History Compass 9/5 (2011): 410–422, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00776.

Magic in the Middle Ages: History and Historiography

David J. Collins*
Georgetown University

Abstract
The aim of this essay is to offer an introductory overview of magic in pre-modern Europe and
of the range of scholarly approaches to that historical phenomenon. The article moves from
the historical to the historiographical, examining first a series of historical watersheds in the
development of Western thought on what magic is and how it works, and second, a set of
modern methodological trends in the study of magic. In the process, the article highlights
several topics driving current research into medieval magic and points out directions for future
scholarship.

‘Magic’ is a hard term to define. In both ancient and modern societies, it has often
been used to condemn whole categories of belief and corresponding practices. Deroga-
tory, unclear, and inconsistent definitions have made magic vexingly difficult to study.
Indeed many scholars across the disciplines dismiss the term ‘magic’ altogether as noth-
ing but a ‘collective term of convenience’.1 Such difficulties are not suffered solely by
magic as an object of scholarly attention. A similar dissatisfaction colors the study of
two other areas of human interest and activity that once enjoyed self-evident defini-
tional clarity and that are closely related to magic in Western history, namely, science
and religion.2 Reactions against past scholarship shape today’s investigations and have
led many researchers to qualify their work by adopting the understandings of magic
characteristic of its practitioners, clients, and persecutors in the specific times and places
under scrutiny instead of applying definitions developed later according to extrinsic
standards of rationality.3 Furthermore, historians of the West and especially of the
Middle Ages have almost universally rejected the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
teleological approaches to magic that considered it worth study only as a primitive
forerunner to rational religion and science.4 Instead historians have begun focusing
more intently on the shifting meanings of magic over time and across cultures and
social strata.5 The slippery definition of magic in history is, from this perspective, not a
hindrance to research, but rather its object.
The consequent circumspection of the newest scholarship on magic, as well as the
obligation to explain it, shapes this essay too, whose aim is the introduction of magic in
pre-modern Europe as the object of scholarly inquiry.6 In its purview fall the practices
that were understood in medieval Western society to manipulate hidden powers in the
created world and that were studied and performed outside orthodox religious and aca-
demic contexts for the material, psychic, or spiritual benefit of practitioners and clients.
The historical research into magic also includes consideration of the mentalities that made
sense of these practices and attention to the accoutrement used in the practices. This
article moves from the historical to the historiographical, highlighting, first, a series of
watersheds in the development of Western thinking about magic; and second, the
methods with which magic has been studied more recently.

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1. The History of Medieval Magic

From the definition above emerge four historical watersheds in the development of pre-
modern Western magic: first, the Christianization of the Mediterranean world and the
greater European peninsula; second, the social and intellectual revolutions of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries; third, the Renaissance; and fourth, the disenchantment associ-
ated with the early modern period and the ‘Age of Reason’.

