Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe

Kathryn A. Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472433503
• eBook ISBN: 9781317138334
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

While pre-modern Europe is often seen as having an 'enchanted' or 'magical' worldview, the full implications of such labels remain inconsistently explored. Witchcraft, demonology, and debates over pious practices have provided the main avenues for treating those themes, but integrating them with other activities and ideas seen as forming an enchanted Europe has proven to be a much more difficult task. This collection offers one method of demystifying this world of everyday magic. Integrating case studies and more theoretical responses to the magical and preternatural, the authors here demonstrate that what we think of as extraordinary was often accepted as legitimate, if unusual, occurrences or practices. In their treatment of and attitudes towards spirit-assisted treasure-hunting, magical recipes, trials for sanctity, and visits by guardian angels, early modern Europeans showed more acceptance of and comfort with the extraordinary than modern scholars frequently acknowledge. Even witchcraft could be more pervasive and less threatening than many modern interpretations suggest. Magic was both mundane and mysterious in early modern Europe, and the witches who practiced it could in many ways be quite ordinary members of their communities. The vivid cases described in this volume should make the reader question how to distinguish the ordinary and extraordinary and the extent to which those terms need to be redefined for an early modern context. They should also make more immediate a world in which magic was an everyday occurrence.

Chapter 1
Introduction:
What Makes Magic Everyday Magic?

Kathryn A. Edwards

The last decades of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries have seen an explosion of research on magical practices and the attitudes about them in late medieval and early modern Europe. Inspired by books as diverse as Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic and Francis Yates’s The Occult in the Elizabethan Age,¹ scholars have combined methods from anthropology, literary studies, criminology, psychology, and gender studies to arrive at a more profound understanding of what has been described as the “enchanted world-view” of this time.² In the process work on witchcraft has dominated. The early modern witch hunts provide a dramatic and, to modern European sensibilities, abhorrent example of one consequence of belief in a magical and immanent world. Strangely compelling, the causes, ideologies, and practices of Europe’s witch hunts have been frequently debated, often revealing a great deal about their authors’ sympathies or frustration with the past. The availability of records have helped this academic focus; the records of witchcraft trials often appear in relatively coherent collections, more accessible for analysis, than many other records of magical practices. Information about witches’ activities, characteristics, and relationships can be found throughout demonologies, trial records, and lists of sentences. In the process of studying such texts, scholars have traced personal, professional, and intellectual networks at all levels of European society. They have also described a world that magic pervaded.³

In so doing, scholars have struggled with an admittedly imprecise vocabulary whose meanings could vary in late medieval and early modern Europe and have certainly shifted between that time and the present. “Superstition,” “the supernatural,” and “the natural” were all concepts key to understanding witchcraft and magic more generally but on which scholars have taken years to come to common definitions—definitions that are still ignored, unfortunately, in many less specialized works.⁴ What to call common beliefs and practices has also been widely disputed, and most terms have been faulted in some way for presumed anachronism. “Traditional religion,” “common religion,” “popular religion,” “shared religion,” and “lived religion” have all been critiqued in some form, although since no acceptable substitute has been agreed to, most scholars use one of the above terms or some minor variant to signal beliefs and practices that were widely shared among classes, genders, and educational levels.⁵ In some cases these attitudes and activities transcended confessions, while in others they were confined to a village or region. They followed a spectrum of what theologians saw as orthodox, ranging from saying common prayers (Ave Maria, Pater Noster) to, among Catholics, sprinkling salt to purify an area. This spectrum also slid into the suspect, such as using the Bible as a protective amulet, and could even become heresy or witchcraft, as it did when a person called on the Virgin or saints for aid in transferring milk from a neighbor’s cow to their own. Despite the very real differences in such practices, however, they reflected a continuum of beliefs where supernatural influence and access were presumed. They could be remarkable or ordinary, even mundane, but they attested to a shared and durable sense of how the world worked, humanity’s place in it, and the relationship between forces not of this world, extraordinary forces in this world, and daily experiences.⁶ This is the “everyday” of this book’s title and chapters.

