Introducing Medieval Magic
This is a special-length bumper post. Take it at your own pace.
How do you understand your world?
Most people take things for granted. There's no blame in that, it's only lucky that the things we can take for granted are brilliant, often true things. We know how the Earth turns and how to strike fire from a lighter. We can watch Jurassic Park and let CGI resurrect animals dead for millions of years from bones, a bit of imagination, and an army of animators. How did medieval people understand their world?
Let’s think about how we think about this.
The Ladder Problem.1
Now, I want you to imagine you are walking down a bustling street. You're in a rush—aren't you always in a damn rush?!—and scaffold is clung like a parasite to someone's bay window. A decorator's van squeezes you in. Alas, a ladder! It is leaning over the path and you are charging directly underneath it. Do you risk walking under it, or avoid it and go around?
If you decided to walk around—or indeed, even thought about going under the ladder as a ‘risk’, why did you? Is it just superstition? Or do you think there’s genuine reason to avoid the ladder?
This a bit unfair, because I led you into it. So let's cut to my point: even things we know to be false or misleading, things we don't even have to take for granted, sometimes we still believe them. If you look at the ladder problem and think it is stupid and a bit pathetic, then this might not be the blog for you.
But if you think it is…
Conceiving of Magic
What about medieval people? How did they understand their world—a world filled with miracles, demons, and marvels? Magic was part of it. But specifically, magic offered to provide explanations and powers over things that were otherwise unintuitive or seemingly impossible to explain. It protected people from facing their anxieties, too.
Worried about the future and what it will bring? Astrological magic may help boost your confidence.
Try this talisman to help keep your feet from getting sore on pilgrimage! Works just like a relic, but no saint needed!2
Wanting a shortcut to a photographic memory to pass your university exams? Try the ars notoria, or a bit of necromancy to conjure up a quick-witted demon. Don't forget to bind it, but once set, ask away!
Or how about that poisoning that's struck the court! And the king is mentally incapacitated. I can tell you for a fact it's your enemies employing sorcerers. Those damn Milanese…3
Your boss, the king, wants you to protect the entire island from amphibious invasion? Easy. Have you tried using natural magic to build a brass wall all the way around it?4
Warfare getting complicated? My friend's been working on image magic-powered weapons. Here's his book!5
Fancy living a little bit longer? How about until the end of time? Some theurgy here, a bit of alchemy there, all achievable.
In this way we must conceive of magic as fundamentally revealing about the human condition.
1. Magic to produce knowledge and understand the world
One has to first of all remember that to do philosophy and theology was also to do science. These are not in opposition, not in our period, and not really ever until the modern day. So in a world that is theological, there are boundaries, definitions, and limits here and there. The world is inherently knowable, because God provided rational man the tools to know about it.
But man was not only rational: rationality was key to his distinction in the universe. Man literally had a unique, immortal, rational, soul. Animals' souls died when they died—they had inferior, ‘sensory’ souls only. Aristotle, Aquinas, and the scholastic philosophers thus expected man's highest faculty, the most religious thing he could do, was to use his rationality. Exercising this virtue was called scientias—knowledge—a word that, as historian of science Peter Harrison explained over many pages,6 eventually became ‘science’—but not for many, many centuries.
Rational man, therefore, needed to produce knowledge to understand God. Magic was one way to do this and it offered secrets the other branches of knowledge did not so easily give up. What tools did rational man have?
For rational man, magic wasn’t simply random superstition. There were systems in magic. As historian Richard Kieckhefer puts it, medieval magic had its own 'specific rationality'—its own structured logic, one system among many that could help medieval people explain the natural and the supernatural.7 People did magic believing it would work—they performed the ritual because they expected the intended outcome.
Take this story to help how we think about the medieval worldview. According to a story recorded by William of Newburgh (c.1135-98),8 a vampire/revenant haunted Annan in Dumfries. He had been an evil man who had fallen from the rafters after lying in wait to catch his wife in an adulterous embrace. As John Arnold puts it, in his confusion the man refused confession and the last rites and died unshriven.
As a result, the body of our evil man rose from the grave after sunset until sunrise, assaulting the fleeing townsfolk, wandering the streets and corrupting the air with its breath. As the town depopulated, the local priest called wise clerics and holy men to come and deliver advice. They feasted and talked.
