 Richard Popkin underlined that Agrippa’s declamation does not contain the “serious epistemological analysis” one would expect from a skeptical debate and suggested that it should be considered as an expression of anti-intellectualism and biblical fundamentalism (Popkin 2003: 29). This reading, however, leaves the key question unresolved: such an anti-intellectualism or biblical fundamentalism is difficult to reconcile with Agrippa’s long-standing interest in precisely those sciences which by then should have been swept away by the appeal to verbum Dei (“word of God”). It is undeniably true that in De vanitate the moral angle prevails over the epistemological critique. This is because Agrippa also looked at trades, professions, pastimes, and social types, none of which were susceptible to epistemological analysis. Moreover, when discussing a science, he was primarily interested in focusing on how it was used and on its concrete effects on society, rather than in investigating its methods and subjects. Some scholars have identified De vanitate as the result of a profound personal crisis (psychological, religious, or cultural), which led Agrippa to a radical criticism of the system of occult doctrines and of his own intellectual choices. No doubt, the circumstances of his life between 1526 and 1530 influenced the tone of the work which he was preparing, accentuating its harshness and inspiring some of its more polemical and audacious pages. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that, all of the sudden, Agrippa abandoned his philosophical convictions, solely because of indignation at the treatment he suffered at the court of Louise of Savoy (Weeks 1993: 120–24). Likewise, the hypothesis of an intellectual upheaval (Keefer 1988: 614–53; Zambelli 2000: 41) remains merely conjectural. Agrippa’s supposed disbelief in science (and, above all, in astrology and magic) contrasts with his continuing work on De occulta philosophia and with his project for a reform of the magical tradition, based on a new vision of science. It is important to recognize that there were serious motivations behind his fierce attack on the foundations of knowledge. Bowen (1972: 249–56) and Korkowski (1976: 594–607), reducing De vanitate to a simple exercise of rhetoric in the fashionable literary genre of the paradox, correctly outlined the work’s formal characteristics; however, they did not sufficiently take into account its philosophical intentions and turned its subversive implications into something quite inoffensive. De vanitate proposed a reform project, one which was broader, more complex, and more radical than that of its model, Erasmus’ Praise of Folly (Laus stultitiae).