Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, & Religion 1250–1750 by Euan Cameron (review)

The social and religious upheavals of the Reformation brought about vigorous debate concerning the beliefs and practices of every class, but the folk beliefs of the peasantry became one of the most hotly contested topics. Euan Cameron, a scholar of Martin Luther and the Reformation/counter-Reformation period, mines theological texts from the thirteenth century to the time of Luther in an attempt to understand the specific problem posed by folk religion to a volatile and changing church in Enchanted Europe. The result is a book that exposes a range of mental attitudes toward popular superstition, primarily from the points of view of churchmen attempting to sway one another in their arguments. Cameron’s great success comes from the dialogue he entreats the reader to hear between groups like the Thomists and Lutherans, the early Protestants and Catholic counter-Reformers, and other contending factions as they attempted to piece together a common understanding of the efficacy of charms, potions, and superstitious acts in a universe ordered by Divine decree and plan. The author’s narrow focus on an elite class of theologians gives the text a detachment from the lower classes and their understanding of their own superstitious acts. The selection of clerical writers and his tight focus on a relatively small number of topics allow Cameron to bypass some of his problems, however, as he presents a secular world divided by politics and cosmology.

Enchanted Europe begins in the pre-modern period, and traces much of the early discussion of religion through Catholic authors like Augustine, Aquinas, and Buchard of Worms. Cameron writes of the early concept of the “densely populated universe,” and a cosmology that defied “Christian-Aristotelian-Thomist categories of God, people, angels, and demons” (p. 42). Church fathers attempted to correct rituals devoid of spiritual context, performed on themselves for purely secular results, while at the same time attempting to preserve the sacramentalia of the mother Church. Internal debates over the effectiveness of charms like “St. Agatha’s bread” or candles consecrated to St. Blasius set off bitter rivalries, which Cameron exposes by sharing writings contemporary to the parties involved and the work of later theologians looking back to the early Church’s dissenters. The author effectively argues that nascent cracks in theological unity sparked by debates over superstition laid the foundation for the Renaissance Humanists and Reformation writers to question the sanctioned practices of Roman Catholicism. This “sea change in … elite attitudes” brings Cameron to his strongest subject, Martin Luther, who he says “brought to the issues raised by superstition, as to everything else, a mind of extraordinary vigour and originality” (p. 143). Cameron makes a concerted effort to demonstrate the areas in which Protestants and Catholics overlapped in their beliefs about superstition—both agreed that purely materialistic rituals invited demonic corruption, although they differed in deciding just what made a ritual “vain”—and he clearly does not excuse the excesses of either camp. He uses the cult of saints as a prime example of how Protestants turned theological reasoning into an oversimplified trope, while at the same time calling attention to the Council of Trent as a Catholic effort to clean up its “abuses of the cult” (p. 219).

Beyond the rivalries between religious factions, Cameron also examines several key theological topics and their relationship to perceived superstition. At the heart of many arguments, he demonstrates, is a belief in the aforementioned densely populated cosmology that determined the practice of folk customs like charm-healing, talismanic protection from harm, and even fertility rites—helpful spirits providing useful results. By the time the early Catholic writers made the transition into the Renaissance period, however, the potential for “the archetypes of pixies and fairies of the folklorists” shifted to a clearly delineated struggle between God and the Devil (p. 42). The forces aiding magic no longer occupied a neutral ground, and any performance of superstitious acts led to a pact with devils, implicit or explicit. Cameron works out...