Magic in the Cloister: Pious Motives, Illicit Interests, and Occult Approaches to the Medieval Universe by Sophie Page (review)

This most recent contribution to the series Magic in History investigates the collection of texts of learned magic once held by the Benedictine monastery at St. Augustine’s in Canterbury in order to examine closely magic’s place in medieval Christian belief and practice. Sophie Page’s tightly constructed and well-argued study draws on recent editorial and theoretical work in the field as she seeks to elucidate the rationality that justified the learning and practice of magic within a particular monastic community. Page’s erudite, lucidly written investigation is both indebted and contributes substantially to a field that has made significant strides in developing workable definitions of magic and its diverse genres, understanding magic as similar to and distinct from orthodox religion, identifying and making accessible a corpus of medieval European magic texts, understanding the sources for these texts, and assessing the nature and reach of their influence in the Middle Ages and early modern period. Page’s volume is a fitting companion to Frank Klaassen’s comprehensive and engaging study of the treatment of texts and manuscripts of image and ritual magic in England, The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013). Each finds that the monks at St. Augustine’s were well able to justify the inclusion of illicit occult texts in the abbey library on accepted intellectual grounds that can be gleaned by study of the manuscripts in which they were recorded; however, Page focuses solely on this community and its magic texts in order to bring to light the theories of the universe informing them and to understand how such theories may have persisted in an early fourteenth-century religious environment. The magic texts at St. Augustine’s preserved and transmitted powerful secrets of the natural world and instructions for communication with other realms, which could be consulted to obtain knowledge useful both practically and spiritually.

The community of St. Augustine’s that emerges in Page’s portrait highlights a love of learning and the practice of discernment, characteristics which dovetailed with the vocational priorities of spiritual devotion and pastoral care. The names of its monastic donors and collectors of texts have been preserved in both their books and in the library’s catalogue; thus it is possible to observe the growth of the collection, apprehend its organization, and note areas of special interest. The collection’s surviving manuscripts contain an array of texts of learned magic familiar to historians of the field, including twelfth-century Latin translations of Arabic texts on astral magic, Hermetic texts, texts of natural magic, texts of Jewish esotericism, and other texts of learned magic such as the Solomonic Ars Notoria. Despite official condemnation of necromancy in the thirteenth century and the heightened scrutiny of magic that followed, St. Augustine’s appears to have been particularly open to the study of learned magic. In the early fourteenth century, the library was enriched by the donations of manuscripts by monks such as Michael Northgate and John of London, both of whose collections included works of natural, astral, image, and angel magic among other scholarly interests. These robust compendia bear witness to personal engagement by the monks who contributed to the abbey’s library holdings as well as to a view that some kinds of learned magic were permissible while other kinds were to be approached carefully or, as was the case with necromancy, avoided altogether.

Chapter 2 discusses the common affiliation of magic and medicine in medieval compendia and the pragmatic character of this association at St. Augustine’s to draw attention to natural magic’s perceived utility as justification for its study. The monastery’s collection included several manuscripts that brought together medicine and magic. One of these, Oxford, Corpus Christi College 125, contains several discussions of the use...