This module discusses the role of magic in medieval culture, with particular attention to the Old English texts included in SEAFARER, and to some Middle English texts taught in Early Narratives and Chaucer.
Contents: The Narrative discusses the following subjects:
Part 1: The Importance of Magic to the Middle Ages
Part 3: The Function of Magic in Old and Middle English Texts
Part 4: Renaissance Changes in the Tradition of Magic
You can skip to any one of these parts by clicking the appropriate hyperlink .
To learn about the LINKS and IMAGES that accompany this narrative, click on the appropriate hyperlink. We recommend that you consult So What? after you have read one or two parts of the narrative below.. Note that the sources used in the narrative are listed in the Bibliography and are cited here only by author and page or by author, title, and page.
Magic appears to most people to concern spectacle and illusion produced by concealed means--in other words, tricks and a form of entertainment. To see how widespread this view of magic is one need only consult the card catalogue of any library. Book on magic tricks and famous magicians far outnumber those that discuss the function of magic in the mental processes of humans throughout history.
Equally powerful is the link between magic and fantasy. When we were doing the research for this module of SEAFARER, we learned that a course on Magic in the Middle Ages had been offered at Brown University in Spring 1992. The students, asked at the end of the course why they had signed up for the course (over 500 registered because the course was offered in a category that Brown students traditionally consider a "gut"), had two responses: 1) they had been reading "sword-and-sorcery fantasy literature" and/or were playing "Dungeons and Dragons" or 2)they were convinced "that science and technology were wholly evil" and hoped that a course on magic would help them deal with a complex world without having recourse to either science or technology. (See LINK10 for more about the Brown course.)
These comments are rather disheartening to those who take the intellectual systems of earlier cultures seriously, but they help establish two points. First, magic invokes a world of fantasy and make-believe with powerful appeal. Second, magic is thought to have practical implications, as we see in students' response: they expected magic to help them solve real problems in their lives. Magic promises escape from the constraints of reality and at the same time offers the promise of secret power over reality.
A pair of illustrations will be useful here. Our discussion connects magic to social institutions and processes, including medical connections (which you can pursue in the Medicine module) and astrology. Medicine stresses the practical aspect of magic as a way to deal with pain and suffering, physical or mental. Astrology emphasizes magic's role in an intellectual system.
If we include pain among the "constraints of reality," it is significant that many Anglo-Saxon texts invoking magic are charms, which are--not unexpectedly--very close to prayers in function, if not in form. (You can read some Old English charms by switching to the Medicine 's third part.)module. Magic, practiced as a response to illness or injury, was a complex art that required knowledge of herbs, incantations, and ways of making words and objects work together, as in amulets; and see talisman. Magic was used to invoke the powers of love and therefore to cure the sicknesses of the heart as well as of the rest of the body. Magic, like medicine, is situated at the boundary between sacred and secular culture; exorcism is one such intersection, a moment that can be seen as medical as well as magic, as religious as well as superstitious.
Quite removed from these earthy matters is the astrological function of magic. It was because magic was described within (although contrary to) a comprehensive system of the cosmos that some operations that belong to magic were tolerated by the Church. Of the subjects and practices encompassed by magic in the Middle Ages, only one, astrology, managed to survive the strictures of the Church and acquire what Edward Peters calls "a certain degree of legitimacy" (66). Astrologers could be subject to charges of practicing black or forbidden magic, but their skills were necessary to setting the medieval clock and to regulating the cyclic year.
What you will learn about magic in this SEAFARER module will not appeal to appetites for . Our interest is not in fantasy or secret powers over space and time; instead it is magic as a means to knowledge, legitimate and illegitimate, in English culture between 600 and 1500. One of the key questions about the place of magic in the medieval world is its relation to systems of control and authority. Some forms of magic challenged the system; others did not. Magic, therefore, is a useful way to conceptualize numerous social and sexual divisions of medieval life.
Magic is a vast subject. The first modern history of the subject, Lynn Thorndike's the History of Magic and Science, consumes eight large volumes; begun in 1922, it was completed only in 1958. Thorndike shows that magic has been a pervasive feature of cultures ranging from the most ancient and partially documented through to modern times. Thorndike was building on the foundations created by Sir James Frazer, another important early authority on the subject, who wrote in 1911 that magic is found "among all peoples and at every period" (Frazer 1:426).
