Category Archives: Magic

Charms on Twitter

By Laura Mitchell

I decided to do something a little different for this post. Rather than write about what I find interesting about charms, I asked Twitter what people wanted to know about medieval charms. I received some really interesting questions and I will do my best to answer them within the context of what I study–fifteenth-century English charms.

@DaintyBallerina asked:

I work on the fifteenth century and there wasn’t the abundance of advice books for housewives then that are found in the early modern period and later. However, we can assume that housewives, and women in general, did use some charms, particularly medical charms. The manuscript I discussed in my previous post on disappearing charms, for example, was a household notebook and it is likely that the women of the Haldenby family made just as much use of it as the men. Medical charms to stop bleeding or cure a toothache would have been useful to a medieval housewife and were probably passed along orally between women throughout the period.1 And of course charms for easing the pain of childbirth would have been used by midwives and other women present at a birth. While these types of charms weren’t specifically aimed at housewives, we can make some educated guesses based on their purpose and the context in which they are found.

@CarolineWazer asked:

Charms tend to not have too many ingredients involved – in fact, most charms rely solely on words to succeed, like the Flum Jordan charm:2

Criste was borne in Bedlem, baptized in þo flem Jordan. Also þo flem astode, also astond þi blode .N. In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.

(Christ was born in Bethlehem, baptised in the river Jordan. As the river stood still, so your blood, N, also stand still. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.)

The ingredients that do show up are items that could be found around the house: virgin wax, an apple, strips of parchment, sage leaves, butter or cheese. Specific words would be written on these items as part of the charm then wrapped around the body (such as a sore knee or the stomach of pregnant woman), worn as an amulet, or eaten. While texts on the virtues of plants and animals or the more elaborate ritual magic brought in more obscure ingredients like the hoopoe (a bird native to Asia, Africa, and continental Europe, but not England). Presumably references to plants and animals like the hoopoe in these texts are due to a continental origin… whether or not hoopoes were imported by ambitious English readers remains to be seen. But the appeal of charms seems to rest in their relative ease of use. They were short and easy to remember, using ingredients that were on hand or at least easily obtained.

512px-Upupa_epops_1_Luc_Viatour (1)
A Hoopoe.
Source: Luc Viatour / www.Lucnix.be

Last, @clamskcl asked:

Now, this is a tricky question to answer. The vast majority of the charms I look at from England are more or less the same as you would find in places like France or Germany, with some regional variations of course. It is also nearly impossible to guess at the origins of a charm given the vast oral tradition. Charms could pass back and forth between friends, neighbours, family, or travellers with ease. Where or when they began to be used is virtually impossible to tell.

If we look further afield to more complicated magical experiments then we can start to see some interesting sources, such as recipes for invisibility. Invisibility was a common desire for magicians, and instructions to become invisible are found in the Greek Magical Papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt, later medieval ritual magic, and in miscellaneous collections like London, Wellcome Historical Library, MS 517 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 1435. The instructions I found for invisibility in Ashmole 1435, an anonymous manuscript written in a very rough fifteenth-century hand that contains practical and academic medical texts and a recipe collection of over 180 items, are remarkably similar to one from the Greek magical papyri from the third or fourth century. (This, I will discuss in detail in my next post.) It would seem then that some magical recipes could travel very far and survive for a very long time indeed!

 


1. Lea Olsan has written several articles examining the evidence of oral transmission of charms in the medieval period. “Latin Charms of Medieval England: Verbal Healing in a Christian Oral Tradition,” Oral Tradition 7:1 (1992): 116-142; “Charms in Medieval Memory,” in Charms and Charming in Europe, ed. Jonathan Roper (Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 11-31. There is also the possibility that the written copies of charms that survive could have been copied by women as well. There have also been some interesting discussions of medieval women’s literacy rates online: http://bavardess.blogspot.ca/2009/06/medieval-women-and-myth-of-illiteracy.html and http://readingmedievalbooks.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/480/, although it is probably more likely that more women could read the charms than could copy them themselves.

