Late Medieval English Magic: English Manuscripts Containing 15th-century Magical Textsis a project born out of the dissertation research I conducted at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. I undertook a survey of English manuscripts containing magical texts from the fifteenth century, which became the basis of and wider context for my dissertation project. Rather than have this information languish in a static form in my dissertation, I decided to put it online in the form of a catalogue so that it could be more widely available and easily updated.
L0031855 Witchcraft and magic Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images http://wellcomeimages.org Witchcraft and magic: a man conducting magic rites, devils and a ghost appearing, and a hunter cowering in terror.The information in this catalogue is based on and expands on this original research in various ways – because of the improvements over the past few years in digitization projects and better online manuscript catalogues I have been able to include several more manuscripts that were not included in my original survey, and I have been able to discover more detailed information about manuscript contexts and the exact kinds of magic texts that survive.
The Late Medieval English Magic catalogue contains a general search function and it is organized into categories by city, library, magic category (charm, ritual magic, etc.), and charm motifs. The charm motifs are fairly broad. They are based on the semantic motifs discussed by Lea Olsan and others, but I have also included descriptive terms such as whether it uses an object like a plate or ring, or food. There are also links to digitized copies of manuscripts where they are available, as well as to other major online manuscript projects such as the Digital Index of Middle English Verse and Manuscripts of the West Midlands projects.
This catalogue is very much still a work in progress. As of this writing I have only uploaded 43% of the total manuscripts in my survey and I haven’t even begun to include the manuscripts from the British Library and Bodleian collections! Suggestions and recommendations are always welcome. You can contact me through this contact form, in the comments to this post, or on Twitter. My hope is that this catalogue will serve as a resource for other scholars and anyone interested in the history of medieval magic.
One of the great perks of a fellowship relating to specific manuscript collections is dedicated archive time. One is at leisure to look at manuscripts from cover to cover, stroll through the pages and discover new things – an experience akin to an unguided walk through a foreign city, as opposed to an organised guided tour of its best features. So I keep coming across scores of little or unknown alchemical recipes on a daily basis!
But no good research experience goes unpunished.
My journey through Cambridge manuscripts is goal-oriented; in addition to case studies, I am drawing up a catalogue of alchemy in Cambridge collections. Most of the recipes I now find myself in the need of documenting have never been recorded before. Like those who have gone before me,[1] I find that recipes in particular slow down my progress… And though comprehensiveness and sanity seem to be incompatible, one fact remains: if the bibliography is to be both consistent and useful, it must be based on the complex task of simplification.
A model for the cataloguing of recipes is difficult to identify. Many existing catalogues do not capture recipes at all, while others record them collectively and generically (e.g. as ‘ff. 50r-76v: Recipes’), but do not recognise or describe them individually. On their journey from manuscript to catalogue, recipes often perform a disappearing act. Many await scholarly rescue from obscurity. Who knows what recipes we will find in the manuscripts themselves? One is almost (almost!) reminded of the now-famous fourteenth century cookbook rediscovered in the British Library (Geoffrey Fule’s cookbook, England, mid-14th century), from which the following image is taken.
London, British Library, MS Additional 142012, here f. 138r: The remains of a grilled unicorn, a reminder of the fate of lost recipes? Click on the image to get to the related BL Medieval Manuscripts Blog post (mind the date…). Republished with the permission of the British Library.
It would be easy to criticise the mentioned type of bibliographies for their treatment of recipes, but that would be both historically insensitive and uncharitable. Their practices often developed in a bibliographical tradition focused on names and titles (and thus oblivious to texts perceived to be minor, including recipes), or were born out of common sense in service of the reader. Given the constraints of time, money and space that apply to most cataloguing projects, it is by far better to produce a wide-ranging resource on time than to spend the same amount of time to describe selected items in much detail, perhaps even risking the appearance of the resource altogether.
For new bibliographies there is always scope for reflection and improvement. As a historian of alchemy working on Cambridge manuscripts I may look towards some excellent recent developments. Several bibliographies in the history of science in print and digital form have made successful attempts to grasp recipes and other anonymous, practical texts.[2] There have also been fresh bibliographical accounts of Cambridge manuscript collections, with different foci on individual repositories, collections or aspects of manuscripts.[3]
And finally, this year marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of a seminal article on the cataloguing of recipes by one of the editors of the Index of Middle English Prose, Kari Anne Rand.[4] Rand mentions that, due to the editorial procedure enforced for the IMEP, Elredge’s 1992 volume on the Bodleian Library’s Ashmole Collection[5] was unable to record approximately 4,480 recipes. The implications of this large number of silent recipe witnesses for unknown material in other archives are staggering. I refer the interested reader to the article for further information. For finishing today’s post, however, I will borrow from its conclusion, with a hopeful outlook for the future as pertinent today as it was two decades ago:
On the basis of the experience of the last fifteen years and given all the possibilities inherent in electronic publishing, it should be possible to produce an even better […] [bibliography] – one which is more inclusive and caters for more needs.[6]
[1] See bibliographies relating to Cambridge University Library manuscript collections are introduced here; further noteworthy are M.R. James’s catalogues for college libraries e.g. for St Johns’s and Trinity College.
[2] A fairly recent example in this subject area is the expanded and revised version of Linda Ehrsam Voigts and Patricia Deery Kurtz, Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000) (eVK2).
[3] Most notable in recent years for images in Cambridge manuscripts are P. Binski, P N. R. Zutshi, and S. Panayotova, Western Illuminated Manuscripts: A Catalogue of the Collection in Cambridge University Library (Cambridge: CUP, 2011); K.L. Scott, and A.E. Nichols, An Index of Images in English Manuscripts from the Time of Chaucer to Henry Viii, C. 1380-C. 1509: I (London: Miller, 2008).
[5] L.M. Eldredge, A Handlist of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Prose in the Ashmole Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990).
![L0031855 Witchcraft and magic Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Witchcraft and magic: a man conducting magic rites, devils and a ghost appearing, and a hunter cowering in terror. Coloured engraving. Published: [18--] Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](http://recipes.hypotheses.org/files/2014/05/magic.jpg)
