La puissance des mots—"Virtus verborum": Débats doctrinaux sur le pouvoir des incantations au Moyen Âge (review)

For all that magicians sometimes employed signs, symbols, gestures, stones, or herbs, spoken spells still comprise the most pervasive magical device in Western culture. The very ubiquity of verbal formulas in many forms of magical operation make words a difficult subject for scholars to grasp. In this impressive study, Béatrice Delaurenti takes a carefully limited approach. As her subtitle indicates, she examines intellectual debates about the power of words in the Middle Ages. In fact, she focuses on a period of intense debate that lasted, in her analysis, from around 1230 to around 1370. These dates mark important "parentheses," as she will ultimately term them in her conclusion, that bracket an era in which some authorities gave serious consideration to the potential natural power contained in incantations.

The standard Christian position on the "power of words" that dominated most of the European Middle Ages was that words were essentially powerless. They were only signifiers that conveyed commands or supplications to powerful entities. Prayers, obviously, petitioned God or his saints; magical spells, intentionally or not, invoked demons. A third potential category beyond the divine/demonic binary appeared in the thirteenth century, however. As Western Europe was flooded with Arabic texts containing Greek and Hebrew learning (and of course extensive Muslim commentary on that learning), Christian intellectuals began to consider the possibility of "natural magic." This development has long been recognized, and has been explored in some detail particularly in the area of astrology and astral magic. Heavenly bodies self-evidently emanated natural energies toward the earth. If magicians could accurately chart their effects and possibly learn to control or direct them, they might be able to perform wonders without any illicit recourse to demonic entities. Theories of natural power also developed for words, sounds, and spoken incantations, however, and this area of potentially natural magic has been much less explored.

Because less basic work has been done on incantatory magic than on astrology, because the intellectual arguments involved are complex and detailed, and because she wants to cover a fairly long period, Delaurenti focuses in depth on only a few sources. Working through discussions of incantations in law, medicine, and theology, she gives substantial attention to William of Auvergne, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Pietro d'Abano, and Gentile da Foligno, while touching on numerous other authorities who informed their work (Avicenna, Averroes, Constantine the African, Isidore of Seville, and so forth). Her analysis culminates with Nicolas Oresme, whom she considers to be the most radical medieval theorist of the natural power of words, and she concludes with Jean Gerson, whom she sees as falling outside the "parentheses" she has drawn.

These men approached the power of words from somewhat different perspectives, developed different arguments, and certainly never established anything like a generally accepted theory of the natural power of incantations. Delaurenti therefore exposes her readers to the various ways in which medieval minds might conceive of words having power. Sounds could exert a physical force, for example, transmitted via the air. They could transmit some of the force (virtus) of the speaker's soul, properly conditioned to be channeled through words, or they could affect the hearer's soul. There was no doubt that sounds could affect the human body or mind. Music might sooth or rouse a listener, for example. Questions concerned how far such influence might extend, and whether such power rested only in sounds or whether particular meaningful combinations of words could also produce such effects. Authorities also debated whether demons might still be involved, but now there were questions about whether certain words might naturally compel demons or whether they always represented a submissive supplication of evil entities.

As Delaurenti rightly asserts, all of this analysis and debate was caused by the great revival of Aristotelian thought in Western Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In an Aristotelian worldview, natural forces [End Page...