Meanwhile two brothers got fired up and went out. The monster had killed their father already. They dug up the corpse before it could rise.
‘…distended to enormous corpulence, its face red and swollen beyond measure… from it flowed so much blood…one understood it to have been a bloodsucker filled with the blood of many.’
Enraged, they hacked at it with their shovels until they seized the heart and tore it to pieces, when they built a pyre and burned it.
All in Annan returned to normal.
‘It is not easy, in faith, to accept this,’ William admitted, ‘except that in our present time there are sufficient examples [of vampires] and abundant evidence.’ (quoted in John Arnold, Belief)
This wasn’t just a ghost story. From one point of view it was heretical. Resurrection was, of course, a sacred concept in this theological universe. Christ was resurrected, and eventually at the Resurrection all human bodies would follow suit, ready for judgement before God. Why was this story allowed?
The answer is given by William—there was abundant evidence. The only thing left to do, then, is try and deduce an explanation from the information they had. Often magic was a solution that could assist in this.
Another really easy example to show magic as a way to produce knowledge is necromancy (sometimes also called nigromancy). When we say necromancy, we don't mean summoning armies of the undead, like in fantasy fiction or videogames. Necromantia literally combines 'dead' (necro) with 'divination' (mantia) because it was about summoning the dead (or sometimes demons) to provide vast and sometimes forbidden knowledge to the user. One ritual for doing this was thought to be found in the Bible and available to all priests—it is simply a reverse exorcism.
The entire point was producing knowledge from the tools available.
2. Magic to rationalise the future
Tied to producing knowledge about the world itself, magic could also offer a route to rationalising and even predicting events yet to come. This is one of the most universal aspects to magic across world cultures. In China’s Shang dynasty (1600-1046bce), reading oracle bones (scapulimancy) was vital to state governance and policy.
Consider the weather. If your entire economy and all your financial interests (not to mention ability to eat food) was tied up in agriculture, seasons and weather are hugely important. It's not about forgetting an umbrella if early frost ruins your annual crop. But what if you could predict the weather for the next year? What if you knew it would be fortuitous to plant certain cereals one year? Well, according to the laws of the Aristotelian universe, with a bit of magic mixed in, you just might be able to.
Or how about politics? The court is a dangerous place. It is an enormous advantage to know whether and when you will be pregnant—since you've been promoted from mistress and are the new Duchess of Gloucester, your child is next in line to the throne. And the king's weak. In fact, why not ask the stars, or maybe a demon, when the king's due to die from illness too? Just to check, of course…
What if there was some ritual that helped to predict how much money you would have next year? What if using tools like graphs, ledgers, and abacuses could—oh, that's just treasury economics.
I gave you that final example because that is how one of my great teachers conceived of the thirteenth century's 'rationalisation' and how he adapted an antiquated idea about modernity and 'disenchantment'. But it's stuck with me because it's true. Economics is a ritual providing the tools to forecast a type of future. In the thirteenth century, the English chancellery increasingly employed just such tools to forecast tax and make informed decisions about borrowing on credit from the Italian banking houses who had branches in London, to finance the king’s wars.
Just like astrology and magic.
Would medieval people have seen one as a social science and the other two as wastes of time? I don't doubt some did. Medieval people could be clever and sceptical as any other. But for most, the point isn't that one is 'magic' and therefore silly and unrealistic and the other is economics and therefore serious. The point is these things offer the keys to foretell the future, and therefore predict yourself ahead of your peers.
3. Magic to change the world
There is no doubting that for some, magic was not merely an aid for producing knowledge. The specific allure associated with magic, perhaps its defining feature and that which sets it apart from theology and philosophy (and economics), was that some people believed it could literally affect the natural and the supernatural worlds now. What is important to note though is that matter in the universe was created immutably by God. Humans could not literally change created matter. But they could process it, and use magic to speed these processes up. That's the fundament of alchemy—matter was immutable but it could be disaggregated and processed to change the nature of that matter. It had the same substance but a new form.
How magic changed the world was achieved in many ways. But first, we must remember this is not a fantasy novel where the author has followed Sanderson's Laws and elected to worldbuild a hard magic system which is easily categorisable and can make beautiful diagrams for Pinterest, or stunning visuals in the opening credits as per Wheel of Time. Medieval magic did offer the promise to change the world, but it was not as simple as a fantasy novel and much more interesting because of it.