1.1. LATE ANTIQUITY AND CHRISTIANIZATION

The beginnings of medieval magic are conventionally associated with the Christianization
of the Roman Empire. The process of Christianization encompassed the development of
a Christian intellectual tradition rooted in Greek and Roman thought as well as a corre-
sponding adjustment of social and political structures and of everyday beliefs and practices.
A Christian demonization of other Mediterranean religions is most responsible for sepa-
rating medieval and ancient notions of magic. The worship of entities other than the
God of the Christians (or the Jews) became regarded as demonic; the invocation of spirits
and gods, the activity at the heart of ancient magic, idolatrous.7
In this early period, Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354–430) developed an influential
distinction between miracle and magic. By this church father’s reckoning, miracles are awe-
inspiring, highly unusual events, whose immediate cause is God, that move the perceivers
to greater faith. By contrast, magic, which can also evoke awe in perceivers, does so only
through demonic involvement and does not include an increase in true faith among its
effects. Augustine’s distinction rests primarily on an identification of agency, that is, on who
is causing the unusual event to happen, and secondarily on interior effects, for example, the
increase of faith. Augustine’s distinction minimizes the significance of observable effects,
e.g., that the injured has been healed, that the falling rock has been restrained, or that a
future event has been accurately predicted: demons might, after all, cause positive natural
events for wicked ends. Augustine thereby excluded a distinction between licit and illicit
magic: by definition because of its demonic agency, magic is immoral and prohibited.8
The hostility of early Christian theologians toward paganism notwithstanding, the
scholarship of the last quarter century has determined Christianization in late Antiquity
and the early Middle Ages to be multivalent in ways that earlier studies overlooked.9
Christianization is now understood to have included top-down acculturations, passive
assimilations, and sundry forms of enculturation in between. Attentive to the possibility
of such variations, historians can now identify more readily practical distinctions in magic
that might not have been ubiquitous or perduring, say, between natural and manipulative
magic: the former investigated and utilized powers intrinsic to objects as created by God
and often avoided official censure, as, for example, Nicholas of Poland’s thirteenth-
century advice to apply the skin and entrails of an eviscerated frog to a wound to speed
healing. The latter, more consistently condemned, aimed at altering events through the
use of special symbols and objects such as talismans and the invocation of spirits.10
Recent scholarship has also begun identifying in pagan philosophy sources for Christian-
ity’s hostility to magic. The dim view taken, for example, by pagan neo-Platonists of the
polytheistic rituals and their demonic appeals resembles later Christian attitudes. The ques-
tion thus arises as to the extent that certain pagan philosophies informed Christian theolo-
gians on this topic.11 More exacting analysis of magic within ancient Jewish communities,
especially at popular and unofficial levels, is encouraging a parallel reevaluation of the
Semitic origins of Christian attitudes.12 Similarly, the study of Christianization north of

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412 Medieval Magic

the Alps, by bringing to light forms of pagan magic that were brought into Christian ritual,
is suggesting constructive engagements between Christians and pagans and demonstrating a
range of continuities between pre- and post-christianized European cultures.13 Indeed, the
further one looks in Europe beyond the old boundaries of imperial Rome, the more com-
plicated and interesting the problems become. The relatively late and slow Christianization
of Scandinavia, the Baltic region, and Slavic peoples from the eighth to the fourteenth
century, for example, resulted in a uniquely extended period of Christian-pagan coexis-
tence. Abundant surviving evidence offers the opportunity to investigate different models
of Christianization vis-à-vis pagan magic and raises the enticing challenge of studying
medieval magic with roots independent of Mediterranean Antiquity.14

1.2. THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES

The profound intellectual and institutional developments of the twelfth and thirteenth
century brought about the second watershed. Two developments warrant highlighting:
the first is legal and encompasses the reintroduction of ancient Roman jurisprudence, a
systemization of the law, and the growth of legal institutions. The second is intellectual
and includes the appropriation of ancient Greek, Islamic, and medieval Jewish philosophi-
cal reflection, especially insofar as it encompassed natural philosophy, and the establish-
ment of institutions of learning that encouraged all-encompassing systems of thought to
address such issues as the reality and morality of magic.15 These developments intensified
both the study of magic in high medieval learned circles and a disquiet about its ramifica-
tions.16 Medieval authorities, temporal and spiritual, associated magic ever more inti-
mately with the activity of demons and gradually imputed heresy to the practice of
magic.17 New judicial procedures such as the inquisitorial mode of investigation and
judicial torture made the identification, prosecution, and punishment of magic easier and
more efficient.18 A religious fervor arose simultaneously that aspired to a yet more chris-
tianized Europe. New clerical organizations, such as the Dominican order, that were cen-
trally organized and whose members were highly trained according to the new
Aristotelian curriculum at the universities, participated wholeheartedly in the condemna-
tions and prosecutions of magic. At the same time, the romance, a literary genre that
incorporated the magical and that grew in popularity through the early modern period
also emerged. Our appreciation of many of the complexities we have examined already –
the equivocal and irregular medieval ways of distinguishing the natural and the supernatu-
ral, competing classical and biblical notions of the demonic, and subtle distinctions
between the miraculous and the magical – has been greatly enriched by literary studies of
magic in the medieval romance.19

1.3. THE RENAISSANCE

A third watershed in the history of magic can be associated with the Renaissance.
Whereas the previous two turning points had implications for the practice of magic at
many levels of society, a Renaissance influence on magic appears to be limited to aca-
demic and courtly circles. Since the twentieth century, the research into Renaissance
magic has been especially attentive to magic’s relation to science.20 The hallmark Renais-
sance exaltation of Antiquity can be seen in the surge of interest in ancient sources for
the new magic. The figure of Hermes Trismegistos stood at the forefront. Scholars had
known of hermetic writings in the Middle Ages but never studied them with the vigor
that marked the Renaissance investigations, beginning with the Florentine philosopher

