Textual Magic
Charms and Written Amulets in Mediaeval England
Katherine Storm Hindley
University of Chicago Press 2023
Hb, 312pp, £36, ISBN 9780226825335
Seventeen years after Don Skemer published his impressive study of mediaeval textual amulets, another American scholar, Katherine Storm Hindley, has given the subject another major push forward; and in the process tried to make a contribution to the history of literacy as well. Her subject is written and spoken charms, as recorded in England between the ninth and 15th centuries, and she has collected over 1,100 examples, with the expectation that thousands more lie undiscovered in manuscripts. She defines a charm as a text designed to produce a specific practical outcome from its enactment, either by being spoken aloud or by being worn or deposited in its written form. The distinction is crucial to her, because it enables her to draw conclusions of relevance to a better understanding of the relationship between literate and oral cultures. She also makes a contribution to that of mediaeval popular religion, by showing that charms in many ways functioned as ordinary people’s equivalent to saints’ relics in healing and protecting.
A constant throughout the period is that theologians and physicians had serious doubts about the morality and efficacy of charms, but nobody else seems to have done so. Both kinds of them are therefore found throughout the period, but with two great watersheds in the use of them. The first followed the Norman conquest, as new texts arrived from the Continent, French became the standard language for spoken charms instead of Anglo-Saxon, non-alphabetic characters came into use, and written charms both sharply increased and became more unlike other kinds of text. The second great shift occurred between 1350 and 1500, when English replaced French as the language of the spoken kind, with a new suspicion of any charms that used unknown languages and characters. Written charms, however, remained mostly in Latin, showing that different languages were regarded as transmitting power in different ways. Oral and written examples also tended to treat different afflictions.
All of this flies in the face of the current scholarly orthodoxy that oral and literate cultures were indivisible: it appears that writing was perceived as having its own power, which transcended that of speech. This distinction was, however, vanishing by 1500, meaning that another watershed in the history of charms was approaching. This swift summary may indicate how much Katherine Storm Hindley’s study has to offer not just the history of mediaeval magic, but that of mediaeval culture in general. Ronald Hutton
★★★★★