Magic in the Middle Ages

Dates Covered: 1000 - 1500
ISBN: 0521785766
HH Rating:

Our Take

A traditional view of citizens of Europe in the Middle Ages has it that they were an ignorant, unwashed lot. Charlatans made their living with alchemy, purporting to transmute base metals into gold. Alleged sorcerers were feared, lynched, or both. Or so modern-day popular depictions go. Are they true? How ignorant were those people? In his ambitiously titled Magic in the Middle Ages, Richard Kieckhefer points out

"Many of the recipes for magic that we will encounter in this book may strike a modern reader as amusing or frivolous, and may indeed have been written in playful spirit, but it is seldom easy to know for sure whether a medieval audience would have been amused or shocked by such material."

Thus, while we might be looking at seemingly outlandish claims regarding magic capabilities, they may not have been taken seriously. That's not to say that outlandish claims weren't made. For example, Kieckhefer writes, "a man could be rendered impotent for the rest of his life by being so careless as to imbibe forty ants boiled in daffodil juice," and that the right foot of a hare will stop dogs from barking. In the same breath, Kieckhefer testifies that he's got a list as long as your arm of similar silliness that "could be extended indefinitely."

Unfortunately, things soon get a little murkier. After initially dealing with the idea that magic was probably accepted or dismissed to varying degrees over Middle Age society, Kieckhefer wanders hither and yon describing what seems to be most everything he could dig up remotely connected to magic but avoiding any other coherent interpretations along the way. In short, he's got a lot of stuff that doesn't fit together so well.

What's to be done with such a survey? Magic in the Middle Ages provides an adequate sketch of the different manifestations of "magic" in the period, but has a very hard time making anything out of it. Kieckhefer kicks off the book by acknowledging what he's trying to do is difficult, even from a semantic point of view. Simply defining a term as slippery as magic vexes him: how is it different from religion, or folk science? There are no distinct lines, and while he provides a few examples of what is supposed to be clearly magic and not some other cultural construction, the reader is still left scratching his head. For instance, he suggests that eating leaves to cure a fever is "science", uttering the Lord's Prayer while doing so is "religion", but eating those leaves and uttering the prayer on three consecutive mornings makes the practice "magical", because "there is no scientific reason or religious reason" for doing so.

With such an ill-defined topic, any author might be loath to continue. Kieckhefer could have easily wandered in semantic circles for pages and pages trying to figure out exactly what it is he's talking about. Large sections of the book feel this way: one gets the sense that Kieckhefer has a diverse body of magic-related anecdotes on his desk and has spent a year or so struggling to get them all in between two covers.

This is not to say the anecdotes aren't worthy of retelling. In delineating the popular history of the supernatural, he uncovers some gems from antiquity. Pliny the Elder, leaning heavily on metaphors and anthropomorphization, claimed the noble diamond and ignoble goat would interact like matter and antimatter and annihilate one another. Christian saints and pagan heroes have been invoked against one another in wonder-working contests. Where Benedicta Ward investigated the role of propaganda in the acceptance and spread of miraculous stories in Miracles and the Medieval Mind [click here for our take on the subject], Kieckhefer seems content to acknowledge the existence of such stories without pursuing what made them weighty enough to pervade cultural consciousness.

However, despite his early suggestion that it is impossible to gauge the medieval reaction towards any specific piece of magic, Kieckhefer does a fine job of teasing them out anyway. Of a book of magic recipes, he reports, a waggish hand wrote in the margins: "This is utterly false, superstitious, and practically heretical." Another long-dead scribe opined, "This would be good -- if it were true!" In a discussion of classic Greek philosophers and their feelings on the subject, Kieckhefer notes, "Cicero ridiculed the notion that the gods communicate messages in dreams, which are in fact merely confused and ambiguous recollections from waking life," making us feel a little better and dispelling the notion that everybody back then was nai:ve and superstitious.

While arguing that only the educated were in a position to write their opinions concerning magic [they were the only literate segment of society], Kieckhefer reveals little details that are independent of class. These details come from what people were using the magic for: making oneself invisible, causing strife between two households, conjuring up a speedy servant. Here's a spell plucked from an Egyptian papyrus:

I adjure you, demon of the dead ... cause Sarapion to pine and melt away out of passion for Dioskorous ... Inflame his heart, cause it to melt ... and let him do all the things in my mind, and let him continue loving me, until he arrives in Hades.

Who hasn't felt these emotions? Kieckhefer might have argued that magic was just another method of fantasy wish-fulfillment, especially considering the number of Middle Aged skeptics he quotes. Perhaps nobody really expected these things to work, but invoked them anyway. They might well have been a benign sort of lottery ticket; nothing the individual ever expects to really work but grants a few moments of fantasy nonetheless. (Of course, one would have to contrast this with the persecution suffered by suspected magic practitioners.)

However, for all this data, Kieckhefer has trouble producing anything more than the broadest of surveys. Pulling out the small human details in his research -- the notes in the margins of old texts and so forth -- gives a more complete picture to the phenomenon of magic, but by and large one could find similar details hiding in nearly any topic. So while charmed by them, in the end, we are left with a very well-read man giving us a sweeping collection of anecdotes that are vaguely related by their subject material. That's not to say it's bad: there are plenty of good anecdotes to tell. But given the spotty nature of finding Middle Age material, Kieckhefer's treatment isn't any more comprehensive or coherent than that.

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