Women, Men, and Love Magic in Late Medieval English Pastoral Manuals

This article re-examines the gendering of love magic in pastoral manuals, focusing on those manuals which were written in England between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. As well as exploring how far late medieval English pastoral writers associated love magic with women, the paper also asks how far they presented men and women as performing the same types of love magic. It is demonstrated that many churchmen remained willing to imagine a more varied cross-section of the population doing love magic, and acknowledged that both men and women might do so for a broader range of purposes, than is often assumed.