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In this original, provocative, well-reasoned, and thoroughly documented book, Frank Klaassen proposes that two principal genres of illicit learned magic occur in late medieval manuscripts: image magic, which could be interpreted and justified in scholastic terms, and ritual magic (in its extreme form, overt necromancy), which could not. Image magic tended to be recopied faithfully; ritual magic tended to be adapted and reworked. These two forms of magic did not usually become intermingled in the manuscripts, but were presented separately. While image magic was often copied in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, The Transformations of Magic demonstrates that interest in it as an independent genre declined precipitously around 1500. Instead, what persisted was the other, more problematic form of magic: ritual magic. Klaassen shows that texts of medieval ritual magic were cherished in the sixteenth century, and writers of new magical treatises, such as Agrippa von Nettesheim and John Dee, were far more deeply indebted to medieval tradition—and specifically to the medieval tradition of ritual magic—than previous scholars have thought them to be.

This volume presents editions of two fascinating anonymous and untitled manuscripts of magic produced in Elizabethan England: the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. Frank Klaassen uses these texts, which he argues are representative of the overwhelming majority of magical practitioners, to explain how magic changed during this period and why these developments were crucial to the formation of modern magic. The Boxgrove Manual is a work of learned ritual magic that synthesizes material from Henry Cornelius Agrippa, the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy , Heptameron , and various medieval conjuring works. The Antiphoner Notebook concerns the common magic of treasure hunting, healing, and protection, blending medieval conjuring and charm literature with materials drawn from Reginald Scot’s famous anti-magic work, Discoverie of Witchcraft . Klaassen painstakingly traces how the scribes who created these two manuscripts adapted and transformed their original sources. In so doing, he demonstrates the varied and subtle ways in which the Renaissance, the Reformation, new currents in science, the birth of printing, and vernacularization changed the practice of magic. Illuminating the processes by which two sixteenth-century English scribes went about making a book of magic, this volume provides insight into the wider intellectual culture surrounding the practice of magic in the early modern period.

This volume presents editions of two fascinating anonymous and untitled manuscripts of magic produced in Elizabethan England: the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. Frank Klaassen uses these texts, which he argues are representative of the overwhelming majority of magical practitioners, to explain how magic changed during this period and why these developments were crucial to the formation of modern magic. The Boxgrove Manual is a work of learned ritual magic that synthesizes material from Henry Cornelius Agrippa, the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy , Heptameron , and various medieval conjuring works. The Antiphoner Notebook concerns the common magic of treasure hunting, healing, and protection, blending medieval conjuring and charm literature with materials drawn from Reginald Scot's famous anti-magic work, Discoverie of Witchcraft . Klaassen painstakingly traces how the scribes who created these two manuscripts adapted and transformed their original sources. In so doing, he demonstrates the varied and subtle ways in which the Renaissance, the Reformation, new currents in science, the birth of printing, and vernacularization changed the practice of magic. Illuminating the processes by which two sixteenth-century English scribes went about making a book of magic, this volume provides insight into the wider intellectual culture surrounding the practice of magic in the early modern period.

Following the suggested lead of Robert Mathiesen, and relying conceptually on the ethnographic work by Tanya Luhrmann, this article looks at what we know about the practice of modern magic and various forms of psychological or cognitive conditioning, seeking to apply it to an analysis of medieval ritual magic and reports about its operation. Beginning with a classroom experiment on dream divination, the author proceeds to examine the primary known works of medieval ritual magic to illuminate what kind of effects they probably had on practitioners. The author argues that understanding the nature of these experiences provides a greater level of sympathy with medieval copyists and practitioners of magic and also provides more subtle insights into the organization and orientation of these texts.

Manuscripts of late medieval and Renaissance ritual magic provide a unique insight into the gender construction of learned men. They reveal a subjective world of desire and anxiety that has for the most part been a matter of conjecture in the literature on masculinity. These manuscripts also overcome one of the limitations associated with the anxiety model: the tendency to regard masculinity as constructed in negative relation to other social groups. In part, learned masculinity was constructed according to external standards, most commonly from the world of the aristocracy. But it was constructed in greater measure according to standards (or desires) deriving from the clerical and learned world itself.

Surviving sixteenth-century manuscripts of illicit magic betray no dramatic changes in ritual magical traditions following the publication of works by Pico, Ficino, and Agrippa. The few changes that the library of ritual magic underwent in the sixteenth century were, in almost every way, natural continuations of transformations already under way during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. How, then, do we account for the apparent disjuncture between the interests of the famous Renaissance proponents of magic and those represented in the surviving manuscripts? How is it that the traditions of Scholastic image magic, so strongly represented in Renaissance writers, could suffer

In the preceding chapter, I described the common patterns of scribal interest associated with texts of astrological image magic. Scribes regarded these texts as belonging to the broad category ofnaturalia,and many evidently regarded image magic as a legitimate part of that library. Like the Magister Speculi, the scribes appear to have made a distinction between this sort of magic, which I have referred to as Scholastic image magic, and other kinds of magical practices that I will refer to as ritual magic. As we shall see, these texts involve the explicit binding, invoking, and employing of demons, the