2. London, British Library, Sloane 962, folio 38v.

 

A Halloween Round-Up

By Lisa Smith

I went a little wild with our Twitter account (@historecipes) on Halloween and ended up tweeting links to stories about magic, supernatural creatures, food and death all day. It was fun–and I learned a lot! If you fancy taking a peek at the dark side of history, here is the round-up of all the links. There’s something here for everyone to enjoy…

Just click here to go to our Storify page.

The witch of Endor conjures up the ghost of Samuel at the request of Saul, who lies petrified on the ground. Engraving by W. Raddon, 1811, after B. West. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
The witch of Endor conjures up the ghost of Samuel at the request of Saul, who lies petrified on the ground. Engraving by W. Raddon, 1811, after B. West. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

The Disappearance of Charms from a Fifteenth-Century Notebook

By Laura Mitchell

Snake amulet, N. London, c. 1870-1916. To treat back pain. Image Credit: Wellcome Collections, London.
Snake amulet, N. London, c. 1870-1916. To treat back pain. Image Credit: Wellcome Collections, London.

Studying medieval charms can bring to light a lot of intriguing social practices and help us to understand what sorts of everyday worries occupied the mind of a medieval person. It can also be an exercise in frustration at the limitations of our information. The Trinity College Library MS O.1.57 manuscript (Cambridge) offers just one such case. This household notebook was originally copied and owned by the Haldenby family and members of their household compiled in the first half of the fifteenth century.[1]

The manuscript contains texts that range from medical recipes to physiognomy to gunpowder recipes. The Haldenby family was part of the lower gentry of fifteenth-century Northamptonshire and the book reflects a significant sub-section of the gentry who, along with members of the secular clergy, were interested in medical and scientific texts.

The Haldenby family and its household also seems to have had an interest in magical or quasi-magical texts, including the Serpentium corius, a group of magical and non-magical experiments using snakeskin, texts on the virtues of plants and animals, which include a number of items of natural magic, and an ad hoc book of secrets containing charms and magic tricks in their notebook, as well as the charms. The charms themselves are nothing extraordinary as far as fifteenth sensibilities go: a charm against fire, three medical charms, a charm to catch a thief, and a love charm (discussed in a previous entry).

Of particular interest to me for this post are three of charms scattered throughout the manuscript: charms for a sore, for sleep, and to catch a thief. All three were originally labelled as charms, but at some point in their history these titles were partially or completely erased by carefully scraping them off.[2] Now these headings are only visible under UV light!

The charm for a sore began with the heading “<A charme> for þo felun” and the sleep charm ended with “Þis is <a charme> for a man þat may not slepe.” The charm to catch a thief originally had an elaborate heading below the charm that consisted of a face and scroll that read “Carmen pro fures” [Charm for thieves], although the heading, like those for the medical charms. In addition to being erased, the thief charm was also partially covered by a later pen drawing, making it especially difficult to see even under under UV light.

Complete erasures of objectionable texts often occurred, as in the Arundel MS 342 (British Library), in which instructions for conjuring spirits has been partly erased.[3] The Sloane MS 513 (British Library) also suffers from an admittedly shoddy attempt at censure of its copy of the Ars notaria. These cases, at least, were more problematic magic rituals.

Examples of two much later French charms (18th century) to hold or to stop snakes. Source: Wellcome MS 4171.  Photograph: Lisa Smith.
Examples of two much later French charms (18th century) to hold or to stop snakes. Source: Wellcome MS 4171. Photograph: Lisa Smith.

However, in TCC O.1.57 there was only a partial erasure. It is impossible to know when these erasures happened: was it in the generation immediately following the original owners? Was it the sixteenth-century owners? The latter seems unlikely given their inclusion of a love charm in the sixteenth century. Moreover, why remove only the title and not the content? This mysterious eraser may have wanted to take advantage of the contents of these charms while publicly denying their true nature.