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Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499). Misattributed in Ficino’s On the Power and Wisdom of God,
as in earlier centuries, to an Egyptian contemporary of the Israelite Prophet Moses, the
collection of writings ascribed to Hermes, the Corpus Hermeticum, had been redacted in
the first through third centuries of the Common Era and show the influence of late
ancient Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism.21
While the challenges taken up in magical inquiry during the Renaissance – the desires
to find, understand, and manipulate hidden powers in nature – were not novel to this
period, the emblematic figure undertaking these investigations, the so-called magus, was.
He (and the magus was indeed always male) is well represented by such fascinating per-
sonalities as Ficino as well as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535), a
German neo-Platonist, who distinguished between manifest and occult properties of
objects,22 and Paracelsus (1493–1541), a neo-Platonic mystic, who wrote extensively on
medicine, alchemy, and astrology.23
Concurrent to the Renaissance, but not directly associated with it was the advent of
the witch-hunts. Understanding how and why the notion of witchcraft developed as it
did and the level of worry and violence it generated has inspired enormous amounts of
writing in our own day from the highly scholarly to the completely absurd. History Com-
pass has recently published a thorough article summarizing the historiography and current
status questionis on witchcraft and the witch hunts in the late medieval and early modern
West, and readers are advised to refer to it.24 Suffice it here to note that among the most
vexing challenges to understand witchcraft has to do with situating it in the broader sys-
tem of beliefs and practices of which it was a part: our own fascination with the lurid
aspects of the witch hunts has surely exaggerated their actual significance.25

1.4. THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The fourth, and here final, watershed in the history of pre-modern Western magic is
the Enlightenment. Although situated well subsequent to the Middle Ages, it marks the
cusp of the modern period and, at least at an elite scholarly level, the rejection of pre-
suppositions foundational to the workings of medieval magic. It therefore serves as a
suitable terminus to the study of ‘medieval magic’. Alternate endpoints, such as the
Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, have less explanatory power: the Reforma-
tion does not correlate to substantive declines or adjustments in belief in magic except
that Protestant polemic newly demeaned as magical and superstitious many practices
regarded within medieval Christianity and early modern Catholicism as genuinely reli-
gious, for example, the sacraments.26 Recent studies have also pointed out that belief
in demons was quite compatible with early modern scientific thought and even pro-
moted crucial developments.27 While each of these historical periods has been associ-
ated with the process of disenchantment made famous by the anthropologist Max
Weber, more recent research has been critical of timelines that simplistically identify
the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, or even the Enlightenment as
the decisive moment in Western disenchantment or that generalize too exuberantly
about its disenchanting effects.28 From another revisionist perspective, the Enlighten-
ment denunciation of superstition itself shares much in common with the early Chris-
tian one both in its designation of a large and absolute category of rejected beliefs,
idolatrous and heretical to the earlier group, irrational and foolish to the later one.29
Authors subsequent to Keith Thomas, who begins the ‘decline of magic’ with the six-
teenth-century Reformation, have had to address what there was in the eighteenth cen-
tury that more proximately motivated the decline.30 Yet the 2000s have also been

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marked by the appearance of a historical literature that challenges the notion of a

decline by highlighting sustained and transformed magical beliefs throughout the
Enlightenment period and beyond.31

2. Medieval Magic: The Historiography

2.1. THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Establishing a timeline for the development of modern scholarly approaches to magic, no

