The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present ed. by David Collins (review)

At over seven hundred pages, this massive book requires a scholar with a strong backpack (not to mention back) to carry it home from the library. And if you have the book at home, the library is probably where you obtained it, since the original hardback purchased from the publisher would have cost you $182.00—a price that puts it out of reach for most non-institutional consumers, and students in particular. Even used copies are somewhat expensive. This review, however, is occasioned by its recent release in paperback, now available from the publisher at a more affordable price of $41.99.

The book bills itself on the front flap as an “overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West.” It has twenty chapters divided over six parts: I. Antiquity; II. The Early Latin West; III. Parallel Traditions (this deals with Jewish, Islamic, and Byzantine, i.e., Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek magical traditions parallel to “early Latin” ones); IV. Old Europe (dealing with medieval and reformation topics, eleventh to eighteenth century); V. Colonial Encounters; and VI. The Modern West. Both of these last sections deal with late modern and contemporary practices (nineteenth century forward). All chapters are written by well-known experts with interesting bodies of work outside this book.

Of course there are major challenges involved with such a large-scale attempt to encompass a group of massive areas of research over such a long period. There is the challenge of the limitation and selection of materials, balancing the risk of getting shallow coverage of too much versus slightly deeper coverage of too little. There is the challenge of making it suitable for the novice without boring the scholar in the field. And there is another challenge, too; for fairly important new histories and ethnographies of magic are coming out at a great rate, and acceptable methodologies, and even the base data—the things that can be taken for granted as true—seem to change so rapidly. It is not possible to give an “overview” of fields in such an active state of development. The trick is to strike a suggestive balance between too much and too little, acknowledging what is still unknown, while making the contributions satisfying to read.

On the whole Collins’s Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West meets the challenges of its compendious mission very well. Most chapters are both suitable for teaching and not boring at all; they do a good job of exactly what I have just described: they strike a suggestive balance, opening up the problems that bedevil the field right now, offering much that is useful to specialists without overloading novice readers. I look forward to drawing on many of the chapters in my future teaching.

Key to the success of this book, or at least a prime source of interest for me, is what looks like a conscientious disruption of the standard historical line through a traditional picture of what constitutes the “West” (beginning in Ancient Greece and ending up more or less typically in the Anglophone colonies of North America). Here, the volume interweaves the Greece-to-America trajectory with an attempt to get at a broader picture of the West as a globalizing phenomenon. It tries not to be just a white history; it tries to understand how important were trading and colonizing in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and to depict a global interchange at each important historical epoch.

Of course to some it may seem even less complete as a “global” project than it does as a “western” one. However if you value a problem oriented approach, it gives a good idea of what problems...