To bring harm or not
In very basic terms, the two ways magic could change the world was either through harm (maleficium) or not. I've kept 'not' intentionally broad, but I'm talking about healing, speeding up the growth of crops, Moses turning snakes to sticks, and whatnot. This is the space where loads of interesting things happen. Some were very 'scientific' like the so-called 'natural magics'; others coming with a rich social history, like the village cunning woman's love potion or herblore.
The other space, harmful magic, maleficium, is equally complex but much better researched and documented. This is about poisoning people, hurting people, manipulating people, even killing them. Stopping it was important. Maleficium was also a spiritual crime: it could be heretical and people were burned at the stake for attempting it. It was often tied to demon or diabolical magic for obvious reasons. It also overlapped with fields like necromancy.
Maleficium is was what fed into the witchcraft mythologies that in postmedieval days would lead to a craze responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.
Mapping Medieval Magic
Because we have established magic has a specific rationality we might think we can still produce typologies, like an early modern wunderkammer-building proto-scientist. Probably we cannot. But, well—whilst it is not simple—maybe we can start having a go.
To help us navigate this world, let's introduce a coordinate map of medieval magic. The first and most important thing is to define our boundaries and establish the limits to what we are defining. I've decided to visualise this in a grid with two spectra.
One spectrum is the axis about perception—this being between sanctioned magic at the one extreme and heretical magic at the other. The second axis is about traditions, between learned and popular.
The Axes
X-Axis: Perception, Sanctioned ↔ Heretical
Sanctioned magic was approved—or at least tolerated—by the Church and elite authorities. Think of certain natural magic, angelic rituals, licensed alchemy, etc.
Between sanction and heresy we might find image magic, certain astrological magic, and the softer side of necromancy/nigromancy.
Heretical magic was condemned as illicit, dangerous, or demonic. This naturally changed over time and was dangerous to perform. Harmful magic (maleficium), certain necromancy, and witchcraft falls here.
Y-Axis: Traditions, Learned/Literate ↔ Lay/Popular
Learned magic was the domain of clerics and scholars—literate, university-trained, and often writing in Latin. Astrological talismans, image magic, grimoires/magic books, and angelic spells are here.
Lay magic belonged to the oral traditions of villagers and cunning folk: charms to heal sick livestock, spirits trapped in glass balls, or a wolf's tooth talisman to help a weaning child stave off gum disease.
To be clear, this is not anything official. Just as medieval magic is not a fantasy novel with predefined rules, historians of medieval magic do not make ‘proofs’ or have a definitive canonical answer or ‘family tree’: this is an interpretation based solely on my small understanding and the excellent training I’ve been privileged to receive.
It is also a flawed interpretation—the X-Axis is making a clear value judgement. When I consider something ‘sanctioned’ is not necessarily when you consider it sanctioned and even where the evidence is strong, ‘heretical’ is not always as clear-cut as you might think.
The Y-Axis has its own problems: to us, in our literate age, reading Substack, 'literacy' may have an air of superiority (especially when looking back at historical people). This is doubly unfortunate as ‘lay’ or ‘popular’ branches of magic must have been incredibly rich, perhaps more so than anything written down, but those traditions have left behind much different—if any—sources. For lay magicians we know about them often through legal sources, which usually condemn or may misunderstand their magic, and through material culture, or objects, which I suggest are much more interpretable because they often lack for written context.
And again, the line is not always obvious—just because a Lombardic village cunning man uses a mirror for his magic, does not also mean he could not or has not read the Picatrix. Likewise, Jehan de Bar was burned at the stake in Paris in 1398 appears to have been capable of 'learned magic' but the list of his errors contain things for which we have no explanation—like 'the nail from a horseshoe, etc.' at item 20. This is another problem when understanding medieval magic—the sources we do have, including those written sources, are all incredibly loaded and must be interpreted with caution. And because some magic was illicit, much was not recorded by design.
With that important thought in our minds, let's sketch a very rough map:
A learned monk tucked away in the abbey's cloister, using angelic spells to unlock divine wisdom, probably sat in the Learned and Sanctioned quadrant. A cunning woman’s charm to heal a sick child was Lay magic that was neither necessarily Sanctioned nor Heretical. These boundaries were both astronomical and yet thin, and for many medieval people, crossing it could have terrifying consequences. Where did the cleric employed by the duke to perform magic with wax images so that the duke might have better control over a mad king fall on this chart? Considering he was burned at the stake and condemned by University of Paris theologians, we guess Heretical and somewhat Learned.
