“Charms,” Liturgies, and Secret Rites in Early Medieval England by Ciaran Arthur (review)

In his compelling study of “Charms,” Liturgies, and Secret Rites in Early Medieval England, Ciaran Arthur challenges the idea that the texts known as the “charms” represented a continued paganism in later Anglo-Saxon England. By resituating these texts in the realm of mainstream Christianity, he proves not only that “charm” is an unhelpful misnomer for these texts, but also that Christian liturgy in early medieval England was more vibrant, varied, and experimental than previously thought.

In his introduction, Arthur provides a concise overview of scholarship that has engaged with the “charm” as a generic category before situating his own research in the context of Anglo-Saxon England at the time of the Benedictine Reform. The remainder of the study is divided into three parts and begins with the word that “lies at the very heart of the ‘charms’ genre”: galdor (pl. galdru), conventionally defined as “charm” (p. 17). In part 1, Arthur argues that the modern understanding of a “charm,” with all its connotations of “magic, paganism, occultism, and superstition,” has been inaccurately imposed on the Old English noun galdor (p. 17). Chapter 1 comprises a survey of occurrences of the word galdor in nonritual texts across the corpus of Old English literature, which establishes that it carried meanings as flexible and diverse as “prophecy,” “song,” and “incantation” (pp. 38, 57). As such, Arthur states, galdor should “simply be defined as a spiritual utterance or chant,” which —when found in “an overtly Christian context”—could take on liturgical significance (p. 63). This provides the point of departure for chapter 2, “Galdor in Authorised Rituals,” which examines the twelve extant ritual texts that contain instructions for the writing or recitation of a galdor. Almost all of these are found in manuscripts produced at “high-status monasteries associated with the Benedictine reform,” suggesting that they were of the type “endorsed” by Christian ecclesiastical authorities and could be “uncontroversially” used in conjunction with other prayers, masses, and liturgical rites (pp. 65, 96).

Having dispelled the notion that galdor can be defined as a magical or pagan concept, Arthur turns in part 2 to the manuscript sources of the texts that make up the “charms” corpus. A factor that has allowed the concept of “charm” to take hold in Old English literary scholarship, Arthur argues, is the routine extraction of such texts from their original manuscript contexts. Here, he resituates the “charms” in the ecclesiastical realm in which they were produced and used. In chapter 3, “The Liturgical Nature of ‘Charms,’” Arthur compares texts conventionally called “charms” with “contemporary liturgical texts that were written in similar ecclesiastical centres” (p. 103). The discussion is arranged thematically, with Arthur examining in turn texts clustered around six themes, including “Visiting the Sick,” “Marriage and Childbirth,” and “Travellers.” In each instance, the close correspondences between “formal liturgical rites” and “charms” suggest that the latter texts “are, in essence, liturgical texts for public or private performance” (p. 133). In contrast to chapter 3, in which Arthur analyzes liturgical rituals sourced from over a dozen different manuscripts, chapter 4 focuses on a single manuscript, the Vitellius Psalter, which contains “a collection of liturgical materials including ‘charms’” (p. 136). Whereas previous case studies of manuscripts containing “charms” have upheld the generic distinction between “charms” and the liturgical materials that surround them, Arthur approaches the Vitellius Psalter as “a holistic collection concerned with the cosmos, liturgy, hidden divine knowledge, and textual obscurity” (pp. 135–36).

In part 3, Arthur turns to the phenomenon of “so-called ‘gibberish’ writing,” which features in many of the texts conventionally categorized as “charms” (p. 169). If we are to understand “gibberish” writings, Arthur contends, we must resituate them within the context of “learned, Christian traditions that engaged with the origin of languages, exotic alphabets, letter manipulation, numerology, and secret writing” (p. 180). The bulk of the chapter is devoted to a discussion of...