Invoking Angels: Theurgic Ideas and Practices, Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries ed. by Claire Fanger (review)

The fourteenth volume in the Pennsylvania State University Press’s “Magic in History” series, Invoking Angels is the second collection of essays edited by Claire Fanger on the underexplored world of angelic ritual magic. Her first volume, Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic, appeared in the same series in 1998, introducing scholars familiar with demonic magic or necromancy to its angelic cousin in a very accessible way. The nine essays in Fanger’s current volume take the subject of angelic magic and its texts to a deeper level of scholarly analysis, revealing both the complexity of the subject and its importance for understanding the late-medieval and early-modern mental worlds and the near obsession on the part of many to have an intimate connection with the supernatural world. In her helpful introduction, Fanger raises the major question faced by writers of these manuscripts: “how may the divine be manifest in this world” in such a way that unworthy humans can interact with it? (1). This quest was no peripheral one, and writers of these manuscripts believed their ritual magic to work ex opere operato, like the sacraments. Did they therefore believe their rituals would work? In her chapter on the very popular Sworn Book of Honorius (Liber iuratus Honorii), Katelyn Mesler comments, “one can only speculate about whether anyone in the Middle Ages actually attempted to follow this complicated and laborious procedure through to its end, for most of the few existing accounts of this text were written by detractors who condemned the work as demonic” (114). Yet, the alternative view that these were works of entertainment also seems unlikely, given the amount of effort required to produce them (not to mention the potential risks). The question remains a complex one, likely with multiple answers.

Fanger is an excellent editor with a broad vision for her collaborations that coordinates the efforts of leading-edge scholars so that they refer to each other’s chapters, making this volume a remarkably coherent one. Especially noteworthy is how the contributors individually and collectively reveal “the plurality of visions of religious practice” that included more “cross-cultural exchange” (2) than is often appreciated. This allows the reader to better appreciate the penetration of Jewish and Muslim theurgic practices into Christian occult works. While the detailed analysis of the manuscripts and the variations among copies and sources that preoccupies most of the contributions is a rather dry exercise—making this volume less accessible to a nonspecialist audience—Invoking Angels is an extremely valuable resource for scholars working in the interlocking fields of late medieval philosophy, magic, and religion across these three religious traditions. It includes extensive notes, a helpful bibliography, some important images, and a number of interesting appendices comparing manuscript versions.

Fanger’s introduction provides a scholarly overview of the history of theurgy in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, defining it as activity dealing with the divine, rather than theorizing, which is the realm of theology. The remaining chapters are organized into two chronological sections. The first five essays cover the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, when there was a florescence in the composition of ritual magic manuscripts. In the 1320s Pope John XXII condemned all ritual magic, so that a pronounced defense of angelic magic as an orthodox form of Christian spirituality suggests a date of composition after this decade. The volume’s second part covers late-fourteenth- to sixteenth-century works, which were mostly adaptations of the earlier texts, and as such reveal the changing attitudes of practitioners over time.

The first half of Invoking Angels deals with four major sets of angelic magic manuscripts. The first, the Ars notoria, were works allegedly composed by the ancient king Solomon offering the practitioner knowledge of the liberal arts directly from angels, rather...