Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies

The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe

Michael D. Bailey

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780801467301
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Superstitions are commonplace in the modern world. Mostly, however, they evoke innocuous images of people reading their horoscopes or avoiding black cats. Certain religious practices might also come to mind—praying to St. Christopher or lighting candles for the dead. Benign as they might seem today, such practices were not always perceived that way. In medieval Europe superstitions were considered serious offenses, violations of essential precepts of Christian doctrine or immutable natural laws. But how and why did this come to be? In Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies, Michael D. Bailey explores the thorny concept of superstition as it was understood and debated in the Middle Ages.

Bailey begins by tracing Christian thinking about superstition from the patristic period through the early and high Middle Ages. He then turns to the later Middle Ages, a period that witnessed an outpouring of writings devoted to superstition—tracts and treatises with titles such as De superstitionibus and Contra vitia superstitionum. Most were written by theologians and other academics based in Europe's universities and courts, men who were increasingly anxious about the proliferation of suspect beliefs and practices, from elite ritual magic to common healing charms, from astrological divination to the observance of signs and omens. As Bailey shows, however, authorities were far more sophisticated in their reasoning than one might suspect, using accusations of superstition in a calculated way to control the boundaries of legitimate religion and acceptable science. This in turn would lay the conceptual groundwork for future discussions of religion, science, and magic in the early modern world. Indeed, by revealing the extent to which early modern thinkers took up old questions about the operation of natural properties and forces using the vocabulary of science rather than of belief, Bailey exposes the powerful but in many ways false dichotomy between the "superstitious" Middle Ages and "rational" European modernity.

Chapter 1

The Weight of Tradition

During that period…we were seduced and we seduced others, deceived and deceiving in various lustful desires, both openly through what they call the liberal arts and secretly by a false show of religion, here proud, there superstitious, everywhere vain.

—Augustine, Confessions

The theologians and other intellectual authorities who wrote about superstition in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries generally had their eyes fixed much more on past tradition than on the future into which they were moving. So it is with that tradition that we must begin to chart their movement, surveying how Christian views of superstition developed from the time of the church fathers to the flowering of high medieval scholasticism in the thirteenth century. It is worth noting again that late medieval writers were never absolutely beholden to past authority on this subject. They readily modified earlier definitions and categorizations, sometimes overtly but more often tacitly. Yet there can be no denying that they all knew and felt the heavy weight of tradition, and their own work cannot be properly understood if separated from it. What follows here will not be a thorough study or even, frankly, a complete survey of patristic and earlier medieval writing on superstition—that would require a book in its own right, if not several.1 Instead we will focus here on those earlier figures who exerted the most profound influence on late medieval writers. A few other figures, less directly influential in later centuries, will also be included in order to flesh out the tradition. Late medieval writers addressing superstition were, in fact, so circumscribed in their acknowledged influences that to restrict ourselves exclusively to the sources they regularly cited would have us jumping from Augustine in the fifth century to Isidore of Seville in the seventh to William of Auvergne and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth. While remaining quite selective, in this chapter I will nevertheless seek to provide at least some skein of connecting material between those great names, and to describe how a tradition that seemed monolithic in the late medieval period actually underwent important changes over the course of centuries.

One small source amply demonstrates the attention intellectual authorities of the late Middle Ages paid to the past when considering the issue of superstition. Brief, fragmentary, and anonymous, the text is found in a fifteenth-century manuscript originally in the possession of, and we may provisionally assume produced by, the Augustinian Hermits in Munich. Consisting almost entirely of quotations from patristic and early medieval sources, this pastiche could have originated almost anytime after the ninth century (when the last source it quotes was likely written). Its unique and fragmentary nature, however, suggests that the fifteenth-century copy is probably the original composition. The catalog of the Bavarian State Library, where it now resides, labels it a Tract on Superstitions, Magic, Sorceries, etc. (Tractatus de superstitionibus, magia, sortilegiis, etc.), but this designation is not found in the manuscript itself. Lacking any title, it begins abruptly “Item: from the first book of On Christian Doctrine,” and proceeds to quote extensively from Augustine’s work—although not, in fact, from book 1 of his On Christian Doctrine (De doctrina Christiana) but rather his fundamental definition of superstition found in book 2 of that work.2 Other texts quoted at length are Augustine’s On the Divination of Demons (De divinatione daemonum) and sections on magic and divination from Isidore’s Etymologies. Also included is an important decree of church law, the canon Episcopi (so-called after its first word, “bishops”), well known to scholars of witchcraft for its description of certain women’s superstitious belief that they journeyed at night in service to the goddess Diana, an image that powerfully influenced fifteenth-century notions of witches flying to diabolical sabbaths.

