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Sophie Page and Catherine Rider (eds), Ashgate Research Compani on to M edieval

M agic, ca. 1000-1500

INTRODUCTION Sophie Page and Catherine Rider

The introduction will explain why magic is a significant area of historical investigation, sumup the current state of research in this field and examine major historiographical trends. Wewill assess different approaches that historians of religion and science have taken to thehistory of magic and the ways in which the nature and extent of the surviving evidence hasinfluenced scholarship. In recent decades historians of medieval magic have demonstratedthat a wide range of people were engaged in magical activities from all groups in society,and that a great variety of magical texts were in circulation. Many of these texts have nowbeen edited and recent scholarship has focussed on the often sophisticated ways in whichtheir authors, practitioners and critics engaged with religious concerns and ideas about the

cosmos. Recent historiography has also increased our understanding of the routes by which Arabic, Hebrew and Greek magic texts entered the Latin West and were disseminated,examined the relationship between learned magic and witchcraft trials, and tried to explainwhy positive attitudes to magic co-existed with the persecution of magical practitioners at theend of the Middle Ages.

I C ENTRAL ISSUES FOR DEVELOPMENT OF THE F IELD

1. Conceptualising Magic

How should magic be defined? What are its essential features? Is it a universal concept, found in all periods and cultures? Is magic always rational within its own cultural context?Can we identify distinct and recurring relationships between magic, religion and science?What is distinctive about the way a magic ritual works? Historians, anthropologists and

sociologists have long discussed these questions, but there are few widely accepted answersand very little work on the specific problems of conceptualising late medieval magic. In this

section, we ask four leading scholars in this area to contribute short pieces (c.5000 words)on how they think medieval historians should conceptualise magic and then to offercommentaries on each others pieces (c. 1000 words)

David dAvray (UCL)Claire Fanger (Rice)

Richard Kieckhefer (Northwestern)

Bernd-Christian Otto (Erfurt)

2. Origins, Languages, Dissemination

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries an extraordinary influx into Europe of magic texts fromthe Greek, Arabic and Jewish traditions transformed the status of late medieval magic from

an illicit activity into a branch of knowledge. The first chapter will establish the nature of the pre-existing traditions of magic in c. 1000. It will be followed by chapters on Arabic and


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Jewish magic texts which will explore the impetus for translating them and their receptionand later history. Later chapters in this section will examine the dissemination and impact ofmagic as it acquired distinctive identities in different parts of Europe.

Magic around the year 1000: Karen Jolly (Hawaii)

Arabic: Charles Burnett (Warburg Institute)

Hebrew: Katelyn Mesler (Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies)

France and Germany: Jan Veenstra (Groningen)

Spain: Alejandro Garca Avils (Murcia)

Celtic lands: Jacqueline Borsje (Amsterdam)

Central and Eastern Europe: Benedek Lang (Budapest)

Scandinavia: Stephen Mitchell (Harvard)

3. Key genres and figures

This section will examine one of the most significant research areas in the historiography oflate medieval magic. Learned magic texts circulated in manuscripts, described complexrituals, and often drew on the same cosmological concepts as the more scientific workstranslated in the same period. More than one hundred distinct texts and several hundred

surviving manuscripts with magical contents have now been identified by scholars, althoughmany remain hardly studied and new copies of magic texts are frequently identified. A recenthistoriographical trend has demonstrated how intellectual resonances of learned magic textswith Greek and Arabic philosophy and science on the one hand, and a closeness to orthodoxChristian rituals and piety on the other, contributed to a gradual shift towards more positiveattitudes to magical texts and ideas in Western Europe.

Genres:

Hermetic Magic: Vittoria Perrone-Compagni (Florence)

Solomonic Magic: Julien Vronse (Orlans)

Necromancy: Frank Klaassen (Saskatchewan)

Natural Magic: Isabelle Draelants (Lorraine)

Authors:

Cecco dAscoli , Antonio da Montolmo and Jerome Torella: Nicolas Weill-Parot

(Paris-Est Crteil)

Berengar Ganell: Damaris Gehr (Istituto Svizzero di Roma)

John of Morigny: Claire Fanger (Rice) and Nicholas Watson (Harvard)

Peter of Zealand: Jean-Marc Mandosio (Paris, EPHE)


