Making Magic in Elizabethan England: Two Early Modern Vernacular Books of Magic ed. by Frank Klaassen

Frank Klaassen has edited two quite different short, sixteenthcentury magical manuscripts. The first, the Antiphoner Notebook (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Additional B.1), is constructed om the wide margins trimmed om an outdated liturgical text. Folding the resulting parchment strips produced an oblong notebook in which a primary scribe recorded a few short examples of ritual magic and then a series of magical charms that he usually labeled as prayers. The manuscript includes several blank folios. A second, seventeenth-century hand added three additional charms to the original text.

The second manuscript, the Boxgrove Manual (London, British Library, Harley MS 2267), is a quarto, written on paper by a single "less than accomplished" (82) scribe. A note dated 13 February 1600 on the first page of the manuscript indicates that it is a scribal copy commissioned by Owen Lording, parish priest of Boxgrove, Sussex, of a magical text authored by a third person who was neither the cleric nor the careless scribe. Despite its messy appearance, it is a fairly coherent and detailed presentation of the astrological knowledge, the rituals, and the steps necessary to perform a delicate magical feat: conjuring demonic spirits om within the precarious safety of a magical circle.

Thus, Boxgrove is a good example of ritual, learned magic, while the Antiphoner, despite the three brief rituals with which it opens, is most concerned with practical, everyday magic: medical remedies for toothache, fever, staunching blood, and curing sick pigs; preventive prayers against thieves and witchcraft; and instructions for preparing protective amulets, worn to ward off sudden death or to help women in childbirth. Its text is surprisingly ee of astrological references, even in the brief rituals recorded at its beginning, whereas Boxgrove uses astrology throughout to calibrate the perfect astrological times, by days and even hours, for successful summoning of spirits. Boxgrove concludes with a number of astrological figures indicating days of the week in each season of the year appropriate for this magical ceremony.

Klaassen makes both texts easily accessible for readers. He gives numbers and (when they are not supplied) titles for items in each manuscript for easy reference. The volume's apparatus consists of a general introduction to the magic of the period, separate introductions for each text, separate endnotes for each introduction and each text, and three short appendices to Boxgrove.

Despite their quite different styles and contents, both manuscripts have a good deal in common. Each relies heavily on earlier magical printed texts and manuscripts. The Antiphoner borrows a good deal om Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft, a work that, even as it debunked belief in magic and witchcraft, offered so many detailed examples of magic and superstition that it became a source for people seeking to practice the very magic it argues against. In addition, many of the charms that make up the bulk of the Antiphoner are derived om medieval magical manuscripts. Boxgrove relies most heavily on printed Latin texts: Agrippa von Nettesheim's De occulta philosophia, especially its wrongly attributed fourth book; and the pseudonymous Peter of Abano's Heptameron, as Klaassen's table of sources in the first Boxgrove appendix makes clear. But many of its explicit details—for example, for ritual purification and for preparation of materials for the conjuring ritual—derive om medieval magical texts. Despite their reliance on earlier magical writings, however, both manuscripts contain original touches and make careful changes to their source texts. For instance, when recording charms found in earlier manuscripts, the Antiphoner's scribe nearly always changed the word charm to prayer, perhaps to make the magical details in his text less obvious. Boxgrove's author stressed the danger to the conjuror once he had summoned spirits, and at least twice urged the conjuror to remain in the protective circle he had drawn for some time after the spirits had been released to make sure they were not hiding in order to seize him once he left its protection. In fact, even if no spirit had materialized, he must still be wary of leaving the circle in case a spirit had come but not made itself known and was lurking to entrap him. Such extreme anxiety is not a usual component of conjuring manuals and may be the author's original addition. The creators of these manuscripts edited and shortened their source materials; synthesized disparate sources; simplified Latinate vocabulary; and reduced or omitted language referring to saints and the liturgy (this last feature is less obvious in the Antiphoner, whose scribe, almost defiantly, retained many Catholic references).

Klaassen's central argument is that sixteenth- century English magic provided a synthesis of old and new magical ideas drawn om practical magic; learned, ritual magic; and philosophical magic that was entering England om the continent. During the sixteenth century in England, magical writing and practice moved om the clerical world to the secular world, om Latin to the vernacular, and away om the shadow of the Catholic Church: "particularly in Protestant regions like England, all forms of magic became increasingly disengaged om conventional religion" (13). Such transformations, Klassen argues, allowed sixteenth-century English magic, as represented in such obscure manuscripts as these, to become one of the foundations "of modern European magic" (2).

Some additional details might have provided more context for these manuscripts. An almost petty inquiry: who gave the Antiphoner Notebook its name? Was the discarded liturgical volume om which the parchment margins were trimmed an antiphoner? If not, does it refer to the collection of charms it contains, an analogy to the collection of antiphons in an antiphoner? Perhaps I missed the answer within the volume, although I searched for it.

A brief discussion of why, in the age of print, so much magical writing was consigned to manuscript would help readers unfamiliar with magical practice in the period. Manuscripts provide both relatively controlled circulation and relative privacy, especially important for dangerous material, and these properties are certainly part of the answer. The flexibility manuscript affords its user to add and edit material is also important to a practitioner working to improve his mastery; this quality may explain the blank folios in the Antiphoner, spaces a seventeenth-century scribe could use to add material.

This reader hoped for some information about the principles by which Klaassen selected these two particular manuscripts to illustrate sixteenthcentury magical writing. How do they relate to the context of other sixteenthcentury magical manuscripts scattered around the English-speaking world? Such a discussion would have made this edition's good argument even stronger. For example, an unedited manuscript housed at the University of Illinois, "Crafte of conjureyinge and how to rule the ffierye spirits of ye planets & make the deuyle appeare" (ca. 1590) (Pre-1650 MS 0102), has much in common with the Antiphoner and the Boxgrove manuscripts. Similarly, the Ashmole MS Collection at Oxford's Bodleian Library, particularly in the papers of Simon Forman, contains instructive texts about how to conjure spirits (including notes about Forman's own failures), and manuscripts recording charms for healing and detailing how to prepare protective amulets. Klaassen could undoubtedly offer many more pertinent examples in a brief discussion of why he chose these two to edit.

Lauren Kassell calls manuscripts such as these "grubby" in her blurb for this edition. As more and more of them find an editor to make them readily available in print, our understanding of the magical world of sixteenthcentury England will become even clearer. Klaassen's careful and informative edition adds an important piece to this picture.