less than for the medieval history itself, involves tricky delineations. In point of fact, the
Enlightenment serves as a starting point for the historiography as effectively as it did an
endpoint for the history. The emblematic product of Enlightenment scholarship,
Diderot’s eighteenth-century Encyclopédie, included a domain on magic of eight topics
ranging from ananisapta to witchcraft. Numerous related terms can also be found outside
of the domain, such as goetia (the invocation of spirits), lots, demonography, enchant-
ment, and necromancy, and the jurisprudential evaluation of spell-casting. Denis Diderot
(1713–1784) himself composed entries on divination and Pythagorism.
The entry on magic by Antoine-Noé de Polier de Bottens (1713–1783), a Swiss
Reformed theologian, offers a representative view of the philosophes on magic, and so of
modern scholarship’s first approach to the topic.32 The entry locates magic’s origins in
the ancient pursuit of wisdom and in medical aspirations to heal. Astrology, divination,
and spell casting diverted magic from these noble beginnings and linked it to cultural bar-
barity and brutish peoples, such as, Polier offered by way of example, Laplanders. He
sketched a taxonomy, dividing magic into three categories: divine, which comprises
familiarity with the will of God and divine interventions in the natural world, such as
miracles; natural, which involves the study of hidden powers intrinsic to natural objects,
has led to developments associated with physics, astronomy, medicine, and navigation,
and has been speciously confused in the past with black and demonic magic; and super-
natural, ‘magic proper’, whose irrationality vainglory, ignorance, and ‘a dearth of Philoso-
phy’ exacerbate. Polier wrote, ‘It is nothing more than a confused mass of obscure,
uncertain, and unproven principles and practices, most of which are arbitrary and child-
ish, as proved by their ineffectiveness’. In short, the strategy, here as throughout the
Encyclopédie, is to highlight a so-called ‘natural magic’ that anticipates the natural sciences
and to deprecate the remaining ‘occult arts’ as the product of ignorance and credulity.
Magic’s relation to religion is ambivalent: the Encyclopédie suggests, on the one hand, that
religion in the best of senses might, in tandem with Philosophy, combat superstition and
oppose magic, but on the other, that religion commonly encourages superstition and
magic. It bears noting that these distinctions are not novel to the philosophes, nor place
them necessarily at odds with the Enlightenment’s traditional opponents. For example,
the corresponding entries in the Dictionnaire de Trévoux, a work with which several eigh-
teenth-century French Jesuits were affiliated, sketched nearly identical distinctions.33

2.2. APPROACHES OF THE MODERN SOCIAL SCIENCES

A subsequent stage of scholarly development dates to the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries. In it early sociologists and anthropologists developed interests in magic
within and beyond European society and forged a set of tools and methods that historians
gradually adopted themselves. The litany of well-known, influential figures begins with
Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), whose Primitive Culture (1871) provided a framework

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for organizing social development from lower to higher forms of civilization. Accord-
ingly, magic falls along a trajectory of belief development that moves through increasingly
civilized forms of religion.34 James Frazer (1854–1941) followed Tylor’s lead in The
Golden Bough (1890)35 but placed magic on a trajectory leading to real science. Magic, by
Frazer’s reckoning, functions according to two misconceived laws of nature that establish
the sympathetic relationships through which magic works: the one, imitation, links rituals
and real objects on the grounds that like produces like. Thus, one might injure or destroy
an enemy by harming his image, and a walnut might be used to alleviate a headache since
the nut resembles the human brain in appearance. The other law, contagion, establishes
the magical principle that what has once been joined remains so in some sense forever.
The severed body parts of one person (including hair cuttings, fingernails, lost limbs,
etc.), for example, might thus be used to exert power over that person even from a great
distance. Frazer’s scholarship also made conventional the distinction between magic as
command over spiritual forces and religion as propitiation of them.36
Emil Durkheim (1858–1917) advanced the discussion by rejecting magic and religion’s
shared reliance on a supernatural realm on the grounds that the Western distinction
between natural and supernatural is not cross-culturally valid or socially universal. His stu-
dents have further observed that even within the West, the distinction has not been abso-
lute or unchanging. Durkheim focused instead on the contrasting function that magical and
religious beliefs and practices have in the social life of given communities. By his reckoning,
religion serves the community, magic the individual; and religion placates and appeals to
supernatural powers, while magic compels them.37 Durkheim’s student and nephew Marcel
Mauss (1872–1950) added that magic tends toward the mysterious and prohibited, whereas
religion, its rites and organization, enjoys social sanction and public acknowledgement.38
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939), the author of How Natives Think (1910) and Primitive
Mentality (1923) focused his attention on the logical systems of a given society necessary
for religious and magical beliefs to make sense.39 Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942)
highlighted the different ends of magical and religious rituals: magical rituals seek after
concrete effects; religious rituals are ends in themselves, markers of the participants’ devo-
tion.40 E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) emphasized the explanatory role of magic in a
world where religion and science cannot explain misfortune and catastrophe.41
Anthropology continues to develop new perspectives on magic and its significance to
Western culture through time. The social anthropologist Stanley J. Tambiah (1929–)
turns to the categories of magic, science, and religion and considers a ‘quality of rational-
ity’ imputed to each. In so attending to the limits of Western scientific thought, Tambiah
engages in a critical analysis of the approaches described in the preceding paragraphs.42
Working within the discipline of religious studies, Randall G. Styers understands magic
to designate a form of alterity against normative religion, rationality, and orderly social
relations. Scholarly interest in it has been motivated by a concern ‘to establish and secure
distinctive norms for modern identity, norms based on narrow forms of instrumental
rationality, industrious labor, rigidly defined sexual roles, and the containment of way-
ward forms of desire’.43 Such insights point to the collapsing distinction between magic
and religion and the former’s consolidation into the latter, so too the increasingly dis-
couraged use of the term magic, as noted at the beginning of this essay.

