Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time

The Occult in Pre-Modern Sciences, Medicine, Literature, Religion, and Astrology

Albrecht Classen

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9783110556520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: History

There are no clear demarcation lines between magic, astrology, necromancy, medicine, and even sciences in the pre-modern world. Under the umbrella term 'magic, ' the contributors to this volume examine a wide range of texts, both literary and religious, both medical and philosophical, in which the topic is discussed from many different perspectives. The fundamental concerns address issue such as how people perceived magic, whether they accepted it and utilized it for their own purposes, and what impact magic might have had on the mental structures of that time. While some papers examine the specific appearance of magicians in literary texts, others analyze the practical application of magic in medical contexts. In addition, this volume includes studies that deal with the rise of the witch craze in the late fifteenth century and then also investigate whether the Weberian notion of disenchantment pertaining to the modern world can be maintained. Magic is, oddly but significantly, still around us and exerts its influence. Focusing on magic in the medieval world thus helps us to shed light on human culture at large.

Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

Attempted Murder by Magic: The Sorcerer and His Apprentice in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron 1

Elizabeth Chesney Zegura, University of Arizona, Tucson

Despite the spirit of rational inquiry that permeates much Renaissance thought, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries also witnessed an explosion of interest in prognostication, alchemy, sorcery, and natural magic. This occurred not just among uneducated peasants whose deep-seated belief in the power of necromancy, magic rituals, spells, and charms dated back to the Middle Ages and antiquity, but also among the era’s humanist intellectuals, nobility, and bourgeoisie. For confirmation, we need only look at the Italian philosophers Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), whose humanistic scholarship includes writings on the occult and ancient theology; at the Dutch physician Henricus Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim (1486–1535), well-known in the French Renaissance, whose De occulta philosophia libri tres (1531–1533) purports to reconcile natural and demonic magic with Christian epistemology; and at the French physician Rabelais (1494–1553), who in his Gargantua and Pantagruel constructs his narrator as an alchemist, stages an encounter between his protagonists and a sorceress (book 3, chapters 16–18), and portrays a magician named Herr Trippa (book 3, chapter 25) – loosely modeled on Agrippa himself.1424

Notwithstanding their popularity, however, and the fascination they held for literati and physicians such as Rabelais and Agrippa, both sorcerers and the study and practice of magic were also mocked and condemned during the era – oftentimes violently. Witch hunts, spearheaded by theologians and lawmakers, continued unchecked in France throughout the sixteenth century; and far from embracing magic unequivocally, many humanists (including Ficino and Pico, both ambivalent in their attitudes toward astrology) denounced divination, astrology, and other occult practices, in part due to pressure from the Church.1425

Even in Rabelais’s saga, with its numerous references to alchemy, demonology, and sorcery, the Utopian patriarch Gargantua singles out astrology for censure: “Laisse-moy l’astrologie divinatrice et l’art de Lullius, comme abuz et vanitéz” (Pantagruel, chapter 8; “But leave divinatory astrology and Lully’s art alone, I beg of you, for they are frauds and vanities”), he exhorts his son, implying that celestial magic is a false path to knowledge that contravenes both divine law and humanistic rationalism.1426 In an intriguing gesture of rebellion against his conservative father, however, the protagonist Pantagruel ultimately integrates magic into his epistemological toolbox, urging his companion Panurge to consult a sibyl as well as the doctor, lawyer, and theologian he has already visited – in case her paranormal insights, arcane knowledge, and self-proclaimed gift as a “seer” should prove superior to their learned, but unenlightened, teachings: “Que nuist sçavoir tousjours et tousjours apprendre, feust-ce d’un sot, d’un pot, d’une gedoufle, d’une moufle, d’une pantoufle?” (Third Book, chapter 16; “What harm is there in gaining knowledge every single day, even from a sot, a pot, a fool, a stool or an old slipper?”), he argues.1427 Far from condemning magic, Rabelais’s hero suggests that any and all sources and types of knowledge, even those frowned upon by the Church, merit our attention and can empower us.

