4 - THE COMMON TRADITION OF MEDIEVAL MAGIC

Summary

Part of the inheritance passed down from classical antiquity to medieval and modern Western culture is the notion of magic as something performed by special individuals. It is the magi, or magicians, who perform magic. Whatever similarities their operations may have to the work of others around them, “magic” remains a negative term associated with a suspicious class of practitioners.

When we look at the people who were in fact using varieties of magic in medieval Europe, however, it becomes hard to sustain the stereotype. Instead of finding a single, readily identifiable class of magicians we find various types of people involved in diverse magical activities: monks, parish priests, physicians, surgeon-barbers, midwives, folk healers and diviners with no formal training, and even ordinary women and men who, without claiming special knowledge or competence, used whatever magic they happened to know. The monks and priests who practiced magic were able to write much earlier and more widely than laypeople, and left more records of their magic, but this does not mean that they engaged in these activities more often.

Nor is there reason to think that these various practitioners engaged in wholly different kinds of magic.