The definitions of and distinctions between “magic” and “religion” have also been at the heart of many of these debates, and the wobbly ground between the two is where this book is situated. Older historiography relied on a distinction drawn from anthropology between magic as operational, its practitioners focused on control and results, and religion as supplicatory, where believers asked God for assistance rather than demanding it.⁷ The same historiography that has contributed so much to our understanding of witchcraft and magical practices more generally has shown that such a distinction was untenable for late medieval and early modern Europe. While learned necromantic practices fall clearly into both modern and pre-modern concepts of magic, what made other actions magical frequently depended on who assessed them.⁸ If a priest, followed by villagers, carried a monstrance containing a Eucharistic wafer three times around a field to ensure a good harvest, was that magic? The priest and the villagers alike would almost certainly say that it was religion, while modern observers might argue that it was magic. The scholars in this collection would likely argue that it was both, that the boundaries between religion and magic, licit and illicit belief and practice were porous and fluid.⁹ If modern scholars classify that practice as magic (and often, therefore, seen as illegitimate) or religion (and, therefore, legitimate) is beside the point. Such processions were founded on the belief in a pervasive enchantedness and wonder that most Europeans accepted at this time. Whether this enchantedness accessed the supernatural, the preternatural, or the wondrous, it relied on a continuum of beliefs and practices where marvelous and miraculous experiences were uncommon, but they were expected and accepted, and life was generally interpreted within this framework.¹⁰ This worldview and its attendant activities is the “magic” of this collection’s title.

Given these perspectives, “everyday magic” can encompass an enormous number of topics in late medieval and early modern European history, as the recent work of Stephen Wilson on Europe’s “magical universe” has shown.¹¹ It can also bridge modern neuropsychology and early modern villages.¹² This collection is by no means as comprehensive. Instead, it uses studies of particular magical activities, theories about magic, and encounters with the magical and marvelous to contribute to and reevaluate broader currents in European historiography in which the pervasiveness of a “magical” perspective may not always be appreciated. It integrates material that is generally placed in separate books on magic and on piety so that its authors can argue for a more inclusive definition of “everyday magic.” Beginning with chapters that compare programmatic statements to lived experience, it then alternates chapters on the theoretical underpinnings of or academic debates over supernatural entities and events that were perceived as affecting daily life with chapters on the lived experiences that developed from such events and interactions with such entities. Both perspectives are key to understanding everyday magic. For example, as the chapters here will show, the activities theorized for guardian angels bore an uncanny resemblance to those of the spirits helping treasure hunters, and spirits and forces of all kinds—not merely demonic or angelic—could be called on equally for help in divination and prognostication, activities that fell well within a traditional definition of magic. To paraphrase the final chapter, the demonic could even be domesticated, that is, it could become an aspect of everyday magic. As these chapters demonstrate, such domestication was contingent on many local factors and at times failed. In all cases, though, it evolved with the societies and belief systems in which it was embedded. The studies here present aspects of that evolution in everyday magic and place such magic within a spectrum of pious practices and daily activities.

As noted above, the chapters collected here consider several of the broad historiographic questions at the heart of studies of witchcraft, magic, and popular belief. They also suggest that other themes in early modern European history may deserve a greater role in this historiography than they presently enjoy. In the process, certain topics recur throughout many chapters. Rather than summarizing each chapter individually, then, I will focus here on the themes binding these articles and their contribution to discussions of everyday magic.

Each author is well aware of the debates over the definition of magic and superstition and the challenges in distinguishing between modern and pre-modern perspectives. The chapters by Antoine Mazurek, Doris Moreno Martínez, Jason Coy, and Jared Poley show that early modern theologians and jurists from both Protestant and Catholic confessions continued to share the late medieval definition of superstition as excessive and improper religious observance. As these authors note, such “superstitious” practices could cause ecclesiastical hierarchies as much, if not more, concern than witchcraft well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That clergy and laity could share such superstitions made them all the more fraught; the commonality of certain magical practices show that people of all ages, classes, genders, and educational levels could accept and advocate for superstition. The very qualities that made something magical could vary from circumstance to circumstance, as Raisa Maria Toivo shows for early modern Finland, a situation that made defining magic and eradicating its superstitious elements almost impossible.¹³ There, farmers could interpret the same action designed to protect their cattle as either skill or magic, depending on who was doing it. If the action was deemed magical, it de facto became superstitious and potentially dangerous, yet if it was proven to be a skill, then the farmer would be remiss not to use it. In fact, abandoning that skill could even be seen as slighting God’s gifts by ignoring a valuable tool he provided for the farmer’s benefit.

