Tag Archives: Magic

Dinner and a Show: Magic Tricks at the Medieval Table

By Vanessa Da Silva Baptista

Le Vivendier is a fifteenth-century anonymous French cookbook, surviving in a single miscellany of medical, botanical, and household recipes. It retains an innocuously titled recipe ‘To make a chicken to be served roasted’ [1]  But this is no ordinary recipe for a roast dinner: the cook is instructed to pluck and paint a live chicken so that it appears roasted and place its head under its wing to render the bird unconscious. When the chicken was cut for serving, it would ‘wake up and make off down the table upsetting jugs, goblets and whatnot’ to the surprise, and, no doubt amusement, of the diners. This bizarre recipe is immediately followed by a similarly strange recipe to make a genuinely roasted chicken sing by binding its neck at both ends, filling the throat with mercury and sulphur, and putting the chicken in a hot place.[2] Allegedly, the singing effect was produced by mercury vapour travelling through the chicken’s throat, creating a whistling sound much like stovetop kettle.

Figure 1 – Le Vevendier Recipe ‘To make a chicken sing on the spit and turn’ with an accompanying illustration of said chicken in Richard’s own hand. The image could be simply a doodle or it may act as a finding aid like a manicle © Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby MS 86, (c.1271-83) fol, 47r. Creative Commons License: CC-BY-NC 4.0

 

Medieval cookbooks, a predominantly aristocratic genre recording the cooking practices of courtly head-chefs, frequently contain recipes that aimed to surprise, delight, and awe.[3] For example, the cookbook of the Duke of Savoy’s head-chef, Maistre Chiquart, Du fait du cuisine (1420) included instructions for crafting an enormous pastry castle, adorned with four towers each housing a fantastic dish: an armed boar’s head; a pike cooked three ways; a piglet; and finally, a swan, roasted, redressed in its plumage – all spitting fire.[4]  What makes Le Vivendier interesting is that it was most likely produced in a less affluent environment. Its manuscript context suggests that it was written or commissioned by an individual for their own private use. Additionally, the recipes discussed here were written by a later hand in the blank space following the main text indicating that they were added by a later reader with specific interests.[5] It therefore speaks to a shared late Medieval culture of playful dinner entertainment that was not limited to the wealthy and powerful.

Le Vivendier contains recipes that are concessions to its owner’s class, balancing the desire to provide dinnertime entertainment with their financial capabilities. A recipe to change the colour of wine in Le Ménagier de Paris (1393) further illustrates this point. This recipe was specifically intended to be performed at the table before guests, with the reader instructed to make a powder of red plants and ‘[t]oss it secretly into a glass of wine’.[6] Le Ménagier is addressed to the fifteen-year-old bride of an old  Parisian bourgeois who, while wealthy, would not have been able to afford the same level of spectacle as Maistre Chiquart but clearly still wished to provide entertainment at his dinner table.

Figure 2 – Detail of a boar’s head and redressed swan spitting fire in ‘The Marriage-Feast at Cana,’ by an unknown artist c.1550. Image in the public domain.

 

That medieval people revelled in playing with their food is further highlighted by informal household recipe collections. In the late thirteenth-century, Richard de Grimhill, a low-ranking Worcester noble, collected recipes that used mercury to make an egg run through the house and make a chicken sing on the spit and turn itself over.[7] The Tollemache Book of Secrets, written in fifteenth-century Suffolk by and for a gentry family, also retains, amongst a plethora of medical, codicological, and other household recipes, two similar English recipes using mercury to animate a cooked chicken and a loaf of bread.[8] In my research on magic tricks in late Medieval Europe, I have found no fewer than thirteen manuscripts, composed between the late thirteenth and fifteenth century in England, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, that contain at least one recipe to animate an egg, cooked chicken, or loaf of bread with mercury. Many more have instructions to turn water into wine or make cooked meat appear raw.

Whether at court or in the gentry household, the medieval dinner table was a space for both dining and diversion. Medieval people outside the aristocracy adapted the elaborate and expensive centrepieces displayed on wealthier tables to their own more modest means, exchanging fire-breathing boar’s heads for jumping eggs. These tricks demonstrate that amusement, delight, and spectacle were important aspects to medieval entertaining at all levels of European literate society.


[1] The Vivendier, ed. and trans, Terence Scully (Totnes: Prospect Books, 1997),  81 (recipe 58).

[2]The Vivendier, ed. and trans., Scully, 82-83 (recipe 59).

[3] For an overview of the medieval cookbook as genre see Bruno Laurioux, Une histoire culinaire du moyen âge, (Paris: Champion, 2005), especially 39-41.

