Medieval Magic Scholars

summarize the contributions of Claire Fanger, Frank Klaasen, and Joseph Peterson to the study of medieval magic.

Now write a 2000 word essay citing at least three books from these scholars using academic references.

Here is the beginning of Fanger's book Invoking Angels. Integrate a summary of this into the discussion of Fanger. This is the book by which God can be seen face to face in this life. This is the book by which anyone at all can be saved and unhesitatingly be led forth into eternal life. . . . This is the book which was the most precious thing given by the Lord—more precious than anything else except the sacraments. This is the book by which corporeal and visible nature can speak, converse, and be instructed by that which is incorporeal and invisible. —from the final paragraph of the Liber iuratus Honorii Naked as they may be, abstracted from context and presented in the evident in- nocence of their wish fulfillment, these claims, which conclude the fourteenth- century Sworn Book of Honorius,' testify to the persistence of two fundamental questions central to this volume: t_ How may the divine be manifest in this world and in things that human be- ings can know? 2. How may human beings, unfit for direct knowledge of the divine, neverthe- less engage with divine things in order to be saved? There are other, more conventional responses to these questions in the later Middle Ages, but this volume is about some of the less conventional ones. The essays collected here look at a variety of alternative views of the relationship of human beings with the divine, as recorded in texts that engage traditional the- ologies and liturgies in unusual ways, sometimes weaving together sources from more than one religion and sometimes from sources commonly regarded as magical. Some of these texts were condemned by medieval and early modern theologians as being in the same class as demonic magic. Despite their status, then and now, outside the canon of medieval religious and devotional writings, 2 INVOKING ANGELS these texts offer important perspectives on the study of religion in the Middle Ages. In general, they attest to the plurality of visions of religious practice, not only in the later Middle Ages but into the sixteenth century. They also demon- strate that this plurality included fertile cross-cultural exchange. Their abun- dance in manuscript attests to an increasing interest in alternative forms of access to the divine, and perhaps also to a parallel anxiety that ordinary liturgies and sacraments might not be sufficient to procure salvation. Finally, these vari- ous approaches to the divine also bear upon natural philosophy, science, and rationality, demanding more nuanced approaches to the relationships between scientific practices and devotional ones. Until fairly recently, these works had remained almost untouched by histo- rians. Starting in the late 1980s, there began to be a marked increase in scholar- ship on medieval ritual magic texts and, relatedly, on the broader problem of magic. Over the past ten years, the trickle of new articles, books, and editions of these texts has increased to something that might almost be called a spate. In my 1998 collection Conjuring Spirits, | complained that the area of texts and manu- scripts of medieval intellectual magic still had too little coverage beyond what was available in Lynn Thorndike’s History of Magic and Experimental Science, completed in 1958.” Now the area looks completely different. In fact, important new discoveries are coming so thick and fast that it is often difficult for publi- cation to keep up—getting a new discovery into print before it is outdated is a challenge that can be both exhilarating and frustrating for those involved.* For this book, I have solicited contributions from scholars whose work has made significant inroads into this former wilderness territory. Taken together, the essays collected here shed light on connections between the domains of religion and science as continuous aspects of habitus for writers and operators of these texts; they show how necessary it is to consider medieval and early modern epistemology as a whole, within the context of all the kinds of texts that concern it. In the history of ideas, the “magical” has often emerged as a label for an idea or approach that apparently should have been broken away from earlier—a problem of fossilized thinking.‘ Yet if modern science has tended to define itself by opposition to a magic that was in principle older, less knowing, and less pro- gressive, at the same time the process of “normal science” has always prag- matically adapted itself to the modes of thought, explanation, and experimental practice of the time. So also has normal magic, of course. In different ways the cosmic infusion of knowledge sought by the liturgy of the Ars notoria (discussed by Véronése), the spiritual cosmology detailed in Antonio da Montolmo’s De occultis et manifestis (discussed by Weill-Parot), and the spirit-conjuring diaries of Humphrey Gilbert (discussed by Klaassen) all show how medieval and early INTRODUCTION 3 modern intellectual writers might associate the angelic worlds and the worlds of human knowledge at once experimentally, scientifically, and spiritually. Another aspect of the premodern epistemology illuminated by these essays is the purposeful bricolage of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic ritual elements that appear in these texts. While the mutual influences of medieval Jewish, Chris- tian, and Islamic writers on philosophy and science have long been a subject of examination for intellectual historians, the interaction between these groups on typological, angelological, and liturgical levels has been much harder to study, in part because of restrictions imposed by disciplinary boundaries, but more significantly because the data for such interactions depend so strongly on texts that are examined here in depth, in some cases for the first time. Many essays in this volume are concerned with key points of this intercultural and interreligious conversation. Topics range from the Latin Liber Razielis and Liber de essentia spirituum, discussed by Sophie Page, to new findings on the probable relation- ship between Christian, Jewish, and Muslim influences on the Liber iuratus Honorii, by Jan Veenstra and Katelyn Mesler, to analyses of the way Jewish and Christian identities are formed through and against ideas about each other’s li- turgical practices, as shown in essays by myself, Harvey Hames, and Elliot Wolf- son. It is only by opening up the history of ideas, as well as the various histories of science and spirituality, to contemplation of texts of this kind that we can begin to form a truly historical picture of medieval and early modern life. L Texts and Contexts One goal of this book is to bring forward new research data for scholars who specialize in medieval manuscripts of magic; but it is also hoped that the book may provide some useful information to a broader audience of readers inter- ested in contiguous areas of medieval social, cultural, and religious history. Be- cause not all potential readers will be familiar with the texts under discussion in this volume, what follows is a brief conspectus, partly to give novice readers a thumbnail sketch of these relatively obscure texts, partly to indicate something of the way the historical narrative around them will be further changed by the essays in this book.