2.3. MANUSCRIPT STUDY AND RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

The study of medieval magic has benefited from the overarching theories and insights of
the social sciences. The earliest historical studies resulted in important compendiums of

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edited documents, usually trial records pertaining to witchcraft and heresy.44 Although
the malformed conviction that the Middle Ages were a uniquely superstitious and cruel
era distorted these editions, the nineteenth-century emphasis on the documentary evi-
dence anchored the historical research in concrete situations and so planted the seeds that
later made evident the inadequacies of many early generalizations about magic in the
West. The revisionism of more recent scholarship is implicit in the historical overview
presented in the first part of this essay, most especially, the tendency of scholars to adopt
the definitions of magic used within the historical societies being studied instead of mod-
ern ones retrospectively applied.45 Along these lines, the debate over magic’s reality has
recently become heated: Edward Bever argues, for example, that it is insufficient for his-
torians merely to reconstruct the cultural and linguistic reality of medieval magic. Instead,
he proposes a scale of reality on which historians should evaluate the historical apprehen-
sion of magic. Accordingly, magic’s reality could be explained variously as the simple
misjudgment of ordinary physical events or with reference to chemical and electrical pro-
cesses within the neural circuitry of the historical participants.46
Revisionist approaches to the West’s apparent disenchantment also are also inspiring
new studies of magic. Official rejections of superstition and hostilities toward certain
kinds of magic in the Middle Ages, early modern science’s appropriation of magical prac-
tices and insights, and rediscoveries of nineteenth-century sympathies toward magic have
encouraged critical return to the disenchantment thesis.47 Such revisionism will be greatly
enhanced as the two principal scholarly discourses of magic – the one regarding magic in
relation to religion; the other, to science – increasingly inform each other.48
The historical study of magic in general and of medieval magic in particular is among the
most vibrant fields of study today. New sources are regularly being identified, new ways of
interpretation are being applied to long familiar texts, richly developed schools of thought
and methodologies battle over contrasting interpretations, and significant questions of intel-
lectual, cultural, and social history are being addressed. Magic may well be no more than a
term of convenience and lack any connection to reality; still, even as fantasy and construct,
medieval magic is today certainly proving itself a fertile topic for scholarly inquiry.

Short Biography
David J. Collins, S. J., is an associate professor of medieval history at Georgetown Uni-
versity. He received his doctorate in history in 2004 from Northwestern University in
Evanston, Illinois. He has published extensively on the cult of saints and Renaissance
humanism in Germany. As a research fellow of the Humboldt and Henkel Foundations
in Munich, he has begun investigating the process of Europe’s disenchantment by
examining medieval and early modern controversies over learned magic in academic,
ecclesiastical, and courtly milieus. On this topic, he has recently published on the
thirteenth-century scholastic Albertus Magnus and the influence and reception of his
teachings on magic.

Notes
* Correspondence: Georgetown University, 3700 O St. NW (571035), Washington, DC 20057-1035, USA.
Email: djc44@georgetown.edu.

1
E.g., Franciscus A. M. Wiggermann, ‘Magic – Religious Studies’, in Hans Dieter Betz, et al. (eds.), Religion Past
and Present (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 7: 712.