Assertions of the universality of magic are routine; what becomes important is how magic fits into larger patterns of social development. Thorndike, for example, asserted that magic was fundamental to the evolution of modern science and that indeed magic was the primitive origin of scientific thinking. J. Bronowski vigorously disputed Thorndike's evolutionary claims for magic and argued that magic differs from science in a single key aspect. Science works with nature rather than against it, Bronowski said, while magic seeks to turn nature upside down and to force nature to yield secrets or results that nature resists or refuses to produce. (This concept of magic would seem to be the one held by many of the students at Brown University mentioned above.) For Bronowski, the defining moment separating magic from science is Francis Bacon, the English philosopher and essayist (d. 1626), who declared, in Novum Organum in 1620, that "We cannot command Nature except by obeying her" (quoted page 36; consider the implications of the gendering of Nature as female here).
Science bows to nature; magic defies nature. Bronowski points out that witches are said to ride backwards on brooms for this reason, and that Masses and other Satanic rituals seek to discover forbidden power precisely by reversing the ritual or ceremony that is thought to conceal power.
In Magic in the Middle Ages, which is being in several Loyola courses in 1992-93 in conjunction with the program of the Medieval Studies Committee, Richard Kieckhefer sees magic as a crossroads for the intersection of 1) religion and science 2) popular and learned culture and 3) fiction and reality (3). This set of ideas is useful because it prompts us to ask what magic does, not only what magic is. Magic intersects with social and intellectual categories, whether such interaction was permitted or prohibited by medieval processes and institutions.
Kieckhefer's three categories suggest why magic is an especially fruitful subject:
Magic has now acquired a dubious reputation, but in the Middle Ages it held a place among legitimate structures of knowledge. Magic was a highly formalized and learned body of lore with Greek and Arabic roots. These learned origins gave magic a respectability and prestige that magic as practiced in folk contexts could never rival. It is equally significant that magic retains some respectability today precisely because of these non-Western and hence "multicultural" origins.
Thorndike defines magic to include "all occult arts and sciences, superstition, and folk-lore" (1:2), "a mass of idea or doctrine" that represented "a way of looking at the world." He includes "all arts of divination, including astrology," as magic (1:4). Even though he warns against the tendency to see magic as the origins of everything from music to medicine (1:6), Thorndike stresses a continuum between magic and experimental science and emphasized the importance of magic as the source of a world-view.
A stricter definition of magic is found in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages (hereafter DMA), which omits animism, astrology, alchemy, and divination (also known as sortilege) from the scope of magic and defines magic as a route to practical knowledge that uses the processes of life on earth to reveal the secrets of the past, foretell the future, or effect favorable change (DMA. "Magic, Bookish". 32).
The DMA claims that up to the seventeenth century there was no competition between magic and science: magic produced phenomena and science studied them. The DMA argues that magic acts took five forms:
W. Noeth writes that the magician "neglects the principle of independent between the sign and the 'thing' referred to" and thinks instead that the sign and the thing as a unity, either homologous or identical (66). Thus by changing the sign one also changes the thing to which it refers. This semiotic approach to magic should be extended from magicians' views to include the views of those who believe in magic, who make the same (faulty) assumptions. See Cameron in the Bibliography for more and also Medicine LINK 6.
The DMA offers another useful paradigm for relating magic to order, in this case to the structure of the cosmos. At the top is of course God, whose powers are unlimited. Next are angels and demons, both of whom enjoy powers denied to humans; beneath them are heavenly bodies, who dominate life on earth (as, again, we will see in numerous sources) and whose powers are understood through astrology. Then there is the terrestrial world, constrained by natural laws and also subject to preternatural or supernatural intervention. Binding all these levels together was a clear concept of law within which religion and custom regulated life according to accepted (and indeed obligatory) patterns. Magic was a way to circumvent or alter this order: magic broke the routine, disrupted the pattern, violated the laws, and hence was "unnatural."