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I. M AKING NEW C ONNECTIONS

4. Themes (Magic and...)

This section will explore the ways in which magic interacted with other aspects of medievalculture. Many topics in this section have been chosen to highlight areas which have seenexciting scholarship in recent years (such as magic at court, magic and medicine). A fewothers have been chosen because we feel that they are important issues that require moreresearch (for example magic and gender, magic and folklore). The chapters fall into fourmain groups. First, chapters on Miracles, Natural philosophy, Divination and Medicine willexplore the prominent role that magic played in learned writing on these topics but also the

practical implications of these debates: for example, canonization processes sought todetermine whether an alleged miracle was genuine or a result of magic, and ideas aboutmagic influenced medical practice, as practitioners were affected by ideas about whatcounted as magical remedies and whether it was legitimate to use them. Second, this

section will examine other contexts in which magic was important: at court, where both the practice of magic and accusations of doing magic featured regularly in political conflicts; inwarfare, where the late Middle Ages witnessed a new interest in magical weaponry; and inthe creation of illusions similar to modern stage magic. Thirdly it will examine how twoimportant aspects of medieval culture shaped both magic itself, and attitudes to magic andmagical practitioners. These are ideas about gender, and the interaction between popularand learned culture. Finally, in this section contributors will explore the relationship betweenmagic and other media and disciplines: visual and material sources for magic, its role inliterary sources and the role of music in magic rituals. This section is intended on the onehand to highlight non-textual sources which have been underexploited by scholars and on theother, to bring expertise from other disciplines to bear on the history of magic.

Miracles: Robert Bartlett (St. Andrews)

Natural Philosophy: Steven P. Marrone (Tufts University)

Divination: David Juste (Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities)

Medicine: Peter Jones and Lea Olsan (Cambridge)

Magic at Court: Jean-Patrice Boudet (Orlans)

Gender: Catherine Rider (Exeter)

Popular Culture and Folklore: Jean-Claude Schmitt (EHESS, Paris)

Conjuring and Illusion: Robert Goulding (Notre Dame)

Literature: Corinne Saunders (Durham)

Music: John Haines (Toronto)

Archaeology: Roberta Gilchrist (Reading)

Images and magical figures: Sophie Page (UCL)


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5. Anti-magical discourse in the later Middle Ages

Much of the surviving evidence for medieval magic comes from sources written by peoplewho condemned it. This section will survey the key ways in which medieval writers often,

but not always, clergy tried to categorize magic and discourage people from practising it.The chapter on Scholastic Critics tackles the most sophisticated critiques of magic made byhighly trained theologians in medieval universities. The chapter on Pastoral Literature and

Preaching will examine how this material was communicated to a wider audience of clergyand laity and the chapter on Law will examine the ways in which lawyers categorised magicand the guidelines they gave for its prosecution. In this period both the church and secular

governments began to take magic more seriously, to condemn it in stronger terms and to putincreasing numbers of people on trial for using it. These trends manifested themselves mostclearly in the first witch trials, which took place in the fifteenth century. The chapters onSuperstition and Sorcery, Belief and Heresy will examine changing attitudes to magic withinthe church: how magic came to be conflated with the much more serious crime of heresy, andhow churchmen became increas ingly concerned about popular superstitions. Finally thechapter on Witchcraft will bring these strands together by examining the early witch trials,drawing on the large amount of important work done by Swiss scholars in recent decades.

Scholastic critics: David Collins (Georgetown)

Pastoral literature and preaching: Kathleen Kamerick (Iowa)

Law: Edward Peters (Pennsylvania)

Superstition and Sorcery: Michael Bailey (Iowa)

Belief: John Arnold (Birkbeck)

Heresy: Kathrin Utz Tremp

Witchcraft: Martine Ostorero (Lausanne)

Conclusion: Future Directions: Sophie Page and Catherine Rider

The Conclusion will discuss some of the directions in which medieval magic studies could goin future years. Which areas are currently under-studied (two of these might be popular

magic, and magic and gender)? What are the important, unanswered questions? Which key sources remain unedited or little-studied? As the chapters in the volume show, there hasbeen a huge amount of scholarship on medieval magic in recent decades but so far there hasbeen little attempt to offer an overview of the trends and the remaining gaps, and theConclusion is the appropriate place to address this. In this way it will aim to set the agenda

for future work on the history of medieval magic, and to offer guidance and inspiration fornew researchers entering the field.

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