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2
Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), i. Or, going one step fur-
ther, ‘Magic does not exist, nor does religion’, Henk S. Versnel, ‘Some Reflections on the Relationship Magic-
Religion’, Numen, 38 (1991): 177.
3
Richard Kieckhefer, ‘The Specific Rationality of Medieval Magic’, American Historical Review, 99 (1994): 813–34.
4
Euan Cameron offers a sympathetic account of the intellectual history associating the Protestant Reformation
with increasing rationality and leading to twentieth-century modernism: Cameron, Enchanted Europe: Superstition,
Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–30. Cf., Kieckhefer, Magic in the
Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), x.
5
Michael D. Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present (Lanham, UK:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 2–3.
6
The bibliography on the problem of periodization is lengthy. See Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe,
1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 191; Howard Kaminsky, ‘From Lateness to Waning to
Crisis: The Burden of the Later Middle Ages’, Journal of Early Modern History 4 (2000): 85–125; and Bailey, ‘The
Age of Magicians: Periodization in the History of Magic’, Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, 3 (2008): 1–28.
7
Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
8
Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700: A Documentary History, 2nd edn. (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 41–2. See also, Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, ed. R. W.
Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 22, 10.
9
E.g., Flint, The Rise of Magic.
10
Benedek Láng, Unlocked Books: Manuscripts of Learned Magic in the Medieval Libraries of Central Europe (University
Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 3–4, 53.
11
James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, ed. Robert Fraser (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
12
Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 227–425.
13
Karen Louise Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1996).
14
The papers collected in Demons, Spirits, Witches incorporates the northern and eastern regions of Western Europe
into the overarching analysis of magic in the Middle Ages: Éva Pócs and Gábor Klaniczay, eds., Demons, Spirits,
Witches, 3 vols. (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005–2008). For an overview of magic in Scandina-
via, see: Catharina Raudvere, ‘Trolldomr: Witchcraft in Ancient Scandinavia’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark
(eds.), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 73–
171.
15
Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983); James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London: Longman, 1995); Hilde de Ridder-
Symoens (ed.), Universities in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
16
Jean-Patrice Boudet, Entre science et nigromance: Astrologie, divination et magie dans l‘Occident médiéval (XIIe - XVe
siècle) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006); Jeremiah M. G. Hackett, ‘Astrology and the Search for an Art and
Science of Nature in the Thirteenth Century’, in Giancarlo Marchetti, Orsola Rignani, and Valeria Sorge (eds.),
Ratio et Superstitio (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 2003), 117–36;
Láng, Unlocked Books; Nicolas Weill-Parot, Les ‘‘images astrologiques’’ au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance: Spéculations in-
tellectuelles et pratiques magiques, XIIe-XVe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2002); Günther Oestmann, H.
Darrel Rutkin, and Kocku von Stuckrad (eds.), Horoscopes and Public Spheres: Essays on the History of Astrology
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005); Jan R. Veenstra, Magic and Divination at the Courts of Burgundy and France: Text
and Context of Laurens Pignon‘s ‘‘Contre les devineurs’’ (1411) (Leiden: Brill, 1998).
17
Alain Boureau, Satan the Heretic: The Birth of Demonology in the Medieval West, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
18
Edward Peters, The Magician, the Witch, and the Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978);
Torture (New York: B. Blackwell, 1985); Inquisition (New York: Free Press, 1988); R. I. Moore, The Formation of a
Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
19
The literature is inexhaustable. Here are listed only a few of the most recent studies: Heidi Breuer, Crafting the
Witch (London: Routledge, 2009); Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003);
Lea T. Olsan, ‘Enchantment in Medieval Literature’, in Sophie Page (ed.), The Unorthodox Imagination in Late Medie-
val Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 166–92; Corinne J. Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural
in Medieval English Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010); and Michelle Sweeney, Magic in Medieval Romance
(Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000).
20
Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Brian
Vickers explains his rejection of the Yates thesis in his introduction to Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renais-
sance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1–56.
21
Charles Burnett and W. F. Ryan, Magic and the Classical Tradition (London: Warburg Institute, 2006); Florian
Ebeling, The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times, trans. David Lorton (Ith-
aca: Cornell University Press, 2007); Antoine Faivre, The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus

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418 Medieval Magic

(Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1995), 181–5; Wouter J. Hanegraaff, ‘Beyond the Yates Paradigm: The Study of
Western Esotericism between Counterculture’, Aries, 1 (2001): 5–37; and Paolo Lucentini, Ilaria Parri, and Vittoria
Perrone Compagni (eds.), Hermetism from Late Antiquity to Humanism (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003).
22
Paola Zambelli, ‘Magic and Radical Reformation in Agrippa of Nettesheim’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 39 (1976): 69–103; Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke, ‘Johannes Trithemius und Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
von Nettesheim’, in Richard Auernheimer and Frank E. Baron (eds.), Johannes Trithemius: Humanismus und Magie
im vorreformatorischen Deutschland (Munich: Profil, 1991), 39–60; Charles Zika, ‘Agrippa of Nettesheim and his
Appeal to the Cologne Council in 1533’, in James V. Mehl (ed.), Humanismus in Köln (Cologne: Böhlau, 1991),
119–74; Carlos Gilly, ‘The First Book of White Magic in Germany’, in Carlos Gilly and Cis van Heertum (eds.,)
Magic, Alchemy and Science (Florence: Centro Di, 2002), 209–17; Christopher I. Lehrich, The Language of Demons
and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa‘s Occult Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Marc van der Poel, Cornelius Agrippa: The
Humanist Theologian and his Declamations (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Charles G. Nauert, Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance
Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965).
23
Pirmin Meier, Paracelsus: Arzt und Prophet, 3rd edn. (Zürich: Ammann, 1993); Heinz Schott and Ilana Zinguer,
Paracelsus und seine internationale Rezeption in der frühen Neuzeit (Boston: Brill, 1998); Charles Webster, Paracelsus:
Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
24
Thomas A. Fudge, ‘Traditions and Trajectories in the Historiography of European Witch Hunting’, History
Compass, 4 (2006): 488–527. See also, Bailey, ‘From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the
Later Middle Ages’, Speculum 76 (2001): 960–90; ‘A Late-Medieval Crisis of Superstition?’, Speculum, 84 (2009):
633–61.
25
Bengt Ankarloo, ‘Introduction’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (eds.), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The
Period of the Witch Trials (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), vii–viii; William Monter, ‘Witch
Trials in Continental Europe, 1560–1660’, in ibid., 6–18, 49–51; Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex,
and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necro-
mancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).
Yet another early modern perspective on the workings of demons in the world, possessions and exorcisms, has been
newly investigated in Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early
Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
26
See the contrasting view of the Reformation impact on magical beliefs and practices in the writings of Keith
Thomas and Bob Scribner: Robert W. Scribner, ‘Incombustible Luther: The Image of the Reformer in Early Mod-
ern Germany’, Past and Present (1986): 38–68; ‘Witchcraft and Judgement in Reformation Germany’, History Today,
40 (1990): 12–9; ‘Magie und Aberglaube: Zur volkstümlichen sakramentalischen Denkart in Deutschland am Aus-
gang des Mittelalters’, in Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter R. Bauer (eds.), Volksreligion im hohen und späten Mittelalter
(Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1990), 253–74; ‘The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘‘Disenchantment of
the World’’ ’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23 (1993): 475–94; ‘Magic, Witchcraft and Superstition (review arti-
cle)’, The Historical Journal, 37 (1994): 219–23; and Keith Vivian Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in
Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971). See also, most
recently, Cameron, Enchanted Europe, 1–30.
27
Clark, Thinking with Demons. See also the work on magic and the rise of science in, e.g., Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs,
The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton‘s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
Yates, Giordano Bruno. A recent volume of the Cambridge History of Science has incorporated chapters on the rela-
tionship of magic and early modern science: Brian P. Copenhaver, ‘Magic’, in Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston
(eds.), The Cambridge History of Science: Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 518–
40; William Donahue, ‘Astronomy’, ibid., 562–95; William R. Newman, ‘From Alchemy to ‘‘Chymistry’’ ’, ibid.,
497–517; and H. Darrel Rutkin, ‘Astrology’, ibid., 541–62.
28
Michael Saler, ‘Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review’, American Historical Review, 111 (2006):
692–716.
29
Bailey, ‘A Late-Medieval Crisis’, 633–61.
30
Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 177–279. Or, alternatively, to undermine Thomas’s hypothesis, as does
Eamon Duffy in The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 1–2, 277.
31
Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004); David Allen Harvey, Beyond Enlightenment: Occultism and Politics in Modern France (DeKalb,
Illinois: Northern Illinois University, 2005); Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies (eds.), Witchcraft Continued:
Popular Magic in Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Owen Davies and Willem de
Blécourt (eds.), Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2004); Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). See also the collected essays of Jan N. Bremmer and Jan
R. Veenstra (eds.), The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (Leuven: Peeters,
2002).
32
Denis Diderot and Jean de Rond d‘Alembert (eds.), Encyclopédie (Paris, 1751–1765). The entry on magic
appeared in volume nine in December 1765. I am grateful to my research assistant, Ted W. Worm, for his