If you have read Chaucer, you can find an example of magic as an evasion of "natural law" in the Man of Law's Tale, in which East meets West. A Syrian sultan becomes enamored of the daughter of the Roman emperor's daughter, whose name is Custance. "In the large book that men say was written in the heavens," the narrator comments, it was ordained that he would die for love:
For in the stars, clearer than glass,
God knows, is written for those who can read it
Every man's death, without any doubt. (B190-96)
The sultan's wish for this woman cannot be denied, but the cultural barriers to it are tremendous (race and religion chief among them). His advisors try "magyk and abusion" (magic and deceit) to change his mind, but they cannot (B 214).
This example recognizes two kinds of magic, with one opposing another: the "magic" of astrology is set against the "magyk" that could apparently change the sultan's destiny. The former is knowledge outside human control, or fate; the other is knowledge that certain humans can use to intervene in fate. We can see the importance of the magician in this cosmos: the magician had the power to cross the boundaries of knowledge and power that kept this order stable.
The magician or magus acquired his name from the magi (MGI) of the Orient. A magus was a priest with the skills to heal, predict the motions of the stars, and manage the occult. Magicians were, in a Christian context in the early medieval period, seen as masters of pagan practices that resisted the powers of Christian teaching. But in the later period, as Chaucer and other writers show, the magician could be characterized as a benevolent, powerful resource for those whose desires or wills were frustrated by the social order or the order of nature. In this sense of order-makers or order-breakers, magicians are distinct from witches.
The association of magic with false belief, including heresy, was fundamental to the identity of magicians in the Middle Ages. Like magic, as Peters notes, heresy was seen as commerce with demons: "the images of the magician and the heretic were shaped by the same kind of fear and revulsion" (xvi). The relation of magic to power explains why those who practices magic were rapidly associated with heretics. In the late antique period (that is, fourth and fifth centuries), this relationship was clearly emerging for the first time as part of the explanation for political change. Peter Brown has described magic at the intersection of the clash of two kinds of power: "articulate power: power defined and agreed upon by everyone," and against it "inarticulate power: the disturbing intangibles of social life; the imponderable advantages of certain groups; personal skills that succeed in a way that is unacceptable or difficult to understand." "Where these two systems overlap," Brown writes, "we may expect to find the sorcerer." (Peters 9).
Among those whose success is "unacceptable or difficult to understand" we can place various powerless groups or groups traditionally thought to obtain power by illegitimate means, including Jews. When the power of individuals within such groups could be traced to magic or heresy, it was relatively easy to bring under normative control. As Peters says in his comments on Brown's view, "Just as heresy is the sin against the Church par excellence, so is magic the sin against the temporal ruler . . . ." (10).
The first Christians were accused of magic (of secret rites, for example). Kieckhefer uses secrecy to differentiate pagan from Christian ideas of magic in antiquity. Pagans who opposed magic, he writes, did so only when it was "secret and antisocial," used to invoke gods in private--rather than in public or acceptable ceremonies--in order to bring evil to others. Christians did not oppose secrecy since they were "secretic," Kieckhefer writes, and this of necessity, for their religion was new and, for a time, dangerous (37-38). Christians, with this view, gave magic a new meaning as a false or idolatrous religious: magic became separated from and opposed to true religion, a view that we will see in the early Christian era, the Middle Ages, and in the Renaissance.
Women's use of magic challenged public forms of power and therefore emphasized the opposition true belief and magical practice. Women who claimed to have access to special knowledge were not classified in the same category as men making comparable claims, and for reasons that are now wholly apparent. For women to claim such powers was a serious disruption of the distribution of legitimate knowledge along gender lines within class lines. Women who sought the aid of magic often did so in order to control their lovers (as Dido does in the Aeneid when Aeneas leaves her; see Kieckhefer (31) for this and other examples). Magic offers an important intersection women's access to knowledge as a means of gaining sexual control in Scriftboc, we will see below. Sexual freedom must be sought through illegitimate means, an indication that legitimate knowledge suppresses or forbids what men as well as women desire.
