  Patrizi's concern with early sources was not strictly scholarly or historical, as can readily be seen by examining his works and the ways in which those texts were employed. An independent thinker, he was willing to consider as wide a range of views as possible on subjects of interest to him, whether they were scientific, philosophical, historical, or dealt with concrete problems in engineering or hydrology. And he made use of them in his own way, unwilling to adhere unquestioningly to the theories and practices of contemporaries who dealt with the same works in different ways.  To cite a concrete example, Patrizi accepted the authenticity of the body of works attributed to the pseudo-Egyptian sage Hermes or Mercurius Trismegistus, as had Marsilio Ficino before him and many of his own contemporaries, such as Giordano Bruno (Yates 1964). He printed some Hermetic works and the Chaldaean Oracles attributed to Zoroaster (Patrizi 1593). It was, ironically, within Patrizi's own lifetime that serious textual and historical arguments would finally be put forward to undermine the authority of many of these spurious works, and his own commitment to the authenticity of the Hermetica can now be seen to have played a major role in leading some of his critics and defenders to single out and publicize some of the historical and textual grounds for rejecting them as spurious (Purnell 2002; Mulsow, ed. 2002). 