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Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe (Kathryn A. Edwards, ed.)

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/preternature.5.2.0256

2161-2196

Ceri Houlbrook,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

Kathryn A. Edwards's Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe is a multiauthored volume primarily concerned with the magical practices and beliefs that occurred in the daily lives of early modern Europeans: the “everyday magic” of its title. As editor, Edwards locates the book within the broad corpus of material on late medieval and early modern magical practices, acknowledging the attention the topic has received in recent decades inspired by Keith Thomas's seminal Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) and Francis Yates's The Occult in the Elizabethan Age (1979). More recent parallels with this volume are Owen Davies's Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2007) and Stephen Wilson's The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-modern Europe (2000). This volume is not, and does not claim to be, as comprehensive as these works, but instead prioritizes a local historicized approach over the more thematic, folkloric styles of previous works, with each contributor carefully locating everyday magic within historically specific social and cultural contexts.The work comprises nine chapters penned by international historians, each with a different specialization. All contributors center their analyses of everyday magic within the context of local circumstances (e.g., law codes, judicial structures, social networks), examining the points of intersection between magical beliefs and practices, and broad narratives of power, economics, community, and religion. Consequently, this volume will appeal to readers from a broad range of disciplines—primarily history and theology, but those with interests in folklore, law, and economics will also benefit from the variety of chapters, each adopting a different focus and approach.In her introduction, “What Makes Magic Everyday Magic?” Edwards, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, considers definitions of the volume's chief terms—“magic,” “superstition,” and “religion”—problematizing such distinctions and stressing their porosity and fluidity. She observes that the historical grouping of actions and beliefs into one category or another—for example, magic or religion—was contingent on who was assessing them as well as when and where they were being assessed. In this, she emphasizes the role of local factors in determining how everyday magical practices were perceived and presented. Edwards also helpfully offers her own definition of “everyday magic,” describing it as “a continuum of beliefs and practices where marvellous and miraculous experiences were uncommon, but … were expected and accepted, and [into which framework] life was generally interpreted” (4). She acknowledges that this definition encompasses a wide variety of topics, of which this volume can hope to address only a minority. The minority it does address, however, are well selected, for they illustrate the prevalence of everyday magic in early modern Europe.Doris Moreno Martínez's essay on “Magical Lives: Daily Practices and Intellectual Discourses in Enchanted Catalonia during the Early Modern Era” opens the volume, drawing on confessors' manuals, demonological studies, and treatises written between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries to analyze the intellectual discourses surrounding everyday magical practices in early modern Catalonia. Moreno stresses the malleability of Catholic rituals, from mass to the veneration of saints, which could take certain forms viewed by clerical authorities as more magical than orthodox. She also stresses the porosity of terms such as “superstitious,” “witchcraft,” “sorcery,” “white” magic and “black,” and demonstrates that the use of everyday magic in Catalonia was viewed on a wide spectrum that ranged from heretical and dangerous to benevolent and beneficial to the community.The next essay, Raisa Maria Toivo's “Lived Lutheran and Daily Magic in Seventeenth-Century Finland,” examines seventeenth-century Finnish court proceedings. Toivo addresses questions such as why certain actions were perceived and presented as evidence of witchcraft, and deemed serious enough to be tried, while others were viewed as simple methods of work or long-standing local customs, thus evading condemnation. By considering the semantics of certain terms used in court proceedings, such as “superstition” and “magic,” and linguistic changes over time, Toivo demonstrates both the ambiguities of such terms and the porosity between approved and forbidden customs, arguing convincingly that negotiations were clearly ongoing over which beliefs and practices were acceptable in early modern Finland and which were not.In “The Guardian Angel: From the Natural to the Supernatural,” Antoine Mazurek considers the various ideological and social factors that motivated the church's acceptance of the guardian angel, and considers the treatment this notion received from theologians. Focusing on the works of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theologians, most notably the Jesuits, he examines their attempts to distinguish between the natural and the supernatural and to place the guardian angel both within this distinction and alongside such concepts as demons, spirits, possession, and free will.Next, Linda Lierheimer's “False Sanctity and Spiritual Imposture in Seventeenth-Century French Convents” presents an examination of false sanctity that differs from other works on this subject because, rather than relying on judicial records—in which the more public, sensationalist trials against false sanctity were highlighted—Lierheimer instead draws on seventeenth-century French convent histories and nuns' writings, biographies, and memoirs. She uses these alternative sources not only to consider specific cases