Kieckhefer's paradigm of intersections--of crossroads-- shows that he is more concerned with the relations between magic and other phenomena than with a strictly limited definition of the subject. Fundamental to his discussion is a two-part division that distinguishes "natural magic" from "demonic magic," with the former being seen as "a branch of science" and the latter as "a perversion of religion" (9). Chaucer's Physician-pilgrim, we are told, uses only "magyk natureel" (General Prologue, A416; see the Medicine module for more). Kieckhefer stresses the interaction of magical practices with religious belief; readers will find his discussions of magic in the Bible (Chapter 2), of magic and paganism (Chapter 3), and of magic and prayer (parts of Chapters 4 and 7) especially valuable in this regard.
A. Old English (Anglo-Saxon, c. 600-1200)
Old English courses traditionally rely on two important sources for information about Anglo-Saxon literary and cultural traditions, Bede's Ecclesiastical History (finished in 734), and Beowulf, possibly as early as the ninth century (some think earlier) and surely the most famous text in Old English. In Beowulf, magic is connected with monsters and so is in suspect. Magic is attached to weapons in the poem, in particular to shields and swords and the protection they offer (a connection to Sir Gawain as well). Like clothing, armor signifies the moral qualities of those who wear it, which is why the genealogy of weapons, like that of wealth, is often the most important thing about it. In Beowulf magic is also connected to writing through runes and through the important Old English word "cræft," which means, among other things, "skill, art, and ability." Both these words--runes and craft--are links that lead to more about magic in the Old English period, both to secret or "runic" writing and to witchcraft. LINK 1 raises issues about magic and continuity achieved through magical objects or through the magic process of writing.
Bede's concern with magic is more direct, since he sees it as a pagan survival that is among the traditions that needs to be replaced by the Church's teaching and its own liturgies and ceremonies. LINK 2 suggests that Bede has pragmatic attitudes about astrology and dogmatic attitudes about heresy, as we might expect. In the Anglo-Saxon period, astrology was necessary knowledge, for without information about the heavens would have been impossible to calculate such essential dates as that of Easter. This is a topic, as all readers of his History quickly learn, that was of supreme importance to Bede (d. 735). Bede compiled a computus or means of calculating important information for the ecclesiastical calendar. To this extent the early Church seems now to have drawn a line between astrology and occult knowledge, but in fact what links these two systems is the universal need for a calendar.
In some SEAFARER texts, magic is important precisely because it is absent. This is true in a variety of texts in which mistaken belief is not being illustrated and in which, instead, true belief is the point. True belief in two causes of sudden change, either human goodness (including conversion) or divine will (Providence), takes the place of magic as an agent. In the Scriftboc, the Old English penitential in SEAFARER, we see an association between magic, women, and sex. (Note: "scrift" means "confession," "boc" means "book.") In the Introduction to confession that begins this text, the priest warns the sinner to "keep the twelve Ember Days that are in the year and guard yourself against witchcraft and magic (poison) arts and fornication and detraction [slander] and pride and covetousness of other men's possessions" (b01.06.4). Note that magic or poison arts are included with other major sins. You might want to check the definition of "Ember Days," by the way. This first reference to magic is not gender-specific, but the second and third in Scriftboc make a clear connection between the "evil arts" and women. A woman could be suspected of practicing "magic and incantations and witchcraft and the like" (14.05.0) or of killing someone "with her witchcraft" (14.06.0). Women were also suspected of using love potions (see 14.08) and employing other means to gain control over the body, whether for sexual purposes or for healing. It is clear that magic was a route to power for women that the Church tried to block. (LINK 3)
A denunciation of a cure for sick children appears in the Scriftboc (the whole of one chapter, 16, concerns sacrifices to demons): a woman is told not to put her child on a rooftop to cure him or her of a fever, for example. The penitentials are useful evidence in this regard, although Kieckhefer's observation that they tell us "what people did, not what they thought" (46) has to be treated with caution (see the Penance module for further information).
What one notices about the Voyages in regard to magic is that the text explicitly explains even remarkable events as having clearly natural causes. For example, the art of keeping a body from decay--up to six months--is explained in the same way that the ability to chill beer is explained: by the use of ice (see paragraphs 12 and 13). Causing things to be frozen over (see paragraph 14) is no mystery at all. But the absence of magic in this text is no indication, of course, that the Scandinavians did not believe in magic; what we see instead is that this kind of matter-of-fact, highly informational discourse has no use for reference to supernatural causes. Theology is not among the issues, which are instead practical matters of direct observation.
