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

Frank Klaasen’s Making Magic in Elizabethan England consists of transcripts of two anonymous Elizabethan manuscripts of magic: the Antiphoner Notebook (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Additional B. 1) and the Boxgrove Manual (London, British Library, MS Harley 2267). In addition to making two obscure and difficult manuscripts accessible to scholars and students of medieval and early modern magic, Klaasen’s insightful introductions and notes explain how magic developed and changed during the early modern period. He particularly focuses on how the scribes of the manuscripts altered and adapted the original texts in response to the changing religious and cultural environment of early modern England.

The Protestant parish priest of Boxgrove commissioned a scribe to copy the Boxgrove Manual in the late sixteenth century. The original manuscript is not extant. Written in English, it is a work of learned, ritual magic that draws heavily on the 1578 edition of Agrippa’s influential De occulta philosophia, as well as other medieval Latin texts of conjuring and necromancy, thus making them accessible to a vernacular audience. It contains lamens and pentacles for the summoning of spirits, many of which have bled through the paper, obscuring the text on the other side. Consequently, Klaasen’s consummate transcription has made the text more accessible to modern scholars by overcoming many of the impediments created by the incompetent scribe.

The Antiphoner Notebook was created in the second half of the sixteenth century, probably by a cunning man, on fragments from a fourteenth-century English liturgical manuscript and copied towards the end of the sixteenth century by two scribes. It is a collection of spells, charms, and cures, written both in English and Latin, dealing primarily with the practices with which cunning folk were most concerned: finding thieves, locating treasure, and countering witchcraft. Some of the Latin is untranslatable and Klaasen has done an excellent job of adding suggestions for what the Latin might have meant. For the scribe of the Antiphoner Notebook, the Latin was part of the numinous power of the magic and therefore needed to be retained, despite the problems it presented. To overcome some of these problems the scribes relied on Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, first published in 1584. Although this was a sceptical, anti-Catholic work written to expose the practices of cunning folk as fraudulent, it nevertheless provided a useful collection of simplified and vernacularized magical spells, amulets, and remedies that were widely used by cunning folk in the early modern period.

In Making Magic in Elizabethan England Klaasen interprets and explains how the scribes who created the manuscripts altered and modified their original sources in response to scientific, religious, and cultural changes in post-Reformation England. In the Boxgrove Manual, for example, the Protestant author removed all the overtly Catholic aspects from his sources. The removal and translation of the Latin from the earlier sources was part of a process in which learned magic was popularized for a much wider English-speaking audience. The Antiphoner Notebook, on the other hand, is ‘a book of magic that preserves older elements, adopts features of the new religion, and despite itself, creates entirely new ones’ (p. 24). Furthermore, the scribe, particularly in his engagement with Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, contemplated the differences between religion and magic, thus creating what Klaasen describes as a ‘peculiarly early modern intellectual artefact’ (p. 26). Earlier studies have tended to depict cunning folk as clinging to the old religion for comfort and support in a rapidly transforming world where superstitious, magical practices were being eradicated. Klaasen’s study of the Antiphoner Notebook supports the work of historians such as Owen Davies, by showing how the practice of cunning folk was dynamic and versatile, meeting the changing needs of the communities they served.

Much of the earlier research into English magical traditions has portrayed...