The Magician, The Witch, and The Law by Edward Peters (review)

REVIEWS and their link with levels of time, the role played by the crowd, and the use of parallel movements and thematic patterns, especially cleansing and rededication. Despite some of the reservations mentioned above, Peterson's edition­ particularly his careful transcription of the manuscript, his thorough annotations, and perceptive introduction-sets a high standard for mod­ ern editions of medieval texts. His edition of Erkenwald richly deserves to become the "standard" edition of this delicate alliterative poem. ROBERT J. BLANCH NortheasternUniversity EnwARD PETERS, The Magician, The Witch, and The Law. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978. Pp. xviii, 218. $15.95. The phenomenon of the judicial prosecutions of persons for the crime of witchcraft in late-medieval and early-modern Europe has occupied the attention of an increasingly large body of American scholars in the last decade. The result of this renewed interest is the availability of a large and growing, and respectably disinterested and detached, body of scholarly literature which has elucidated many major questions of interest and laid to rest many myths. Professor Peters' book is in keeping with this trend. More importantly, The Magician, The Witch, and The Law is an important work which both provides a new analysis of questions that have been central to recent discussion and draws attention to phenomena that have not previously figured very largely in that discussion. The main burden of the argument in this work is an amendment to the dominant view that the stereotype of the witch that underlay the prosecutions of the witch-hunting period derived directly from heresy prosecutions of the twelfth through fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Peters argues that it was, instead, a growing concern over the general problem of magical practices that provided the context in which the stereotype of the typical witch was created. The study of learned magic was beginning to appear as an important activity in various circles during the twelfth century, and, as this became more widely understood in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the fear that magical prac­ tices were linked to demonic beings was voiced with increasing persua197 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER siveness. Ultimately, it proved impossible for the advocates of learned magic to convince their contemporaries among the intellectual elite that magic could be practiced without demonic assistance. Magic was found to be necessarily demonic among the theologians and canonists of the period and, therefore, declared to be heretical. The fear of the Crimen magiae grew in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries when it became clear that magic was being used as a tool or weapon in many of the royal, princely, and ecclesiastical court circles of Europe. As Peters points out, there was a veritable demimonde of sorcerers and their as­ sistants attached to the major courts, even if only marginally. The use of magic to eliminate rivals or to achieve success and the discovery of the political uses of making accusations of sorcery led to a series of fourteenth-century trials in which the stereotype of the magic practitioner as the frequenter of demons, in pact with Satan, became fixed. By the end of the fifteenth century, Peters argues, most authorities were not able to perceive a real difference between the learned sorcerer and the low magic that had always been a feature of peasant life. As the phenomena of low magic came to the attention of the authorities, they simply in­ cluded its practitioners in the developed stereotype. The relationship between the fear of learned magic, especially in po­ litical contexts, and the long development of that attitude, from the early awareness of learned magical practices to the culmination in the political trials of the fourteenth century, has been very ably set out by Professor Peters. However, it must be noted in criticism of this work that the author passes over the problem of heresy and the elaboration of the demonological stereotype of the heretic as it developed in the Cathar trials in Languedoc in the fourteenth century. He has suggested addi­ tional facets to the larger problem, but he has not succeeded in weaken­ ing the argument that the witch stereotype owed an enormous burden to heresy, and...