[4] Maistre Chiquart, Du fait du cuisine, ed. and trans., Terence Scully (Arizona: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2010),137-145 (recipe 10).

[5] For more on this manuscript see Terence Scully, The Vivendier, 3-15.

[6] Le Ménagier de Paris, trans. Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 330.

[7] Hic incipient experimenta bona et optima, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby MS 86, fol 47r.

[8] Tollemache Book of Secrets Suffolk, Helmingham Hall LH. II., 27r

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Call for Editors: Social Media and Acquisitions

The Recipes Project is looking for new editors to grow our readership and expand the range of scholarship we feature on the blog. Are you a savvy Tweeter who loves the back-and-forth exchange of social media? Are you a regular reader with ideas about what you’d like to see us feature on the blog? Do you love thinking about recipes in all their myriad forms? Then you might make a great social media or acquisitions editor, and we would love to hear from you!

Editorial duties include:

Social Media Editors

  • Amplifying, sharing, and promoting writing on recipes, especially by underrepresented groups 
  • Running our social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter)
  • Regular liaising with co-editors about site development, content, and promotion

Acquisitions Editors

  • Engaging with underrepresented groups and areas of study related to recipes, especially among underrepresented groups and non-Western societies
  • Connecting with and inviting potential contributors 
  • Organizing, editing, and uploading posts in rotation with other co-editors 
  • Regular liaising with co-editors about site development, content, and promotion 

About Us

The Recipes Project is an interdisciplinary, volunteer organization. This work is the unpaid product of a community of passionate scholars of recipes.

We welcome candidates from all backgrounds, including those engaged with the culinary arts, creative food writing, and academic research. We welcome scholars from a variety of disciplines: anthropology, comparative literature, classics, history, linguistics, literary criticism, sociology, and more. Graduate students are valued members of our community.  We particularly invite submissions from those from underrepresented groups and non-Western societies. 

The Recipes Project has an international reach that explores recipes of all kinds: medical, culinary, scientific, magical. Our posts cover a range of topics relating to historic cookbooks, instructions, ingredients, guidelines, and methods of cultivation and production across time and place. We value new writers and early career researchers, giving them a platform for new writing and supporting and amplifying their work. We have a broad audience—in 2021, we averaged 18,000 unique site visitors per month, and we have over 11.5K Twitter followers. We look forward to expanding further, with your help!

Application Details

To apply, please include a CV and one-page pitch describing what you wish to bring to the team. Acquisitions Editors: include two ideas for a month-long series and how you might expand our reach to new audiences. Social Media Editors: include two ideas for a week-long social media campaign that reaches distinct and diverse groups. Have other ideas? Send them our way! 

Please submit applications via email to recipesproject@brocku.ca. First review will begin on Feb. 1, 2022 and will continue until positions are filled.

Current Editorial Team

  • Clare Gordon Bettencourt
  • Jessica Clark
  • Amanda Herbert
  • R.A. Kashanipour
  • Sarah Peters Kernan
  • Melissa Reynolds
  • Joshua Schlachet
  • Miles Wilkerson

Powerful Bundles: The Materiality of Protection Amulets in Early Modern Switzerland

By Eveline Szarka

If you shop around for a protection amulet today, you will most likely stumble upon ornamental jewellery. More often than not these pieces are round in shape, and pieces featuring Kabbalistic or runic symbols are especially popular. The term ‘amulet’ is described as a “piece of jewellery some people wear because they think it protects them from bad luck, illness, etc” in the OED. However, when it comes to premodern protection practices, the efficacy of amulets depended on both the production process and the materials and ingredients used. There are two additional significant differences between contemporary and early modern understandings and applications of amulets: First, in early modern Europe, amulets were not only carried around as mobile objects but also attached to houses or buried into the thresholds. Second, amulets were often used to protect valuable livestock against diseases thought to be caused by supernatural agents.

In my research, I understand amulets as powerful bundles, often of diverse materials, which take effect through physical contact between the amulet and the object (person, animal, house) to be protected. As I discuss below, the materials commonly used include herbs, plants, food stuff, words (both spoken and written) and time. For example, it was believed that gathering plants at a certain time of the day or on a holiday enhanced the amulet’s power.