Given this backdrop, one might expect Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549)1428 to focus more frequently on magic in her Heptaméron, a putatively realistic portrait of contemporary life that was composed in the 1540s and published posthumously in 1558 and 1559.1429 Not only did she patronize Rabelais, after all, but occult pursuits and beliefs, ranging from superstitions and prognostications to amulets, charms, and magic spells, were integral components of French Renaissance culture that even her own mother, Louise de Savoie (Louise of Savoy, 1476–1531), embraced. Still barren as an adolescent in 1490, Louise apparently consulted a soothsayer, the Italian monk Francesco da Paola or François de Paule, who accurately prophesied both the birth of her son (François d’Angoulême, b. 1594) and his accession to the French throne.1430 With her confidence in astrology and the occult thus confirmed, Louise would engage Cornelius Agrippa himself, reputedly a magus as well as a healer, as her physician in 1524 during her stay in Lyon, instructing him to supplement his medical duties by constructing astrological and political horoscopes.

One such prognostication, which predicted military success for the king’s enemy, the Duke of Bourbon, apparently contributed to a break between the queen mother and Agrippa in 1525, when Louise left Lyon but ordered her physician to remain there – without a salary.1431 The next year, Agrippa would dedicate his De sacramento matrimonii declamatio (Declamation on the Sacrament of Marriage) to the widowed Duchess of Alençon, or Marguerite herself, perhaps in hopes of ingratiating himself once more with the French royal family.1432

Court theologians condemned the physician’s treatise, exacerbating the rift between Agrippa and Louise; but more importantly for the purposes of this study, these insights into the queen mother’s predilection for prognostications and horoscopes provide us a glimpse of the superstitions and astrological beliefs that flourished in Marguerite’s family and at court. Far from being insulated from the discourses and practices of magic that permeated her culture, she clearly was acquainted with or knew of Agrippa of Nettesheim; was familiar with the prognosticators who preached from street corners and with peddlers hawking charms, amulets, and marvelous cures; and would have heard talk of ghosts and necromancy in conversations with friends, family members, and servants. Notwithstanding the “slice of life” they purport to offer us, however, and their focus on the darker realities of Renaissance culture, Marguerite’s “true stories” (“veritable[s] histoire[s],” prologue, 9) make surprisingly few references to the esoterica, sorcery, and occult beliefs and activities that were so prevalent in her era.

In view of the confessional conflicts and internecine violence that swirled around her in Reformation-era France, one might speculate that Marguerite’s reticence on the topic is a function of the occult’s controversial nature in humanistic, Catholic, and Protestant circles. The queen of Navarre was, after all, a suspected heretic for her evangelical activities, and any hint of non-conforming theology or esoteric rituals in her writing would have risked garnering the Sorbonne’s opprobrium – once again.1433 Yet her willingness to discuss magic cures, amulets, and witchcraft in her comedy Le malade (1535–1536) weakens this hypothesis, suggesting that caution was not the only reason for Marguerite’s virtual exclusion of discourses on the occult from her magnum opus.1434 Instead, the dearth of references to magic in the Heptaméron is likely driven in part by the nouvelle genre’s characteristic realism.1435 One might argue, to be sure, that references to the supernatural, religious superstitions, and folk magic appear with some regularity in Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Decameron (ca. 1351), the ostensible model for the Heptaméron; yet far from giving credence to the marvelous, the Italian author typically “ridicules those who show a naïve belief in magic” from either a common-sense or satiric perspective.1436 This tendency persists in subsequent nouvelle collections, including the Heptaméron. In addition to conforming to the genre’s realistic conventions and traditions, the near-absence and implicit denigration of magic in Marguerite’s short stories are consonant with rationalistic tendencies in Renaissance humanism and Protestantism, with Marguerite’s own dialogic symposia, and with her pledge in the prologue to tell the truth.1437

On the rare occasions when she does touch on the magical beliefs, discourses, and practices that were prevalent in her culture, Marguerite rids them of their enchantment. This realistic, demystifying approach to the occult is evident in the devisant (storyteller) Géburon’s characterization of sorcerers (no. 29, 228) as thieving ne’er-do-wells, rhetorically stripped of the magical powers they purport to wield; in the Heptaméron’s single “ghost story” (no. 39), which demystifies the reputed “haunting” of a house by exposing its natural causes; in a preacher’s alarmist claim (no. 43) that a mystery woman is likely the “devil in disguise,” which discussants disparage with laughing references to the clergyman’s stupidity; and in her portrayal of the sorcerer Gallery (no. 1), whom the pardoned murderer Saint-Aignan – a royal procurator from Alençon whose appeal for clemency, dated from the mid-1520s, is historically documented – engages to kill his own wife, an earlier victim’s father, and the writer herself with black magic.1438

