Tabitha StanmoreRecensioni

Although based upon the deep research of a Ph.D. dissertation, this popular presentation is just a bit too casual for my taste. Still, there are occasional tidbits of new information that make it worth it. While she doesn't really address whether the magic is real, she does strongly argue that everyone believed that it was, at least in the "pre-modern" era, 14th-17th centuries. Magic didn't become a secular crime until Henry VIII, meaning ordinary people were free to attempt to change their fates, so long as their goal was not itself a crime.

When most people – and perhaps most historians – think of magic and its practitioners in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the twin images that come to mind are likely to be those of the witch and the learned magus. In popular culture the person accused of witchcraft (usually a woman) is a figure of pity or fascination, while the overreaching and over-learned magus is a character open to derision. But as Tabitha Stanmore expertly shows in Cunning Folk, magic was a more complex field of activity – and indeed business – than these limited stereotypes will allow. Men and women who were neither liable to be accused of witchcraft, nor learned like Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa or John Dee, made their living from the practice of magic. These ‘service magicians’ are the subjects of Stanmore’s eye-opening book, which lays bare the grubby and transactional – yet relatably human – world of late medieval and early modern England’s cunning folk.

Tabitha Stanmore has already done more than anyone to advance our knowledge of service magicians in the last decade with her book Love Spells and Lost Treasure (2022); Cunning Folk brings the insights gleaned from her unrivalled knowledge of the primary sources to a broader audience. While previous historians have focused on some of the better-known service magicians themselves – the notorious Jacobean wizard Simon Forman, for example – Stanmore concentrates on the human stories of the clients of these magicians, and on the types of magic they employed. While many of these people were surely charlatans, the typical figure who emerges from Stanmore’s meticulous research is often something more like a sort of proto-therapist: experienced men and women with a hard-won and refined understanding of human psychology who restored hope to the desperate. In a society where even clergy, after the Reformation, increasingly withdrew from a ministry of reassuring their flock by demonstrations of sacred power, these individuals acted as a last resort for the resolution of apparently insoluble problems.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Francis Young is the author of Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

In the late medieval and early modern eras a belief in certain parts of magic was part of everyday life. Love potions, finding lost objects, a change of luck? Then people would see their local 'wise woman' or 'wizard'. However sometimes the desire for help veers over into black magic, danger or debt and crosses the line into illegal activities. Here Stanmore recounts how 'practical magic' was part of the everyday for people in all levels of society. The level of research is fabulous and the writing is very engaging.