Spellbound

Towards the end of the thirteenth-century Arthurian romance L’Estoire del Saint Graal, King Celidoine looks to the stars and, anticipating famine in Britain, commands his seneschal to gather as much wheat as he can. The seneschal obeys, but both he and the people fail to understand Celidoine’s motivations. They gossip and joke, until the famine arrives and destroys almost half the population. Shortly afterwards, when Celidoine again reads the stars, he foresees the arrival of an army of Saxons. He marshals his barons and the Saxons are routed.

In Anne Lawrence-Mathers’s The Magic Books: A History of enchantment in 20 medieval manuscripts, magic is also a force embodied by the books that sought to encompass it. Whether complete, unfinished or in fragments, they remain as precious today as they were to the kings, dukes and abbots who commissioned them. “Magic books” had a totemistic value, and that is what we still discern in their marginalia, doodles and faint underlinings.

The physicality of these manuscripts contrasts with the vaporous and elusive quality of magic itself. Surveying books from across the Middle Ages, from the court of Charlemagne to the library of the “wise king” Charles V, Lawrence-Mathers acknowledges the difficulty of defining magic, especially in relation to religion. What becomes clear, however, is that not even the denunciations of Augustine, Isidore of Seville and Thomas Aquinas could stop “books” being created and consulted. Magic in the Middle Ages took on a life of its own, and the author shows how what bordered on the sacrilegious found its way into texts that espoused purity and faith in God. A fine example of this is a copy of the Ars notoria (British Library, Sloane MS 513) that offers readers the gift of divination and “the exclamation ‘Amen, amen, amen says Richard Dove, monk of Buckfast’ on folio 192v”. Other key manuscripts, such as the Estimaverunt Indi, a twelfth-century work of geomancy (divination by geographical features) condemned by the bishop of Paris, lived on in excerpts. The censure and the retrieval appear to have been linked. In a phrase that sums up much of the nature of these magic books, Lawrence-Mathers says that “knowledge was desired – but in a deniable form”.

The paradox of magic was that the forbidden knowledge it promised also suggested an illicit power, so access had to be carefully controlled. As a result, there evolved a symbiotic relationship between the enlightened elite – kings and rulers – and the manuscripts’ continued preservation. Not for nothing is it Celidoine, a ruler and, in the context of L’Estoire del Saint Graal, one of God’s “select”, who is able to divine the future from the stars.

Lawrence-Mathers’s book is an ambitious undertaking. The notion of “twenty” manuscripts is perhaps arbitrary and the illustrations are unevenly distributed. Some passages of exposition are akin to looking into an empty museum case. These are unavoidable pitfalls, but there are more notable omissions. For example, the role of divination in the Hundred Years War is underexplored, and the author’s work on Christine de Pizan, while shining a light on her remarkable legacy, lacks cohesion.

The Magic Books is at its best where text and image, like the planets and stars, come into alignment, as in the stand-out section on the Ars notoria or the chapter on clerical sign-reading, which focuses on the twelfth-century Eadwine Psalter and the work of the English monk and chronicler Matthew Paris (1200–59). At such times the reader becomes a full participant in tutorials on onomancy (fortune-telling based on someone’s name) and the images acquire an air of strange and inexplicable intimacy. To look upon Hildegard of Bingen’s alphabet, to run one’s palm over the image of a matrix of the seal of God, and to read Lawrence-Mathers’s illuminating book, is to find oneself voluntarily, but appropriately, spellbound.

Katherine J. Chen is the author of Joan: A novel of Joan of Arc, 2022

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