Review of: The Magic of Rogues: Necromancers in Early Tudor England , by Frank Klaassen and Sharon Hubbs Wright

Abstract

The historical study of magic and the occult in Western Europe is often split in two. One main approach, drawing on the fact that practices deemed to be magical have frequently been condemned by both secular and religious authorities, approaches magic as an illicit activity and studies the records of that condemnation. Such an approach is centered above all on the study of witchcraft and witch trials, even though the sort of practices alleged in cases of witchcraft are often in no way representative of the sort of magical rites people in premodern Europe actually employed in the course of their daily lives. As Klaassen and Wright note in their introduction to this volume, “those accused of witchcraft were commonly not magic practitioners at all” (1-2). Scholarship of this sort lends itself to the study of perceptions about magic, as well as to the social contexts in which magic was practiced or at least out of which accusations arose. The other line of study, becoming more common since the 1990s, focuses on magical texts. Here scholarship tends to operate in the style of intellectual history. It can tell us much about how practitioners (at least relatively elite practitioners who could write) understood their own practices, and about the influences that shaped them. Because of their illicit nature, however, such texts were almost always anonymous and generally reveal little about the historical contexts in which they arose.