And this changed dependant on context. A well-known astrologer whose reputation had him called ‘a gret and a konnyng man’ falling squarely under the Learned and non-Heretical quadrant one day might the next day find himself hanged, drawn, and quartered for treasonous sorcery, clearly moving him well off the Sanctioned board, though perhaps not yet as far as 'Heretical'.9 One century the papacy might hire sorcerers and the church follow Aristotle in praising the value of astrologers. The very next Pope might outlaw magic.
This was a dynamic world that could and did change often. The most obvious and most momentous change came in the late fifteenth century, though its antecedents and mythology developed especially in and after the 1430s: witchcraft. This blog may not deal much with witchcraft, because besides being complex, extremely sensitive, and mostly postmedieval, there are great resources out there already on the subject. Alas, never say never.
What’s Coming: Magic and Marvels Ahead
On this blog we’ll explore the rich, strange, and wondrous world of medieval magic but also the equally rich, strange, and wonderful world of medieval marvels.
Here’s a glimpse of posts to come:
Magic Words: From verba ignota to Alakazam.
Mental Illness and Magicians: How were service magicians employed at the courts of 'mad kings'?
A Magicians' History: How did magic tie Virgil, Zoroaster, and Roger Bacon together?
Necromancy—Fantasy and History: From reverse exorcism to armies of skeletons, what was necromancy really?
Magic at Universities: Was Magic ever taught at Universities? Padua? Prague? Oxford? Toledo? Orléans? Or has the 'magic school' always been a trope of fantasy fiction?
Accounting, Divination, Religion, and Science: How rituals about predicting the future might mean sorcerers became accountants.
We’ll dive into forgotten texts, meet some people who practiced magic, and explore the marvels that defined medieval thought.
I will aim to start with one post a week, every Monday morning.
This has been a special bumper post, extra-long, but not meant to be necessarily absorbed in one go. Future posts will be much shorter and more manageable.
Final Thought: A World of Wonder
Magic was never one thing. What makes this blog important is the attempt to try and capture, and through each fascinating synecdoche, understand medieval magic and the marvels of the medieval world. Magic was somewhere between the other systems of producing knowledge—which, whilst we might think we understand, are no less important or intriguing (maybe a little bit).
Magic was at times sanctioned and at others heretical, practiced by those literate, those learned, those clerical, and those lay. To us, magic would be everywhere in a medieval world just as busy with demons as it was with animals. But to medieval people, magic might have meant something specific. It was about belief but as a system of knowledge it was also a rational way to understand a designed world filled with things waiting to be explained and even controlled. It shaped medieval hopes, fears, and peoples' ways of knowing.
It’s time to uncover that world.
Subscribe to join me on this journey through medieval marvels and mysteries. Question:
What comes to mind when you hear ‘medieval magic’? Angels, witches, revenants—or something else?
Drop your thoughts below—I’d love to hear them, and any ideas for future posts you’d like to see.
Credit to Professor Sophie Page of UCL for this idea. I hope she doesn't mind me borrowing her example.
For example, a mole’s foot.
The Visconti Dukes of Milan and Milan generally was infamous for an association with sorcery and poisoning. This references the exile of Valentina Visconti from Paris in 1392.
I’ve cheated a little bit as this is actually taken from Robert Greene’s Elizabethan play (Frier Bacon and Frier Bungay c.1589) about Roger Bacon (1219/20-92), who was mythologised to have been (one of) the builders of a talking ‘Brazen Head’ which could predict the future and help Friar Bacon encircle all Great Britain in a wall of brass.
Konrad Kyeser’s Bellifortis (c.1405).
The Territories of Science and Religion which I thoroughly recommend.
Richard Kieckhefer’s article is literally called ‘The Specific Rationality of Medieval Magic’.
And cited in John Arnold’s excellent Belief and Unbelief.
Referring to Roger Bolingbroke (d.1441).
Your writing is deep, fascinating , lengthy to read on an IPhone. I see that you are new here like myself. I hope you continue this work on Substack. I love it.
Wow! I enjoyed this so much. This is an area I'm completely ignorant of. I've studied folk beliefs, but never really thought how magic must have evolved and became an integral part of the fabric society. Looking forward to reading more.