Episcopi dates most likely from the late ninth century. Its earliest known iteration appears in a legal collection assembled around 906 by the canonist Regino of Prüm.3 This makes it by far the youngest text included in this fifteenth-century pastiche. Medieval authorities, however, believed that the canon originated at the Council of Ancyra (modern Ankara), held in 314, which is how the scribe labeled it here, so he would have thought it to be his oldest text, predating Augustine by almost a century.4 With virtually no original commentary inserted between its excerpts from ancient sources, and completely lacking an introduction or conclusion (it remains obviously unfinished), the compilation’s purpose is obscure. The most likely explanation for its composition is that a scribe either took upon himself or was instructed to assemble early authoritative material on superstition. Such a primer would have been an obvious way for a late medieval cleric to get quickly up to speed on the most fundamental, authoritative discussions of superstition from the early Christian era.

If only this anonymous clerical compiler had known the real date of the canon Episcopi, we might be able to extrapolate from his selection of texts some kind of perceived periodization: a grouping of sources stretching from the patristic era to the beginning of the tenth century. Instead, however, it would have been Isidore of Seville, in the seventh century, whom our scribe would have thought to be his chronological outlier (if he thought about the chronology of his sources at all—he certainly did not place them in any such order). Yet there are valid grounds for us to impose this periodization anyway onto medieval thinking about superstition, although it is not one that any medieval thinker would consciously have recognized. Already in the second and third centuries CE, church authorities began redefining Roman notions of superstitio to fit a Christian framework, and by this maneuver they effectively categorized all pagan religion as superstitious. They continued to think of superstition mainly in terms of paganism long after Rome fell and Christianity achieved dominance in western Europe, as late as the tenth century and even into the very early eleventh.5 Between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, however, superstition was reconceived again, thanks to a major intellectual revival that took place in western Europe, giving rise to much more systematic natural philosophy and also more developed demonology than had been known for centuries, into which ideas of superstition had to be fit. This broad periodization and the conceptual shift it entails will provide the backbone of this chapter and essential background for understanding how authors of the late medieval period appropriated earlier sources and how they approached the perceived superstitions of their own time.

The Superstition of the Pagans

As we have already seen, the term superstitio arose in antiquity. It carried multiple and complicated meanings, but in general, since Roman paganism did not assert a strictly dichotomous moral system of absolutely good deities opposed by absolutely wicked demons, superstition for the Romans entailed less the complete opposite of proper religio and more an excess of devotion or observance. They also applied the term to unofficial or foreign cults that they deemed to entail dangerous or “unreasonable” practices. For Roman authorities, early Christianity fulfilled all the conditions of a superstition. Of course, Christian writers rejected such charges against their faith. They turned them back against the Romans, and against all pagans (a word whose meaning they also bent to their purposes to mean anyone who was neither Christian nor Jew), proclaiming all the deities of the ancient world to be false and all the devotions honoring them to be erroneous. In the process they upended some fundamental features of ancient metaphysics. This revolution was, in fact, not exclusively Christian in the making. Christianity’s monotheism grew out of Judaism’s, of course. Also certain late-antique pagan philosophers who conceived of fully benevolent deities or even a single deity governing the entirety of creation struggled with the implications of rites directed to other lesser and more ambivalent creatures, just as Christian thinkers would.6 Ultimately, however, Christianity raised such issues more aggressively and more successfully than any previous intellectual system. The Christian universe became a sharply bifurcated one. On one side stood Christ and his angels while on the other massed all the dark forces of perdition. Moreover, thanks to Christianity’s sweeping universalism, all human beings were implicated in these divisions, whether they accepted them or not. Roman cults, and those of all other ancient peoples, were not simply empty and meaningless; as conceived by Christian authorities, they were instead directed toward fallen Christian angels. All the deities and daimones of the ancient world became for the Christian polemicists who pronounced against them irrevocably evil demons.7 Since these entities were entirely malevolent and bent on harming humankind, any sort of worship or veneration shown to them automatically became excessive, unreasonable, and superstitious. This transformation, beginning very early in the Christian era, was far from sudden, but its ultimate success was nearly absolute.

“Therefore, my dear friends,” wrote the apostle Paul to the early Christian community in Corinth, “flee from the worship of idols.” He went on to explain why. “What pagans sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be partners with demons.”8 In the second century, the apologist Justin Martyr urged faithful Christians to reject all false “opinions of the ancients” and not to be swayed by the “superstitious people” who continued to profess them.9 In the third century, the theologian and church father Origen, defending Christianity against the Greek philosopher Celsus, established daimones as entirely evil demons, thereby cementing the notion that all paganism was inevitably superstitious.10 Of course, Christian pronouncements did not necessarily matter much to non-Christians until the new faith assumed a powerful place in the Roman world, which would not happen until the fourth century, in the wake of the emperor Constantine’s declaration of official toleration in 313. Even during the fourth century, however, newly ascendant Christianity, basking in imperial support, coexisted with respectable and entrenched pagan systems. In this period, it seems that many autho...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Names and Titles
• Abbreviations
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1. The Weight of Tradition
• 2. Superstition in Court and Cloister
• 3. The Cardinal, the Confessor, and the Chancellor
• 4. Dilemmas of Discernment
• 5. Witchcraft and Its Discontents
• 6. Toward Disenchantment?
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Bibliography