Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe ed. by Kathryn A. Edwards (review)

Kathryn A. Edwards’s Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe is a multiauthored volume primarily concerned with the magical practices and beliefs that occurred in the daily lives of early modern Europeans: the “everyday magic” of its title. As editor, Edwards locates the book within the broad corpus of material on late medieval and early modern magical practices, acknowledging the attention the topic has received in recent decades inspired by Keith Thomas’s seminal Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) and Francis Yates’s The Occult in the Elizabethan Age (1979). More recent parallels with this volume are Owen Davies’s Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2007) and Stephen Wilson’s The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-modern Europe (2000). This volume is not, and does not claim to be, as comprehensive as these works, but instead prioritizes a local historicized approach over the more thematic, folkloric styles of previous works, with each contributor carefully locating everyday magic within historically specific social and cultural contexts.

The work comprises nine chapters penned by international historians, each with a different specialization. All contributors center their analyses of everyday magic within the context of local circumstances (e.g., law codes, judicial structures, social networks), examining the points of intersection between magical beliefs and practices, and broad narratives of power, economics, community, and religion. Consequently, this volume will appeal to readers from a broad range of disciplines—primarily history and theology, but those with interests in folklore, law, and economics will also benefit from the variety of chapters, each adopting a different focus and approach.

In her introduction, “What Makes Magic Everyday Magic?” Edwards, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, considers definitions of the volume’s chief terms—“magic,” “superstition,” and “religion”—problematizing such distinctions and stressing their porosity and fluidity. She observes that the historical grouping of actions and beliefs into one category or another—for example, magic or religion—was contingent on who was assessing them as well as when and where they were being assessed. In this, she emphasizes the role of local factors in determining how everyday magical practices were perceived and presented. Edwards also helpfully offers her own definition of “everyday magic,” describing it as “a continuum of beliefs and practices where marvellous and miraculous experiences were uncommon, but . . . were expected and accepted, and [into which framework] life was generally interpreted” (4). She acknowledges that this definition encompasses a wide variety of topics, of which this volume can hope to address only a minority. The minority it does address, however, are well selected, for they illustrate the prevalence of everyday magic in early modern Europe.

Doris Moreno Martínez’s essay on “Magical Lives: Daily Practices and Intellectual Discourses in Enchanted Catalonia during the Early Modern Era” opens the volume, drawing on confessors’ manuals, demonological studies, and treatises written between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries to analyze the intellectual discourses surrounding everyday magical practices in early modern Catalonia. Moreno stresses the malleability of Catholic rituals, from mass to the veneration of saints, which could take certain forms viewed by clerical authorities as more magical than orthodox. She also stresses the porosity of terms such as “superstitious,” “witchcraft,” “sorcery,” “white” magic and “black,” and demonstrates that the use of everyday magic in Catalonia was viewed on a wide spectrum that ranged from heretical and dangerous to benevolent and beneficial to the community.

The next essay, Raisa Maria Toivo’s “Lived Lutheran and Daily Magic in Seventeenth-Century Finland,” examines seventeenth-century Finnish court proceedings. Toivo addresses questions such as why certain actions were perceived and presented as evidence of witchcraft, and deemed serious enough to be tried, while others were viewed as simple methods of work or long-standing local customs, thus evading condemnation. By considering the semantics of certain terms used in court proceedings, such as “superstition” and “magic,” and linguistic changes over time, Toivo demonstrates both the...