Magic in Medieval Manuscripts (review)

This slim volume comes from the North American publication of the British Library series Medieval Life in Manuscripts, to which Page earlier contributed a volume Astrology in Medieval Manuscripts (2002). The series draws upon the vast resources of the British Library manuscript collection to present topical themes—flowers, warfare, courtly love—to a general audience. Page succeeds admirably with this handsome paperback in which beautifully reproduced images and an insightful text are sensitively integrated. The text does not simply string together a series of fascinating pictures, nor are those images merely illustrations to the narrative. Page provides a solid introduction to the subject of magic and richly demonstrates its visual nature.

The book is divided into a brief introduction and five chapters: “The Medieval Magician,” “Natural Magic,” “The Power of the Image,” “The Magical Universe,” and “Necromancy and Sorcery.” The last three pages contain the apparatus: a useful bibliography of primary and secondary sources, an index, and publication information. All of the illustrations come from the British Library and are adequately, if briefly, identified with a descriptive caption, date, manuscript, and folio number, the title of the work and context for the image being signaled in the text. Because the manuscripts of the British Library are so well studied, additional information about individual manuscripts can readily be found elsewhere, including, now, the catalogues and digital image databases online.

Page’s primary materials impose a chronological and geographical focus, emphasizing magic as it was understood between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. This period reflects the high Middle Ages that is best represented in the preprint, manuscript tradition, but also coalesces comfortably into an historical period that begins at the time when many Jewish, Greek, and Arabic texts on magic were translated into Latin, and ends with the trials and witchcraft persecutions of the late Middle Ages. Page lays the ideological foundations for understanding Renaissance and Reformation developments, but only alludes to them.

A product of the British Library, it is no surprise that the history of magic is here told with a slight British accent; the majority of the illustrations come from England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and Merlin figures prominently in the lineage of medieval magicians. Yet the book reproduces a richer array of manuscript evidence. The earliest illustrations are culled from eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon bestiaries, Marvels of the East, and medicinal texts; the latest shows angels of the sun from an early-sixteenth-century Liber iuratus. Many images are taken from continental manuscripts: witches from a fourteenth-century French Grandes chroniques, the magician Nectanebus from a fifteenth-century Old French Alexander Romance, or various exemplars from Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ On the Properties of Things, one Italian before 1309 and another Flemish from 1482. The images are so numerous and well-chosen that it would be heartless to fault the book for not containing more examples of German or Italian origin. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a single library that by itself could provide a significantly more comprehensive range of materials, or that is equally committed to bringing its manuscripts to the public.

If the images emphasize an Anglo-French tradition, the text does not. During this period, ideas about magic came from a body of diverse texts transmitted through scholarly channels that transcended national borders. Page makes reference to a wide range of authors, so that readers hear of seminal thinkers Augustine and Albertus Magnus and key texts such as Picatrix, from which no pictures are available. The result is a book that lays a solid foundation for understanding medieval magic.

Page is sensitive to modern questions about magic, but lets the material shape her discussion using the categories and terminology of the medieval period. In the first chapter, “The Medieval Magician,” Page chronologically presents a series of magicians, at that time considered historical figures, thereby writing a brief history of magic while describing what magicians did and shaping a working definition of magic. We see its origins in the pagan Zoroaster; glimpse the Biblical passages where...