A Cultural History of Magic in the Middle Ages

The study of magic in medieval Europe is a burgeoning field. The present volume offers an overview of current, cutting-edge scholarship on magic in the Middle Ages based in close study of its ritual texts, practices, narratives, and aspects of its material culture. Magic, as Richard Kieckhefer famously wrote, is a crossroads—a place where religion intersects with science, learned culture converges with popular, and reality meets fiction. His metaphor remains apt, and this volume demonstrates all these areas of convergence and more. The study of magic can offer an intimate window into the lives of the real people that used its rituals, or who suffered or benefited from them, as well as social connections between them. Through the study of magic, we can also see new connections between humans and their biological and material environments. Further, magic allows us to explore intersections between medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam from new angles, for members of these three major religious cultures interacted in their religious and ritual lives much as they did in their intellectual and economic ones. Collectively, the chapters in this volume demonstrate how magic figures in many areas of medieval culture and how its study contributes to our understanding of that culture in new, historically important, and fascinating ways.