This last example, a case of “attempted murder by magic,” will constitute the primary focus of this study. In particular, I will examine (1) the episode’s context and backstory, as well as the proposed curse itself, channeled through wax figures1439 similar to voodoo dolls in a process known as envoûtement; (2) the magic’s subordination to, and effective nullification by, prosaic elements in the plot; (3) the event’s religious resonances, as related to internecine quarrels of the era; (4) the episode’s legal and juridical dimensions, including comparisons and contrasts between the nouvelle’s two “murders by proxy” and the ways in which they are adjudicated; and (5) the role of the sorcery episode within the complex grid of dualities, simulacra, and transmutations that make up the substantifique moelle of Marguerite’s narrative.

Preliminary Matters: The Backstory, Context, and Proposed Curse

Far from being a major character or key focal point of nouvelle 1 of the Heptaméron, the sorcerer or “invocateur” named Gallery appears very briefly and late in the narrative, well after the events that drive the first three quarters of the plot and establish the story’s primary focus. These events, or narratemes, include (1) the double adultery of the procurator Saint Aignan’s wife, who sleeps with a bishop “pour son proffict” (12; “for profit,” 71) and a young chevalier named du Mesnil “pour son plaisir” (12; “for pleasure,” 71); (2) the youth’s discovery that she has betrayed their “pure love,” which he envisions in idealized, courtly terms, by sleeping with the clergyman, which prompts him to break off their liaison; (3) the wife’s claims to her husband that du Mesnil is a rebuffed admirer who is stalking her; (4) the husband’s orchestration of du Mesnil’s murder, largely at his wife’s behest; (5) the couple’s attempt to cover the evidence of their crime, by burning the victim’s body, burying his bones in mortar, and suppressing eyewitness testimony against themselves; (6) their trial, conviction, condemnation to death, and flight to England to avoid prosecution; (7) their royal pardon at the urging of Henry VIII (“[le roy d’Angleterre] le prochassa si très instamment, que, à la fin, le procureur l’eust à sa requeste,” 16; “the King of England . . . was so persistent in the matter that in the end Saint-Aignan got what he had been asking for,” 76); and (8) their return to France, where they are ordered to pay a sum of 1500 crowns to du Mesnil’s bereaved father.

Only at this moment in the narrative, after the tale’s early “sound and fury” have subsided, does the sorcerer appear, somewhat anticlimactically. Even then, Marguerite devotes few words to his portrayal and incantations, never swerving from the story’s primary focus. Upon his return to France, Marguerite tells us, Saint-Aignan “s’accoincta d’un invocatuer nommé Gallery, esperant que par son art il seroit exempt de paier les quinze cens escuz au pere du trepassé” (16; “[he] fell in with a sorcerer called Gallery, in the hope that the occult arts would enable him to avoid paying the fifteen hundred écus to the deceased man’s father due by him to his victim’s father,” 76). Rather than rejoicing at the commutation of the death sentence he and his wife so richly deserved, then, or attempting to expiate his sins, Saint-Aignan seeks to erase the penalties assessed against him entirely by engaging a sorcerer to kill du Mesnil’s father, the Duchess of Alençon, and his own wife surreptitiously with black magic. To this end, Gallery shows Saint-Aignan “five wooden dolls” (76; “cinq ymaiges de boys,” 16), three with their arms hanging down and two with their arms raised up in the air, and proposes to fashion wax dolls in a similar style. The poppets with the lowered arms represent people Saint-Aignan wishes to kill (Marguerite d’Alençon, du Mesnil’s father, and Saint-Aignan’s wife), while the ones with their arms up represent public officials (King François I and and Chancellor Jean Brinon) whose favor the procurator is seeking.

To achieve this result, Gallery plans to put the wax dolls underneath an altar so that they [the people] can hear mass being said (“où ilz orront leur messe,” 16)1440 and promises he will teach Saint-Aignan “certain words” or an incantation to recite over the poppets at the time of the curse’s execution. Because the procurator’s wife overhears and reports her husband’s new murder plot to the authorities, however, Saint-Aignan’s proposed hex on her, Marguerite d’Alençon, and du Mesnil’s father never comes to fruition. Instead, he and Gallery are condemned to hard labor for the remainder of their lives.

