Magic and Superstition in a Fifteenth-Century Student Notebook

Summary

Despite longstanding ecclesiastical prohibition of the practice of magic and the growing censure it provoked at universities, fifteenth-c. German scribes produced and copied a wide variety of texts containing descriptions of rituals, incantations, and other magical practices. Some of these texts give directions on the summoning of demons; several instruct readers in the fashioning of talismans to seek the aid of astral powers, and others offer methods for seeing into the future. The best-known summary description of magical practices and superstitions in late-medieval Germany was penned by Johann Hartlieb, a physician at the Bavarian court in mid-fifteenth-c. Munich and a self-styled authority on and critic of the magical practices of his day. His Buch aller verbotenen Künste (Book of All Forbidden Arts) catalogues the varieties of magic, divination, and superstition practiced at the time and alerts good Christians, especially his patron, about the tricks of the devil. The widespread nature of the superstitions and divinatory practices Hartlieb describes in his work is also confirmed by their presence in numerous Latin and vernacular manuscripts of the period.

One reason for the proliferation of such texts in the fifteenth century was the spread of literacy and the increased availability and affordability of paper. The study and practice of magic were therefore not confined only to highly educated professionals such as Johannes Hartlieb. Richard Kieckhefer has linked the increased awareness of magic to the rise of education in general:

If the late Middle Ages saw a flowering of popular education generally, they were also a golden age for magic. Now one no longer needed to be a specialist. Anyone could learn the magical arts, and many people evidently did so.