While many recipe books containing instructions on how to make amulets are now lost, it is a stroke of luck that some 17th and 18th-century handbooks are still preserved in the State Archive of the Canton of Berne, Switzerland thanks to early 20th century folklorists and collectors. Unfortunately, these books are difficult to date and connect with specific authors, owners and users. However, comparisons with court documents show that people commonly produced and applied amulets throughout the early modern period. For example, in a court case in Basel 1719, a folk healer called Friedrich Fritschi defended himself for putting hazel rods underneath a window as a way to protect the house owner from a spectre.[i] Although we do not know much about these books, the recipes and the arrangements of the instructions offer valuable insights into the contemporary relevance and ideas about the efficacy of such practices and artefacts. For instance, instructions about the production of amulets are written alongside suggestions on how to get rid of cheese-eating mice, indicating that the production of amulets against evil forces belonged to everyday house care (Hauspflege) .

Basic materials and ingredients of an amulet: linen, a cord, rods, plants, salt and bread. Source. E. Szarka

Let us now turn to an example that illustrates the concepts underpinning the efficacy of the protection amulet:

To insert into houses and barns in case of foul ghosts

Take some good vines, rods, melissa, brown periwinkles, communion bread and salt, [and bind] everything together in the three holy names with a string. Make as many as you need and drill [a hole] in both the barn and above the doors and thresholds. Put a small bundle in every hole and speak: “I put you in here in the name of God”.[ii]

This instruction exemplifies the three main production steps required to ensure the efficacy of the early modern amulet. First, people needed to gather the listed materials and ingredients. Some plants were commonly believed to be inherently powerful against evil forces, such as hazel rods. Salt and communion bread – liturgically and ritually blessed objects (so-called “sacramentals”) – were reoccurring ingredients in these kinds of recipes. Sometimes, makers also used or added slips of paper furnished with bible verses to the amulet to intensify its efficacy. Second, one had to mix the materials and ingredients, form a bundle and tie it with a string. Finally, the amulet had to be applied accordingly. It could be attached to an animal’s neck, to a door, buried into the thresholds or hidden in a drill hole above the house so that it kept malevolent entities from entering. People considered uttering sacred words both during the production and application process to be highly potent.

Drill hole in a wooden beam for a protection amulet found in an 18th century house in rural Basel, State Archive of the Canton of Basel-Land, SL 5250.5024. Source: E. Szarka

As we have seen, the gathering of materials and ingredients, the production as well as the application of the amulet were considered necessary consecutive steps to accumulate divine power. The ingredients were either inherently powerful or charged with sanctity in a liturgical context. Language, both uttered orally during these three steps or added in the form of paper slips, formed essential material ingredients that enhanced the amulet’s efficacy as it drew upon divine power. Similarly, the timing of the production could play a crucial role. For example, one had to collect the plants or apply the amulet at a particular holiday or a sacred time of the day. Time, just like language, acted as a “material” component charged with sacred power that could be transferred to the amulet through the specific production circumstances. Once applied to houses or animals, these effective little packages containing both visible and invisible materialities provided a metaphysical shield to unseen forces.

As I argue in my dissertation on ghosts and spirits in Post-Reformation Switzerland[iii], early modern people believed the world to be permeated by multiple invisible forces. Handling constant supernatural attacks from spirits and witches called for specific measures. Women and men tried to tackle and manipulate the supernatural sphere with elaborate rituals written down in recipe books. Practices concerned with amulet making disclose different concepts of causal relations in the physical and metaphysical world. Above all, they mirror a specific understanding of materiality, according to which certain plants and aliments, but also language and time, contain power that people can accumulate, enhance, and transfer to other materials, places and living beings to preserve their living environments.

[i] State Archive of the Canton of Basel, Criminalia 4, 22.

[ii] State Archive of the Canton of Berne, DQ 888, translated from the original German text by E. Szarka.

[iii] Eveline Szarka, Sinn für Gespenster. Spukphänomene in der reformierten Schweiz (1570-1730), doctoral thesis at the University of Zurich, 2020, upcoming Spring 2021.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Academic biography:

Eveline Szarka completed her PhD at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her dissertation focuses on the impact of the Protestant Reformation on the belief in ghosts and specters in Switzerland from 1570-1730. This year, she was granted a scholarship from the Swiss National Science Foundation to visit Harvard University and University College London from 2020-2022 as a postdoctoral fellow. However, due to the pandemic, she will likely postpone the start of the fellowship until 2021. Eveline’s  upcoming project focuses on handbooks about magic tricks and life hacks as related to the history of knowledge and science (1650-1850). Her research interests lie in early modern world views, historical conceptions of (im)materiality, causality, and magic as well as the potentials of human manipulation of the physical world.

 

Charmed: into the Spellbound exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Kristof Smeyers

Image of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, featuring the "Spellbound" exhibition.  Photo by permission of the author.
Image of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, featuring the “Spellbound” exhibition. Photo by permission of the author.

