Johann Georg Faust

Johann Georg Faust ( , German:; c. 1480 or 1466 – c. 1541), sometimes also Georg Sabellicus Faustus and known in English as John Faustus, was a German itinerant alchemist, astrologer, and magician of the German Renaissance. He was often called a conman and a heretic.

Doctor Faust became the subject of folk legend in the years soon after his death, transmitted in chapbooks beginning in the 1580s, and was notably adapted by Christopher Marlowe as a tragic heretic in his play The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1588-1592). The Faustbuch tradition survived throughout the early modern period, and the legend was again adapted in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's closet dramaFaust (1808), Hector Berlioz's musical composition La damnation de Faust (premiered 1846), and Franz Liszt's Faust Symphony of 1857.