ª 2011 The Author History Compass 9/5 (2011): 410–422, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00776.x

History Compass ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
 Medieval Magic 419

comparative analysis of Polier’s entry and Gabriel Naudé’s schematization of magic in the Apologie pour tous les grands
personnages qui ont esté faussement soupçonnez de magie (Paris, 1625). See also Luciana Alocco, ‘Le domaine obscur et
inconfortable de la ‘‘magie’’ ’, Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie, 40–41 (2006): 233–50.
33
Dictionnaire universal françois et latin (Paris, 1771) 5: 719–20. Editions were published at Trévoux in 1704 and
1721 and at Paris in 1732, 1743, 1752, and 1771). See Arnold Miller, ‘The Last Edition of the Dictionnaire de
Trévoux’, in Frank A. Kafker (ed.), Notable Encyclopedias of the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Voltaire Founda-
tion, 1994), 5–50; and Lucette Perol, ‘La notion de superstition de Furetière au Dictionnaire de Trévoux et à l’Encyc-
lopédie’, in Bernard Dompnier (ed.), La superstition à l’âge des Lumières (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 1998),
67–92.
34
Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language,
Art, and Custom, 4th edn. (London: J. Murray, 1993).
35
Frazer, The Golden Bough.
36
Versnel, ‘Some Reflections on the Relationship Magic-Religion’, 171.
37
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (Mineola, NY: Dover
Publications, Inc., 2008).
38
Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic (London: Routledge, 1972).
39
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality, trans. Lilian A. Clare (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1923); How
Natives Think (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
40
Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948).
41
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937).
42
Stanley J. Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990).
43
Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004), 25–7.
44
Jules Michelet, Satanism and Witchcraft, trans. A. R. Allinson (New York: Carol Pub. Group, 1992); Henry
Charles Lea, The Inquisition of the Middle Ages: Its Organization and Operation (New York: Harper & Row, 1969);
Materials toward a History of Witchcraft, 3 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1986); A History of the Inquisition of Spain, 4
vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1988); Joseph Hansen (ed.), Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns
und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Bonn: C. Georgi, 1901); Zauberwahn, Inquisition und Hexenprozess im Mittelalter,
und die Entstehung der Grossen Hexenverfolgung (Aalen: Scientia, 1964).
45
Kieckhefer, ‘The Specific Rationality’, 813–34.
46
Bever, The Realities. Reactions to Bever’s work appeared in the journal Magic, Witchcraft, and Ritual: ‘Contend-
ing Realities: Reactions to Edward Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe’, Magic,
Ritual, and Witchcraft, 5 (2010): 81–121.
47
Classically, Dieter Harmening, Superstitio: Überlieferungs- und Theoriegeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur kirchlich-theolog-
ischen Aberglaubensliteratur des Mittelalters (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1979). Recently, Cameron, Enchanted Europe. See
also Bailey, ‘The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Litera-
ture’, American Historical Review, 111 (2006): 383–404; Bailey, ‘A Late-Medieval Crisis’, 633–61.
48
Clark, Thinking with Demons. Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: University of Cam-
bridge Press, 2001); Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2006). H. Darrel Rutkin, ‘Astrology, Natural Philosophy and the History of Science, c. 1250–1700: Studies toward
an Interpretation of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola‘s Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem’(Ph.D. dissertation,
Indiana University, 2002); Rutkin, ‘Astrology’.

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