Entering the ‘Spellbound’ exhibition, you are confronted with a ladder leaning against a wall like a menacing question mark. There is no avoiding this ladder. Do you walk under it or do you go round? Even before you are inside the Ashmolean’s exhibition space, ‘Spellbound’ asks big questions about magic, ritual, and witchcraft. The ladder is a clever prelude: it shows how magical thinking is not part of a past inhabited by our ‘superstitious’ predecessors, but smugly points out that we live in a magical world today (and will still do so tomorrow). The ladder sets the tone: visitors are encouraged to engage with their own magical thinking. By the time you have made your decision, you know not to approach the magical objects in the exhibition as unenlightened remnants of delusions and misconceptions. They are, instead, intrinsic parts of people’s ‘inner lives’—not incidentally, research from the Leverhulme Trust-funded project Inner Lives: Emotions, Identity and the Supernatural, 1300-1900 lies at the foundation of the exhibition.

‘Spellbound’ stretches out across three thematic exhibition spaces divided between learned magic, witchcraft, and folk magic, though they are best experienced in dialogue with each other: retracing one’s steps between rooms can help make sense of some of the more enigmatic objects, and help one draw emotional or sensory connections of one’s own. Together, the spaces immerse the visitor in more than eight centuries of magical thinking and feeling, simultaneously encouraging us to reflect on our own thoughts and feelings. The thematic set up invites us to draw connections across ages and cultures without, importantly, trying to convince us of a ‘universalist’ interpretation of magic.

Its innovative approach—across themes and ages—raises questions of its own. How do you create an exhibition that aims to capture interiority and emotions, in particular when those emotions and their related practices are related to subjects as wilfully elusive as the magical and supernatural? The invisible is a tricky thing to display in a glass case of a museum. Thankfully for the curators (and for us), magic has been captured in a wide variety of writings and objects—sometimes literally—for example, the small flask which famously contains a witch came with a warning from the woman who donated it to the Pitt Rivers Museum in the early twentieth century: ‘…if you let him out there’ll be a peck o’ trouble.’ In fact, several objects in ‘Spellbound’ hail from the cabinets of Pitt Rivers and are re-imagined in what at first glance seems like a more sterile and modern museum environment. The supernatural and the magical, so this exhibition convincingly shows in the form of hundreds of things, were profoundly material categories.

A second question that arises when looking at the many, very different objects is: How do you recreate a museum context in which a worn shoe or a feather can be ‘seen’ and ‘experienced’ by visitors as magical and emotional, ideally without having to read essay-length labels that explain its significance for the person who made it, kept it, or used it? Labels are used sparingly, and to effect. The meaning and emotional significance attributed to everyday objects instead becomes apparent when you take the time to look. Objects of magic show signs of emotional practices throughout the ages: pages of grimoires were read until they fell apart, things were carved, bound, charmed, pierced, tied, burnt, scratched, bottled.  

In other instances, the fact that they were kept is revealing in itself: the worn leather of a shoe found concealed under floorboards by homeowners, for example, attests to a patina of emotional and magical meaning that remains vivid despite—or because—of its mystifying character. The accompanying catalogue poignantly quotes Sara Ahmed’s The cultural politics of emotions on how emotions ‘stick’ to objects, whether we recognise them as magically material like the steel of a horse shoe and the obsidian of John Dee’s black mirror—or not. It is to the curators’ credit that visitors are compelled to figure out precisely how a shoe or corset were magical. That materiality becomes particularly powerful when the exhibition lets different kinds of objects communicate with one another, as in the case of the Boy with Coral painting and the piece of red coral depicting St Michael defeating the devil. Several modern art installations beautifully enrich the visitor’s sense of wonder as they wander between objects.

St Michael © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Boy with Coral © Norfolk Museum Services. Both images courtesy of the author.
St Michael © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Boy with Coral © Norfolk Museum Services. Both images courtesy of the author.

‘Spellbound’ makes clear how structures of magical thinking remain vibrant and flexible; they are not, nor were they ever paradigmatic, rigid belief systems. Rather, they constitute of pragmatic, idiosyncratic amalgams of beliefs, practices, and objects that made sense to individuals and shaped communities. They are profoundly human. This popular and charming exhibition will do much to rid us of the persistent dismissal of magical thinking as ‘superstition’ and to begin to take people’s experiences—past and present—seriously. Touch wood.

Kristof Smeyers (Twitter: @kristof_smeyers) works as a doctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp. His research attempts to untangle the grey areas between science and religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by focusing on supernatural religious phenomena in Britain and Ireland.