Byzantine Magic ed. by Henry Maguire (review)

282BOOK REVIEWS Byzantine Magic. Edited by Henry Maguire. (Washington, D.C: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Distributed by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1995. Pp. vii, 187. $30.00.) The essays collected here were originally delivered at a colloquium held at Dumbarton Oaks in 1993, when magic was in the air. Valerie Flint's The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1991) had come out two years previously to considerable acclaim, while S. J. Tambiah provided an anthropological perspective in the shape of his Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge, 1990). Byzantine Magic was the response on the part of Dumbarton Oaks. The result is a bit of a ragbag, with no clear unifying themes, but with interesting individual papers. Henry Maguire's "Magic and the Christian Image" (pp. 51-71) has the distinction of bringing out the magical properties of Christian images, an aspect of the iconoclast controversy which tends to be downplayed. The interest of this piece is increased because it fits neatly into the pattern noted by Flint in her work on western Christendom. Her theme was the way Christianity was enriched by its willingness to absorb local practices and beliefs, which in the process were given Christian meaning. This, however, produced difficulties over authenticity: who and what was holy or unholy ? A. Kazhdan tackles this problem in "Holy and Unholy miracle workers" (pp. 73-82). He challenges the orthodox view that "unholy magic causes death, confusion, sexual misbehaviour; holy miracles are creative, healing, and reviving ." It was never as clear as this. The Byzantines found it difficult to draw a clear line between the holy and the unholy, between the natural and the supernatural . These were problems that still remained unresolved in the twelfth century when they troubled the historian Nicetas Chômâtes—as intelligent and objective an observer as Byzantium produced. This fits with a "Kazhdian" theme: Byzantine ambivalence. Other contributors seem to take their cue from Kazhdan.John Duffy (pp. 83-95) points to the embarrassment produced by the academic study of the occult. This had been made possible by Michael Psellos's rediscovery of the Chaldaean Oracles and allied texts which he brought back "almost from the dead." Psellos's stance on the occult was informed by his general attitude toward the Neoplatonic tradition. He made the right noises about pagan mumbo-jumbo, but he justified his interest by pointing to similarities with the Christian mystical tradition. This Duffy then contrasts with Michael Italikos 's far more cautious and dismissive attitude toward the same material in the next century. But what was he doing studying it in the first place? In much the same way that Michael Italikos was embarrassed by the occult, so the canon lawyer Balsamon found it difficult to come to terms with popular beliefs and customs, as M. T. Fögen demonstrates (pp. 99-1 15). She rounds off her study of Balsamon with a comparison between the treatment of magical practices in the fourth and the fourteenth century. The best that can be said is that a comparison over a thousand years is not that helpful, especially when some of the most important material on magic and popular customs has been neglected. It is a shame that nobody thought to comment on the investigations into popular customs and beliefs attributed to Michael Psellos. These have been used since BOOK REVIEWS283 the seventeenth century by those interested in Greek folklore, but there is still no proper study of these texts, which remains a desideratum. Their style suggests that they did come from Psellos's pen, but his authorship must remain in doubt now that the treatises on demonology originally attributed to him are no longer so. The one substantial contribution to the volume is R. P. H. Greenfield's survey of Palaeologan Magic (pp. 117-153)· Whereas for earlier periods there is surprisingly little material on magic, for the last centuries of Byzantium there is a wealth of material available, including court cases involving magic,which come from the Patriarchal Register. Greenfield's aim is to provide "an overview of the great range and variety that clearly existed in the Byzantine magical...