Book Reviews 159

Albrecht Classen (ed.), Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Mod-
ern Time: The Occult in Pre-Modern Sciences, Medicine, Literature, Religion, and
Astrology (Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 20). Berlin and
Boston: De Gruyter, 2017, x + 757 pp., illustrated. ISBN 978-3-11-055607-0

A hefty tome indeed, with 25 substantial single-authored chapters. Specific top-

ics considered are mediaeval blacksmiths as magical (often maligned) metal
workers (Warren Tormey), runes as magical means to find thieves in the medi-
aeval and early modern Germanic tradition (Chiara Benati); the biography
of an Irish Druid (Aideen O’Leary); early mediaeval Christian missionary ap-
proaches to local magicians (Christoph Galle), sculptured motifs of magic on
Rouen Cathedral (Nurit Golan), love magic and magicians’ spells in mediae-
val Germanic epics and romances (Christopher Clason, Rosemare Morewedge,
Christa Tuczay, and the editor Classen himself), French and Arthurian ro-
mances (Cristina Azuela, Anne Bertholet, Kathleen Jarchow, and Dalicia Ray-
mond), and in high-to-late mediaeval Galician and English poetry (Veron-
ica Menaldi, Lisa Weston, and Daniel Pigg); special late-mediaeval-to-early-
modern accounts of applying or identifying black magic or negative sorcery/
witchcraft (Claire Fanger, Amiri Ayanna, Elizabeth Zegura), indeed in the art
of Netherlander van Oostsanen (Matha Peacock) and in Czech early mod-
ern story-telling (Jiri Koten); connections between magic and natural science
(David Tomícek, Thomas Willard), and a parting dose of theory on how West-
ern sciences were founded in a more enchanted, unsecularized world than we
thought (Alison Coudert). Bar one, all articles are in English.
The Introduction by Professor Classen, eminent in Mediaeval and Germanic
Studies and editor of Mediaevistik, is by far the longest contribution (108 pp.,
including 73 pp. summarizing others’ contributions), and I will mainly focus
on it for this assessment in the light of the other articles. Having reviewed
Classen’s work elsewhere, I find myself very much an admirer of his exposi-
tions of High German literature. The Introduction here, however, is perhaps
a little disappointing, if not also somewhat overwritten, and definitely needs
the accompanying articles to support it, because the general topic does not
seem to be his forte. What he says about magic in German literature is well
backed up by the chapters on Gottfried of Strassburg’s Tristan und Isolde, and
it is well that he spends time in both his chapters with Johannes Hartlieb’s
text of Zaubrey (1456) and the Historia von Johann Fausten (1587), “a kind of
summary of centuries of magic literature” (p. 61), because these two are only
treated allusively elsewhere. But there are lots of barely substantiated general-
izations that the Christian Church, despite “countless efforts” to “excoriate and
eliminate it,” could “not control magic” which “raged throughout the entire pre-

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160 Book Reviews

modern world” (e.g., pp. 9, 13, 15, 17, etc.), sitting beside his acknowledgement
that magic was integral to accepted bodies of scientiae, not just in a “clerical
underworld,” but as one access to “esoteric” or “profound knowledge” of “won-
drous things” (pp. 18, 21, 102, with pp. 8ff., pp. 64ff., 104 ff.). We would have hoped
that these matters would have been more clearly sorted out to put the variety
of contributions in context.
Perhaps, in the end, it is better for all the articles to be read and not to have
systematized solutions at the beginning. But Classen relies as his key exam-
ple of types of magic on an early fifteenth century poem Der Ackermann (The
Plowman) written in High German for the distinctions of practices named geo-
mancy, hydromancy, chiromancy, necromancy augury, paedomancy, etc. (p. 5),
and readers have to wait 634 pages to learn that these categories derive from
Late-Antique Isidore of Seville (p. 639). Along the way we are helped with a
listing of relevant categories, used by Carolingian missionaries in the Early Mid-
dle Ages for handling local magicians (pp. 237–239 [Galle’s article in German])
and with tradition-legitimized ways of placing divine as against dark magi-
cal arts (ars notoria) (e.g., pp. 477ff.) or defining cultic malefici (pp. 568ff.).
Yet Classen himself has tended to lapse into simplicity by reducing problem-
atic magic to “necromancy” (esp. pp. 17, 19, 27, 79–50, 64–65, 105), which is not
indexed and for him apparently means sorcery in general, and only receives
its generic Latinization as nigromantia and its clearest definition as demon-
conjuring ‘black magic’ by Claire Fanger’s paper (at p. 478).
As theoretical background to the book, I notice that the whole book puts us
in touch with the new titles on Western magic. On ‘one hand,’ though, there
is surprisingly little placement of Lynn Thorndike’s seminal eight-volume His-
tory of Magic and Experimental Science (1923), and also little on the subsequent
history-of-science plumbing of what happens in the history of experimental-
ism and rational deduction during the time of most of the texts covered in
Classen’s collection. Thus Alistair Crombie’s massive Styles of Scientific Think-
ing in the European Tradition (1994) does not get a look in. Classen has learnt
of the recent Occult World (edited by Christopher Partridge) and Wouter Hane-
graaff’s survey there is acknowledged (p. 7), but strangely not Peter Forshaw’s.
And, ‘on another hand,’ when it comes to anthropological background, we often
get taken back to James George Frazer (sometimes to Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl,
Malinowski, Mauss), but find nothing of the mass of newly documented mate-
rial on magic and sorcery, particularly from Melanesia. Nothing on ‘payback
theory’ really manifests, about more-or-less-private recourses and techniques
of revenge, for example, always featuring as among the last-surviving features
of traditional cultures, or about the transition from poisoning to (relatively)
non-poisoning societies. The whole question of universal(izing) religion com-

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Book Reviews 161

peting and holding advantage over what are overwhelming individual, local
and regional impetuses in this collection is not probed either.
Overall, the many chapters, on texts not accessible or well investigated
until recently—the Wistasse romance, The Book of Zabulon, Cantigas de Santa
Maria, Maugis d’Aigremont, Liber florum celestis doctrine, etc.—make this vol-
ume a wonderful contribution to learning. It is just that readers are left having a
harder time making sense of its manifoldness than might have been expected.
But perhaps that is not such a bad thing after all, for too much guidance can
flatten out variety or detract from a challenge better left to those daring to take
on this richly textured weighty tome.

Garry W. Trompf
University of Sydney
garry.trompf@sydney.edu.au

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