We find no references to magic in the Colloquy or the Life of Ceolfrith, either--at least none that is obvious, and in this case the omission is due to the strict theological orthodoxy that governs the texts. In the case of Ceolfrith, the source of wondrous events or unexpected turns is either God's providence or human goodness. Both appear in paragraph 34, when providence supplies a war and Ceolfrith's father turning a feast for the nobility, who are gone off to fight, into a feast for the poor instead. Providence--certainly not magic--is also responsible for snatching Elias into heaven referred to in Gregory's letter to Hwætbert (Paragraph 39). the Colloquy also displays a combination of practical information (even if not particularly technical) that excludes magic. This text, as an instructional document (in several senses) has no place either for injunctions against magic as a negative example or for supernatural causes for events.
The Life of Leofgyth, however, offers an important exception. You will remember that, in this text, an evil nun's grave is desecrated by her infuriated subordinates (see Paragraph 4, and look at LINK 3 again). After the young nuns trample on the grave, Tette, the abbess, visits it and finds "that in a wonderful manner the earth which had lately been heaped up had subsided and sunk to the distance of half a foot below the top of the grave." Horrified, the nun demands a period of fasting and penance, after which the hole in the grave "began to fill with the rising soil, so that in one and the same moment she arose from prayer and the earth made level the grave. Hence it is plainly shown that, when the monument visibly returned to its former state, the divine virtue invisibly absolved the soul of the dead woman through the prayers of the holy nun" (Paragraph 4).
This transformation is an intersection of good and evil, just as the dead nun's misguided ideas about discipline were. The earth sinks because the nuns jumped on it, of course; but the hole is described as "wonderful" (Paragraph 4) and Tette is frightened by it as she would not be by an event she understood. The earth rises to fill the grave as a result of prayer; the cause of that wonder is not a mystery. Note that the young nuns "reproach" the dead nun to "relieve their mortification." This act may refer to a curse --an important instrument in magic--on the dead. The nuns "curse her cruelty" as if they expect their words to affect the dead woman's fate. Tette reprimands them for this curse; she herself is singled out for never having cursed (Paragraph 11).
It is also interesting that we find the intersection of prayer and magic here, a mixture Kieckhefer discusses. In her letter to Boniface, Leofgyth implores him to defended her "by the shield of your prayers against the poisonous darts of the secret enemy" (see the end of the text). Here words are imaged as though they offered physical protection against the "darts" of satanic temptation.
B. Middle English Texts (c. 1300-1500)
Several Middle English texts offer diverse views on the understanding of magic in the Middle Ages. One is Sir Gawain the Green Knight, the plot of which turns on magic transformations of the Green Knight and the Morgan Lefay, and which also presents the possibility of the bauderik or Green Girdle as an amulet, a device that will protect its wearer from harm. (LINK 4) Note that Gawain seeks protection and that he feels that he must conceal this magical device not only from his host but from his confessor.
The link between confession, magic, and forgiveness is important in the the Second Shepherd's Play (also discussed in SEAFARER in the Labor Module, where you should see Link 5) and in the Pardoner's Tale. In the play, as in Sir Gawain, evil characters are associated with magic (in this case Mak, the thieving shepherd, and Gil, his accomplice and wife); magic stands opposite to true belief, and the contrast is made plain in music. (LINK 5)
If you have had Chief British Writers I, you will be able to work with the place of magic in both the above texts. The Canterbury Tales are another focus for magic in medieval texts; we will see that Chaucer frequently referred to the subject and that he understood it in diverse ways.
One that almost all students of Chaucer encounter is the association of astrology with hidden knowledge in the Miller's Tale. There the clerk (that is, student) Nicholas uses astrology to deceive old John and cuckold him. When Nicholas has kept to his room for several days and feigns illness, John says, "I crouche thee from elves and fro wightes" (evil spirits and evil creatures; A3478-79). John says a "night spell" and otherwise displays his belief in the curative powers of incantations. Note how Chaucer pits a learned group (students) against working people, a link to labor and rank. (LINK 6) (See the Reeve's Tale, too.)
