin Anton Delrio’s (1551–1608) highly influential Disquisitionum magicarum lib. vi (1599), an encyclopedic inquiry into the subject. Frederich von Spee (1591–1635) cites Porta in what by then had become a single-handed criticism of the persecution of witches. Thus the recipe for the witches’ unguent in Spee’s Cautio criminalis seu de processio contra sagas (1631) is used as evidence against the claims of Bodin and Delrio.