As the case of the Finnish farmers demonstrates, magic itself could have many aspects and implications; the same individual who caused illness could often provide the means for its cure as well as create protective amulets, find missing objects, or prepare love potions. Owen Davies has rightly noted that the line between a practitioner of everyday, common magic (a cunning person) and a witch could be fine indeed, but seemingly it was well understood in early modern Europe.¹⁴ Moreover, cunning people could enjoy lucrative and long careers at the same time that others were being accused of and prosecuted for witchcraft. The chapters by Johannes Dillinger and Raisa Maria Toivo contribute to this discussion about everyday magical practitioners. Through analysis of trial records from early modern Germany and Finland, they highlight the cultural contingency in distinguishing between the qualities of magic: good, bad, or somewhere in the middle. In his study of treasure hunting, Dillinger argues that a key component in making magic dangerous and suspect was the harm that it might cause or be perceived to cause others, a version of the maleficia so familiar to scholars of witchcraft. Toivo, however, stresses that, for early modern Finns, classifying magic was unimportant, and the words associated with magic changed their connotation over time and depending on confessional circumstances.

Such magical powers depended on an ability to manipulate natural or supernatural forces, and Mazurek’s article focuses on how these forces were interpreted in early modern Spanish and Italian debates over the role of the guardian angel. Special knowledge and substance often made angels and demons central figures in magical practices ranging from elite necromancy to more common divination and protective spells. By their own nature, both angels and demons understood and could manipulate the created world far better than humanity, and both were willing to do so, according to the theologians Mazurek analyzes. For these intellectuals, guardian angels thus provided an invaluable bridge between the natural environment and troubles with which humans had to cope and the salvation humans hoped to obtain. Yet the activities guardian angels inspired humans to perform could appear as magical and, by implication, suspect, either through the way angels could manipulate natural forces or the support angels gave to human attempts to protect themselves from demonic temptation. The visionary nuns of Linda Lierheimer’s chapter on false sanctity were subject to similar analyses. Their spiritual guides assessed if their impulses were demonically or divinely (angelically) inspired in part by the balance of natural, unnatural, and supernatural behaviors the nuns exhibited. Claims of angelic assistance could actually undermine a visionary’s status if the angel inspired her to behave in a way that did not exhibit the qualities of spiritual perfection that were expected in a woman under angelic guardianship.

Lierheimer’s chapter is one of many in this collection that insist on the importance of local, historicized analysis to understand the attitudes towards and practices of everyday magic in early modern Europe. Such a focus should not surprise anyone familiar with the historiography on witchhunting. There, local circumstances—law codes, judicial structures, public health, social networks, and neighborhood relationships—have been central to analyses for decades. In subjects like everyday magic, however, the degree of historicization can vary widely. For decades, even centuries, folklorists have gathered and organized material on everyday magic and beliefs. Often they have classified these materials thematically and analyzed them to show broad cognitive and cultural patterns linked to a relatively constant pre-modern, folk, or subconscious sensibility. While such work can be invaluable, historians must use it cautiously if they want to assess changes over time, the influence of the cultural environment, and the relationship between such beliefs and other historical trends.¹⁵ The chapters by Toivo, Moreno, Lierheimer, Dillinger, and Edwards all demonstrate this cautious integration of folkloric materials into historicized analysis. They embed everyday magical practices and experiences within a historically specific social and cultural context. In the process a broad cast of characters is seen to be involved in magic—men and women, nuns and housekeepers, theologians and farmers—and the types of magic that are accepted as “everyday magic” and individuals’ responses to its use varies. Farmers see magic as a necessary tool, treasure hunters present their hunt in a sacramental framework, and Huguenot ministers calmly question ghosts. Although magic involved cooperation in some cases, as Lierheimer and Dillinger show, contests for the right to exhibit magical and mystical effects could also divide communities. Rather than existing in a consistent and enduring folkloric framework, the constitutive characteristics of everyday magic evolved to reflect local circumstances and, as Sarah F...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: What Makes Magic Everyday Magic?
• 2 Magical Lives: Daily Practices and Intellectual Discourses in Enchanted Catalonia during the Early Modern Era
• 3 Lived Lutheranism and Daily Magic in Seventeenth-Century Finland
• 4 The Guardian Angel: From the Natural to the Supernatural
• 5 False Sanctity and Spiritual Imposture in Seventeenth-Century French Convents
• 6 Magic, Dreams, and Money
• 7 The Good Magicians: Treasure Hunting in Early Modern Germany
• 8 A Christian Warning: Bartholomaeus Anhorn, Demonology, and Divination
• 9 The “Antidemons” of Calvinism: Ghosts, Demons, and Traditional Belief in the House of François Perrault
• 10 The Constitution and Conditions of Everyday Magic in Late Medieval and Early Modern Catholic Europe
• Index