Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe

First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing. While pre-modern Europe is often seen as having an 'enchanted' or 'magical' worldview, the full implications of such labels remain inconsistently explored. Witchcraft, demonology, and debates over pious practices have provided the main avenues for treating those themes, but integrating them with other activities and ideas seen as forming an enchanted Europe has proven to be a much more difficult task. This collection offers one method of demystifying this world of everyday magic. Integrating case studies and more theoretical responses to the magical and preternatural, the authors here demonstrate that what we think of as extraordinary was often accepted as legitimate, if unusual, occurrences or practices. In their treatment of and attitudes towards spirit-assisted treasure-hunting, magical recipes, trials for sanctity, and visits by guardian angels, early modern Europeans showed more acceptance of and comfort with the extraordinary than modern scholars frequently acknowledge. Even witchcraft could be more pervasive and less threatening than many modern interpretations suggest. Magic was both mundane and mysterious in early modern Europe, and the witches who practiced it could in many ways be quite ordinary members of their communities. The vivid cases described in this volume should make the reader question how to distinguish the ordinary and extraordinary and the extent to which those terms need to be redefined for an early modern context. They should also make more immediate a world in which magic was an everyday occurrence.

While pre-modern Europe is often seen as having an 'enchanted' or 'magical' worldview, the full implications of such labels remain inconsistently explored. Witchcraft, demonology, and debates over pious practices have provided the main avenues for treating those themes, but integrating them with other activities and ideas seen as forming an enchanted Europe has proven to be a much more difficult task. This collection offers one method of demystifying this world of everyday magic. Integrating case studies and more theoretical responses to the magical and preternatural, the authors here demonstrate that what we think of as extraordinary was often accepted as legitimate, if unusual, occurrences or practices. In their treatment of and attitudes towards spirit-assisted treasure-hunting, magical recipes, trials for sanctity, and visits by guardian angels, early modern Europeans showed more acceptance of and comfort with the extraordinary than modern scholars frequently acknowledge. Even witchcraft could be more pervasive and less threatening than many modern interpretations suggest. Magic was both mundane and mysterious in early modern Europe, and the witches who practiced it could in many ways be quite ordinary members of their communities. The vivid cases described in this volume should make the reader question how to distinguish the ordinary and extraordinary and the extent to which those terms need to be redefined for an early modern context. They should also make more immediate a world in which magic was an everyday occurrence.

Experiences of magic and witchcraft in the early modern period have often been presented as extraordinary occurrences, when they were, from the perspective of people living during this period, part of a shared and very familiar cosmological outlook. By presenting a wide range of everyday supernatural experiences, from spirit-assisted treasure-hunting to magically-assisted recipes, this book will show the extent to which such incidents and the beliefs underlying them have common frames of reference and were accepted as legitimate, if unusual, occurrences or practices. Particularly important in this context is the integration of witchcraft. As the authors in this collection argue, witchcraft was more pervasive and often less threatening than many modern interpretations suggest. Magic was both mundane and mysterious in early modern Europe, and the witches who practiced it could be in many ways quite ordinary members of their communities. The vivid cases described in this volume should make the reader question how to distinguish the ordinary and extraordinary in the early modern experience and the extent to which those terms need to be redefined for an early modern context Notes on Contributors vii 1. Introduction: What Makes Magic Everyday Magic? / Kathryn A. Edwards 1 2. Magical Lives: Daily Practices and Intellectual Discourses in Enchanted Catalonia during the Early Modern Era / Doris Moreno Martínez 11 3. Lived Lutheranism and Daily Magic in Seventeenth-Century Finland / Raisa Maria Toivo 35 4. The Guardian Angel: From the Natural to the Supernatural / Antoine Mazurek 51 5. False Sanctity and Spiritual Imposture in Seventeenth-Century French Convents / Linda Lierheimer 71 6. Magic, Dreams, and Money / Jared Poley 93 7. The Good Magicians: Treasure Hunting in Early Modern Germany / Johannes Dillinger 105 8. A Christian Warning: Bartholomaeus Anhorn, Demonology, and Divination / Jason Coy 127 9. The "Antidemons" of Calvinism: Ghosts, Demons, and Traditional Belief in the House of François Perrault / Kathryn A. Edwards 147 10 The Constitution and Conditions of Everyday Magic in Late Medieval and Early Modern Catholic Europe / Sarah Ferber 161 Index 181 Experiences of magic and witchcraft in the early modern period have often been presented as extraordinary occurrences, when they were, from the perspective of people living during this period, part of a shared and familiar cosmological outlook. By presenting a range of everyday supernatural experiences, from spirit-assisted treasure hunting to magically-assisted recipes, this book will show the extent to which such incidents and the beliefs underlying them have common frames of reference and were accepted as legitimate, if unusual, practices.