The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance PDF
Preview The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance
conTenTs Preface ix Introduction 1 Part I: The Apothecary’s Dilemma 13 1 Magic and Natural Philosophy 17 2 Scholastic Image Magic Before 1500 33 3 Some Apparent Exceptions: Image Magic or Necromancy? 57 Part II: Brother John’s Dilemma 81 4 The Ars notoria and the Sworn Book of Honorius 89 5 The Magic of Demons and Angels 115 Part III: Magic After 1580 157 6 Sixteenth-Century Collections of Magic Texts 161 7 Medieval Ritual Magic and Renaissance Magic 187 notes 219 bibliography 249 index 267 This content downloaded from 128.250.144.144 on Sat, 04 Jun 2016 20:35:11 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Klaassen_FM.indd 7 11/26/12 6:07 PM This content downloaded from 128.250.144.144 on Sat, 04 Jun 2016 20:35:11 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Klaassen_FM.indd 8 11/26/12 6:07 PM Preface Manuscripts of illicit magic present considerable methodological challenges for modern historians. While they may communicate in excruciating detail their constituent operations, they simultaneously give little explicit information about their authors, scribes, and collectors. Because magic texts often claim ancient lineage, they unsurprisingly deemphasize their more modern transmit- ters; good counsel would also have suggested the value of anonymity when cop- ying an illicit work. As a result, that someone chose to transmit a magic text tells us that he thought it was worth the effort, but little more. Was the transmitter a practitioner, a kind of antiquarian, or just a slavish scribe copying the next text in a volume? Did he copy it so as to develop arguments against magic, as a kind of curiosity, or just to make money? With few exceptions, what we know about the people behind the letters has been revealed unselfconsciously or inferred from the broader historical context. And, in fact, historians of medieval magic are usually delighted just to find a new m anuscript, anonymous or not. In an unusually stimulating seminar with Brian Stock at the University of Toronto, the intellectual spark that gave rise to this study was first struck. I began to wonder what could be learned about medieval magic by focusing on the manuscripts themselves: their mise-en-page, their organization, the works with which they were bound together, and how they were recorded in inventories and catalogues. I was also interested to know whether a broad survey of surviving manuscripts might reveal patterns that could help us understand the intellectual culture surrounding learned magic in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance. This gave rise to my doctoral dissertation and to much of my intellectual produc- tion since that time. As in any study of magic, I have had to move well beyond the skeletal evidence this approach provides, but the manuscript of magic and the codex that contains it have remained my intellectual rudders. In this study I do not seek to provide a comprehensive treatment of the tra- ditions of illicit learned magic in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Instead, I follow two principal genres of magic manuscripts, identify some of the defin- ing features of the intellectual cultures they represent, and attempt to draw some general conclusions about the history of magic. Although I believe that This content downloaded from 128.250.144.144 on Sat, 04 Jun 2016 20:36:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Klaassen_FM.indd 9 11/26/12 6:07 PM
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