It seems clear that whoever erased these titles was more concerned about the perceived nature of their book rather than the reality. Indeed, the charm to catch a thief could easily have been cut out entirely without affecting any other text in the book. Less clear is why there was such a concern, since such charms were used throughout the early modern period (as Lisa Smith recently discussed for an eighteenth-century manuscript). Perhaps the owners simply felt particular concern about the respectability of their book at one point in time… It is doubtful that we will ever know.


[1] Genealogical entries regarding the Haldenby and Mortemer families give the manuscript a terminus post quem of 1454.

[2] The other three charms do not have such obvious headings.

[3] Sophie Page includes an image from the Arundel manuscript in Magic in Medieval Manuscripts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 39.

Anthony Lewis and the Aphrodisiac Remedy

By Jennifer Evans

In early modern England, academic and popular medical writers expressed concern that there were many couples who struggled to conceive and so were childless. An English edition of François Mariceau’s midwifery manual remarked that that he ‘admire[d] the great passion which many have, who complain of nothing with greater regret than to [be] without Children, especially without Sons.’[1] Barrenness though was not only limited to those who were childless; those who had had children previously but now struggled to conceive again were also thought to be barren.

One strategy for remedying barrenness, particularly if it was caused by frigidity (a loss of libido and sexual pleasure caused by cold) recommended by early modern medical writers was to consume ‘provokers of venery’ what came to be called in the late seventeenth century aphrodisiacs. Numerous foods were thought to be aphrodisiacs including, nettles, artichokes, parsnips, mustard seeds and onions. As one published book of medical recipes, Dr. Trigg’s Secrets, Arcana’s & Panacea’s  (1655) declared ‘an excellent secret to help barrennesse’ was ‘The buds of the Sun-flower before it blossome, boiled and eaten with butter, vinegar and pepper, do mightily excite to venery, and provoke lust more than the Artichoke. Nettle seeds are good for the same purpose; so is garden cresses and rocket and purslaine’.[2]

Wikimediea Commons: H. Zell
Wikimediea Commons: H. Zell

Many aphrodisiacs were incorporated into fertility remedies recorded in domestic recipe books, although these texts were rarely as explicit as Dr. Trigg’s secrets in explaining that these remedies were useful because they encouraged couples to engage in sexual activity that would lead to conception. One plant regularly described by medical authors as an aphrodisiac was Eryngo also known as Sea Holly. The roots were often candied, and recipes for this were recorded in several domestic recipe books including an anonymous seventeenth and eighteenth century collection housed in the Wellcome library (MS 8097).[3] The author of this recipe gave detailed instructions for washing, boiling and candying the roots of this plant. The root was also included in several remedies designed to improve fertility. A collection attributed to Elizabeth Okeover included ‘An excellent helpe to conception’ – ‘Take the rotes of seaholly it growth by the sea side & is like to little trees of halfe a yeare height some call it Aringeime take the rootes of this & make it in sirrupe & eate it in the morne & at 4 a clocke take some gentle pills at the beginenge not before every recept’.[4] Similar remedies were also included in a recipe book attributed to Anne Glydd (1656) and one attributed to Bridget Hyde (1676-1690).

Credit: Rowan McOnegal. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk
Credit: Rowan McOnegal. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk

Despite the frequent appearance of such fertility remedies though, it was rare for manuscript collections to include direct or explicit references to sexual stimulants on their own. The only instance I have encountered so far was recorded in a collection described as ‘Medical Reciepts written by Anthony Lewis, from a book owned by Lady Marquee Dorset’. The recipe stated, ‘Sotherne wood being laid under ye beeds [sic] head, doth provoke venery.’[5] Nicholas Culpeper in his English translations of the Royal College of Physicians Pharmacopoeia Londinensis had also described southernwood as an aphrodisiac listing it as follows:

‘A Brotanum mas, foemina. Southernwood, male and foemale. Is hot and dry in the third degree, resists poyson, kils worms, provokes lust; outwardly in plaisters, it dissolves cold swellings, and helps the bitings of venemous beasts, makes hair grow: take not above half a drachm at a time in pouder’.[6]

Culpeper’s text suggested that southernwood provoked lust when taken as an internal medicine, like many aphrodisiacs. In Anthony Lewis’s recipe, though, the herb was supposed to stimulate sexual desire just through proximity to the body. This was not unprecedented Phillipa Pullar has suggested that the Greeks and Romans enjoyed satyrion root [a type of orchis] because its tuberous and erect fleshy stem was thought to have an effect even when held in the hand.[7]

However, the positioning of the herb within the bed, where it was perhaps expected that sex would take place, is reminiscent of infertility magic where enchantments were placed in the bed of the victim to prevent them from engaging in copulation. For example The Magick of King Karani, a medieval treatise republished in the early modern period, included a spell that appears very similar to the above,

‘hat a Man’s Member cannot be erect, till what is laid be removed. And if one lay the Herb [whores vervain] under the Pillow, he that lies upon it shall not erect, a[n]d if you give a little of the Herb powdered in drink to a Man, he will not erect to coition for seven dayes.

Interestingly, this remedy may have been influenced by ideas of magic, or perhaps counter-magic, against infertility enchantments. However, there is nothing surrounding the remedy to suggest that this was the case. The remedy was also not explicitly related to fertility–there was no suggestion that this was the reason that it had been recorded. It was recorded on the same page as a method for establishing whether a pregnant woman was carrying a male or female child, but was sandwiched between an oil to remove facial wrinkles and a medicine to make the hair grow. If anything this might suggest that this aphrodisiac was included as an anti-aging measure. It was a common humorous trope, and accepted medical reality, that many old men were impotent.

This lone recipe is something of an anomaly then. It is puzzling that this is the only remedy of this type that I have found so far. Recipe books include much material taken from medical texts and from physicians, and it was common for general medical texts, midwifery manuals and herbals to describe aphrodisiacs, so why was this information not more readily incorporated into manuscript texts?

One possible reason was that many aphrodisiacs were described as being effective on their own without much complex preparation–although there were some remedies that combined numerous ingredients. It was perhaps common knowledge that eating artichokes, sea holly, or satyrion would have these effects. Perhaps this remedy merited notation precisely because it was not to be consumed which made it unusual. I have yet to figure out why this lone note is the only explicit reference to aphrodisiacs in manuscript collections, but it does continue to intrigue me.

[1] Hugh Chamberlen, The diseases of women with child … written in French by Francis Mauriceau (London, 1672), 6.

[2] Anonymous, Dr. Trigg’s Secrets, Arcana’s & Panacea’s: Approved by his long admired Experience and Practice, whereby he wrought such wonderfull Cures (London, 1665), p. 141-2.

[3] Wellcome Library London, MS 8097; see also London British Library, M.S. Add. 45196, Brockman Papers: The Receipt Book of Anne Glydd, 1656,; London Wellcome Library, M.S. 2990/27, Bridget Hyde 1676-1690, fol. 27r; London Wellcome Library, M.S. 1511, Mrs Carr 1682, Fol. 18r; London Wellcome Library, M.S. 3082, Johnson Family 1694-1831, Fol. 203v.

[4] Wellcome Library London, MS 3712, Elizabeth Okeover (& others), 141.

[5] British Library Ms Sloane 556: Medical Receipts Written by Anthony Lewis; From a Book Owned by

Lady Marquee Dorset, 1606. fol. 31 r.

[6] Nicholas Culpeper, Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, or, The London dispensatory further adorned by the studies and collections of the Fellows, now living of the said colledg. (London, 1653), p. 13.

[7] Philippa Pullar, Consuming Passions: A History of English Food and Appetites (London, 1970), p.238.