What to make of the episode, given the dearth of narrative cues, is a puzzle. From a moralistic standpoint, and within the context of Renaissance France and its ethos of vengeance, we cannot discount the possibility that Saint-Aignan believes his actions are honorable. Following the first homicide, he constructs his murder of the chevalier du Mesnil, carried out by an assassin, as a legitimate crime of honor against a man who sought to sully his wife’s virtue. This, indeed, was his initial legal defense: for after burying du Mesnil’s bones, he sues for a pardon on the grounds that the youth, whom he had barred from their house on several occasions, “pourchassoit le deshonneur de sa femme” (15; “[had] “dishonourable intentions with regard to his wife,” 75) and “estoit venu de nuict en lieu suspect pour parler à elle” (15; “this person had … come under suspicious circumstances to visit his wife,” 75).

Upon finding du Mesnil lurking “outside his wife’s bedroom door” (75; “le trouvant à l’entrée de sa chambre,” 15) in the dead of night, Saint-Aignan claims he was so shocked and “disturbed” (75) that he killed the chevalier (“plus remply de collere que de raison, l’auroit tué,” 15), more in the heat of anger than deliberately, and to protect his home and family against the intruder.

Yet this potentially exculpatory argument, rejected by the French chancellor for its counterfactuality at the time of Saint-Aignan’s first conviction, figures only briefly in Marguerite’s account of his initial flurry of crimes, and not at all in her narrative of the second criminal episode, or attempted “murder by magic.” To be sure, the terms of the procurator’s pardon, as brokered by the King of England, “restore[s] him to his possessions and his honors,” s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Magic in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age – Literature, Science, Religion, Philosophy, Music, and Art. An Introduction
• Magical (and Maligned) Metalworkers: Understanding Representations of Early and High Medieval Blacksmiths
• Painted Eyes, Magical Sieves and Carved Runes: Charms for Catching and Punishing Thieves in the Medieval and Early Modern Germanic Tradition
• Constructing the Magical Biography of the Irish Druid Mog Ruith
• Zum Umgang mit Zauberern im Rahmen frühmittelalterlicher Missionsanstrengungen (Dealing with Magicians Within the Framework of Early Medieval Missionizing Efforts)
• Magic and Science: The Portail des libraires, Rouen
• The Magic of Love: Queen Isolde, the Magician Clinschor, and “Seeing” in Gottfried’s Tristan and Wolfram’s Parzival
• Magical Gifts in Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan und Isolde and the Rejection of Magic
• Was Eustace Diabolical? Magic and Devilry in Le roman de Wistasse le moine
• Merlin, or, a Prophet Turning Magician
• The Book of Zabulon – A Quest for Hidden Secrets: Intertextuality and Magical Genealogy in Middle High German Literature, with an Emphasis on Reinfried von Braunschweig
• Miracles and Magic: Necromantic Practices Found in Cantiga 125
• Magic at the Margins: The Mystification of Maugis d’Aigremont
• The Magician at Home with his Family: Comparative Historical Ethnographies of Two Pre- Modern Magicians from Autobiographical Sources: John of Morigny and the Tibetan Monk Milarepa
• Curious Clerks: Image Magic and Chaucerian Poetics
• Representing Magic and Science in The Franklin’s Tale and The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale: Chaucer’s Exploration of Connected Topics
• Magic in Late Medieval German Literature: The Case of the Good Magician Malagis
• Motives, Means, and a Malevolent Mantel: The Case of Morgan le Fay’s Transgressions in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur
• Witchcraft, Heinrich Kramer’s Nuremburg Handbook, and Ecclesiasticus: The Construction of the Fifteenth-Century Civic Sorceress
• Magic and Ritual in Late-Medieval and Early-Modern Popular Medicine
• Attempted Murder by Magic: The Sorcerer and His Apprentice in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron 1
• How Magical Was Renaissance Magic?
• Magic in Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen’s Saul and the Witch of Endor
• Heterochronic Representation of Magic in Czech Chapbooks
• Rethinking Max Weber’s Theory of Disenchantment
• Contributors
• Index