Magic is important to the Franklin's Tale and the Canon's Yeoman's Tale. The Franklin's narrative refers to magic four times, more than any other of Chaucer's texts. It is about a young squire whose only hope of winning his love, a married woman, is to make black rocks disappear from the coast of Brittany, and he does (or does he?) with the assistance of a former colleague who is now a magician at Orleans. Although the tale is complicated and plainly suggestive of exploitative relationships, it is a romance --check the definition, because this does not mean "love story"--and approximates a happy ending. (LINK 7)
The Canon's Yeoman's Tale is quite different--a tale of frustration and exploitation with a complicated technical vocabulary that suggests that Chaucer's familiarity with alchemy (ACM) and its false claims that alchemists could turn base metals into gold. This tale condenses alchemical learning in Chaucer's time and offers a way to examine the perversion of commerce that alchemy was (see Harwood in the Bibliography). The tale also calls attention to an "alchemical" issue at the heart of Christianity, the power of the priest to turn bread and wine into Christ's body and blood, or Transubstantiation (LINK 11).
Another tale in which magic is dealt with in a sinister way is the Pardoner's Tale (LINK 8), which examines the intersection between magic and religious belief in the context of the forgiveness of sins. For a thirteenth-century text that connects gender to magic, see LINK 9.
The history of magic in the Renaissance is far more complicated than in the Middle Ages, and literary expressions of magical powers, from Marlowe's to Shakespeare's, are likewise more elaborate. Dr. Faustus is a splendid example of how magic and illusion raise not only traditional themes of the abuse of legitimate knowledge, but also satire against the corrupt Church (magic and Catholicism) in a form of mockery pervasive in the period. Return to LINK10 for this discussion.
Faustus is a Renaissance work with medieval roots of many kinds. Bronowski observes that magic developed differently in Roman Catholic and Protestant countries. Transubstantiation was a controversial issue during the Protestant Reformation and was one of the reasons why Roman Catholicism was associated with black magic. "Magic" was seen as a suspect and unprovable aspect of Catholic doctrine, not just an article of faith but an assertion about bread and wine that contradicted empirical observation. Transubstantiation played a crucial role at the onset of the Reformation in England and C. E. Wright lists it among the four predominant concerns for reforming the Roman Church in England
The others on Wright's list: royal supremacy (the English monarch's independence from the Pope); the right to read the Bible in the vernacular; and the return to "the purity of the Primitive Church."
Major literary historians of the Renaissance, including the notorious polemicist John Foxe, wrote that after the Norman Conquest (1066), Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury and others destroyed the authentic Latin sources of the Anglo-Saxon Church. "Studying by al means how to preserve and further this their newcome doctrine," Foxe wrote, these conspirators "did abolish and rase out of Libraries and Churches, all such bookes which made to the contrary" of their views (Foxe, Acts and Monuments 1141).
According to Foxe, all "heresies," including celibacy of the clergy, Transubstantiation, worship of the Blessed Sacrament, auricular confession, and Masses of satisfaction (another potential source of magic), among others, were "new nothynges lately coyned in the minte of Rome without any stampe of antiquitie" (Acts and Monuments iiiia). Foxe raised this matter of forgery, heresy, and "newcome doctrine" in his discussion of the "Statue of Six Articles" of 1539, also known as "An Act Abolishing Diversity in Opinions," which supplemented earlier definitions of heresy--a topic always closely connected to magic, as we saw above, and considerably strengthened the hand of Henry VIII in enforcing ecclesiastical conformity. (See Foxe Acts and Monuments 1135-1137 for the Acts. For the text of the Acts, see Elton Tudor Constitution 389-392; there is a good discussion by Tanner, Tudor Constitutional Documents 95). See the Act against Superstitious Books and Images of 1550 (Edward VI), printed by J. R. Tanner Tudor Constitutional Documents, A.D. 1485-1603. Cambridge, 1948. 113-14. Tanner's documents have been revised by G. R. Elton the Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary. Cambridge, 1965.