of false sanctity and their relationships to convent life, but also to argue convincingly that such cases were relatively ordinary occurrences that tended to be negotiated within the day-to-day life of local communities and that were rarely punished severely.In “Magic, Dreams, and Money,” Jared Poley takes a historical economic approach to the examination of the interrelationships between oneiromancy (the interpretation of dreams to predict the future), the symbolism of gold, and perceptions of acquisition and greed. Drawing on the evidence of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuals such as that of Thomas Hill, he considers the myriad symbols in dreams—from beards to dragons—that were believed to denote forthcoming riches. His examination of such sources within the economic climate of the time demonstrates a widespread method of instrumentalizing magic and popular lore in the early modern period while also revealing the financial desires of everyday people.On a related topic, Johannes Dillinger's “The Good Magicians: Treasure Hunting in Early Modern Germany” presents a novel take on an understudied subject—treasure-hunting and magic—by considering it in relation to both witchcraft and economic values. Drawing on the evidence of books and grimoires penned by historical treasure-hunters, Dillinger describes the processes of treasure-hunting, which involved both divining the location of treasure and engaging with the supernatural forces invariably guarding it. This was a widespread practice in early modern Europe, and one that undoubtedly centered on magical beliefs and practices, and yet—as Dillinger demonstrates by examining trial records—there was far less condemnation of treasure-hunting than there was of witchcraft. Dillinger considers possible reasons for this and reaches a convincing conclusion by examining the economic aspects of beliefs behind both pursuits.Continuing the theme of prophecy taken up by Poley, in “A Christian Warning: Bartholomaeus Anhorn, Demonology, and Divination,” Jason Coy examines how the various forms of divination—from palm reading to crystal balls, from augury to astrology—were perceived and presented by the clerical authorities of early modern German-speaking Europe. Coy observes that divination in this period has received scant attention in modern scholarship, despite its being a prodigious topic at the time, with many demonological treatises dedicated to its condemnation. Coy aims to redress this imbalance, and achieves this by focusing on the understudied work of seventeenth-century Swiss pastor Bartholomaeus Anhorn, whose Magiologia: A Christian Warning against Superstition and Sorcery (1674) was a vast compendium on magic and witchcraft. Coy examines the methods and sources—Catholic, Protestant, classical, and biblical—Anhorn drew on in his various condemnations of divination, including condemnation of divination as demonic and, conversely, fraudulent; as foolish, naïve superstition; and as dangerous to the Christian community. Such an analysis illustrates the fierce disapproval, but also the ambiguities, that characterized the clerical attitude toward everyday magic.Related to Coy's examination of demonology comes Edwards's own “The ‘Antidemons’ of Calvinism: Ghosts, Demons, and Traditional Belief in the House of François Perrault,” in which she analyzes the seventeenth-century haunting of the home of Huguenot minister François Perrault, as recorded in Perrault's L'Antidemon de Mascon (1656). Employing L'Antidemon as her primary source, she examines the ambiguities and tensions this particular case of haunting reveals with regard to combining and reconciling Catholic, Calvinist, and folkloric beliefs. The question of whether Perrault's apparition was conceived of, and treated as a spirit of the dead (unpalatable for church authorities) or as a demon (far more acceptable) is at the heart of these tensions. And the uncertainty expressed by Perrault, an otherwise exemplary Huguenot minister, outlines the broader ambiguities that may trouble modern scholars but that, Edwards argues, were generally accepted by the communities who experienced them.Also delving into the fraught relationship between magic and religion, Sarah Ferber concludes this volume with her essay on “The Constitution and Conditions of Everyday Magic in Late Medieval and Early Modern Catholic Europe.” Ferber considers and critiques the terminology and categorizations (e.g., the everyday, the new, the ideological) employed in past and recent historical works on everyday magic, helpfully noting how they may differ from those employed by the practitioners of the magic itself. She takes a critical historical approach to the subject, aiming to make a case for understanding the history of everyday magic by reference to its “geographical and historical specificity” (163). She does this successfully, examining systems of power, authority, and official church practice, arguing that everyday magic cannot be separated from broader narratives of religion, ritual, power, authority, and orthodoxy.Despite the variety of topics and approaches adopted by the individual contributors, Edwards's volume incorporates a number of overarching themes and arguments that draw the chapters together into a cohesive whole. One such theme is that of how the myriad forms of everyday magic, and the various ways they were treated by the authorities, reflect the religious divisions of early modern Europe. Another theme is the ambiguity and porosity characterizing notions such as magic and witchcraft; several contributors locate these notions on a continuum, on which both the dangerous and the beneficent existed. The primary purpose of this volume, however, is not to illustrate the prevalence and ambiguity of everyday magic in early modern Europe. Instead, it is to demonstrate the benefits of applying a local historicized approach to the study of this topic—that is, to locate magic within local social and cultural contexts, which, in this reviewer's opinion, this collection does very successfully.