add a discussion of this book by klaasen. In this original, provocative, well-reasoned, and thoroughly documented book, Frank Klaassen proposes that two principal genres of illicit learned magic occur in late medieval manuscripts: image magic, which could be interpreted and justified in scholastic terms, and ritual magic (in its extreme form, overt necromancy), which could not. Image magic tended to be recopied faithfully; ritual magic tended to be adapted and reworked. These two forms of magic did not usually become intermingled in the manuscripts, but were presented separately. While image magic was often copied in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, The Transformations of Magic demonstrates that interest in it as an independent genre declined precipitously around 1500. Instead, what persisted was the other, more problematic form of magic: ritual magic. Klaassen shows that texts of medieval ritual magic were cherished in the sixteenth century, and writers of new magical treatises, such as Agrippa von Nettesheim and John Dee, were far more deeply indebted to medieval tradition—and specifically to the medieval tradition of ritual magic—than previous scholars have thought them to be.

Add a discussion of Peterson's contributions to Dee studies including this book: John Dee's Five Books of Mystery by Joseph H. Peterson Discovered in a hidden compartment of an old chest long after his death, the secret writings of John Dee, one of the leading scientists and occultists of Elizabethan England, record in minute detail his research into the occult. Dee concealed his treatises on the nature of humankind's contact with angelic realms and languages throughout his life, and they were nearly lost forever. In his brief biography of John Dee, Joseph Peterson calls him a "true Renaissance man"? detailing his work in astronomy, mathematics, navigation, the arts, astrology, and the occult sciences. He was even thought to be the model for Shakespeare's Prospero. All this was preparation for Dee's main achievement: five books, revealed and transcribed between March 1582 and May 1583, bringing to light mysteries and truths that scholars and adepts have been struggling to understand and use ever since. These books detail his system for communicating with the angels, and reveal that the angels were interested in and involved with the exploration and colonization of the New World, and in heralding in a new age or new world order. While Dee's influence was certainly felt in his lifetime, his popularity has grown tremendously since. His system was used and adapted by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and subsequently by Aleister Crowley. This new edition of John Dee's Five Books of Mystery is by far the most accessible and complete published to date. Peterson has translated Latin terms and added copious footnotes, putting the instructions and references into context for the modern reader.

Add the contributions of Sophie Page including a discussion of her book magic in the cloister and the routledge history of medieval magic. I will past in cover blurb below that you can summarize. This most recent contribution to the series Magic in History investigates the collection of texts of learned magic once held by the Benedictine monastery at St. Augustine's in Canterbury in order to examine closely magic's place in medieval Christian belief and practice. Sophie Page's tightly constructed and well-argued study draws on recent editorial and theoretical work in the field as she seeks to elucidate the rationality that justified the learning and practice of magic within a particular monastic community. Page's erudite, lucidly written investigation is both indebted and contributes substantially to a field that has made significant strides in developing workable definitions of magic and its diverse genres, understanding magic as similar to and distinct from orthodox religion, identifying and making accessible a corpus of medieval European magic texts, understanding the sources for these texts, and assessing the nature and reach of their influence in the Middle Ages and early... The Routledge History of Medieval Magic brings together the work of scholars from across Europe and North America to provide extensive insights into recent developments in the study of medieval magic between c.1100 and c.1500. This book covers a wide range of topics, including the magical texts which circulated in medieval Europe, the attitudes of intellectuals and churchmen to magic, the ways in which magic intersected with other aspects of medieval culture, and the early witch trials of the fifteenth century. In doing so, it offers the reader a detailed look at the impact that magic had within medieval society, such as its relationship to gender roles, natural philosophy, and courtly culture. This is furthered by the book’s interdisciplinary approach, containing chapters dedicated to archaeology, literature, music, and visual culture, as well as texts and manuscripts. The Routledge History of Medieval Magic also outlines how research on this subject could develop in the future, highlighting under-explored subjects, unpublished sources, and new approaches to the topic. It is the ideal book for both established scholars and students of medieval magic.

I'd like you to add a discussion of Fanger's take on the description of medieval magic as theurgy, using the example of the ars notoria. Here is more material from her book to integrate. Some part of the popularity of the Ars notoria was thus probably due to its self-representation as sacred; no doubt its proliferation was helped along, too, by the pragmatic nature of its advertised goals (which might potentially ease the expense of university study, reducing time spent on education and the over- all cost of books and exemplars). By the late fourteenth century the text existed in several versions, and copies from this period can be found deriving from many European locations. The earliest, or “A? version (as Véronése labels it in his edition), is an unglossed ritual containing prayers, notae, and some mytho- historical context, but almost no ritual instruction; a slightly later version (the “B” version)® includes the original prayers and notae and adds an extensive gloss containing ritual instructions and further mythohistorical context. The gloss offers clues to the use and reception of the basic liturgy, answering some impor- tant questions about how the ritual was supposed to be performed and how it INTRODUCTION 5 was understood and thought about. Prior to the work of Véronése, the relation between the various versions of the notory art was unknown, and the glossed version was essentially unread. In his chapter in this volume, Véronése gives a descriptive and interpretive account of the glossed version, describing the oper- ating instructions as represented in the glosses in Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, lat. 9336, then zooming out to treat more broadly some of the opera- tive resemblances between the Ars notoria, Neoplatonic theurgy, and Christian sacraments. As was the common fate of many medieval liturgies, the notory art was fre- quently taken apart and its components repurposed; its prayers, verbal formulae, and structuring ideas were reused in other works, some more nearly and some more distantly related to it. The work that is most explicitly connected to it is the Book of the Flowers of Heavenly Teaching by John of Morigny. John of Morigny John was a monk of the Benedictine order at Morigny, educated at Chartres and Orleans and active in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. What is known about him comes almost entirely from his own Liber florum celestis doctrine (Book of the Flowers of Heavenly Teaching), which, in addition to containing a lengthy prayer text (modeled on the Ars notoria, and similarly designed to peti- tion angels for the transmission of curricular knowledge), includes many auto- biographical passages.!° John’s writings are a key source of information about the Ars notoria, since he describes his own and others’ experience of its oper- ation before learning (via a vision induced by the Ars notoria itself) that the prayers in outlandish tongues had in fact been corrupted by subtle insertion of demonic invocations." By his own account, John discovered the Ars notoria when he was a student too poor to afford books. He had acquired a work of necromancy from a col- league and copied as much of it as he could, but he was beset by doubts about pursuing its rituals. After consulting a Lombard doctor named Jacob, he was directed to the Ars notoria, from which, according to the doctor, he might ob- tain all the knowledge he sought without danger to his soul.!* Guided by the doctor, John first approached the Ars notoria as a sacred text and a wholesome alternative to the demonic conjurations he had been contemplating. As he used the art, he learned better. The Ars notoria opened vistas on a dark visionary landscape filled with nightmarish forms and demons masquerading as monks or persons of the Trinity. John was eventually helped to free himself by Christ, John the Evangelist, and especially the Virgin Mary. When he finally 6 INVOKING ANGELS laid aside the Ars notoria, still wishing to obtain what he calls “the good part of his purpose,” he sought from the Virgin permission to compose his own art, similarly intended to infuse the operator with knowledge of the liberal arts, phi- losophy, and theology with only thirty simple prayers. The Virgin agreed, and the Book of Thirty Prayers (the primary liturgy of the Liber florum) was delivered, its express purpose to supplant and destroy the corrupt Ars notoria. It offered worthy seekers an alternative mode of obtaining knowledge through instruction from the Virgin.” This text is a recent discovery. Unlike the Ars notoria (which, though chroni- cally understudied in the past, has always been known to exist in printed books as well as manuscripts), the text of the Flowers of Heavenly Teaching was not actually known to survive at all much before the 1990s. In the Grandes Chro- niques de France there is recorded for the year 1323 a somewhat sensational ac- count of the burning of a work by a monk who attempted, claiming instruction from the Virgin Mary, to bring back the condemned Ars notoria in another guise;'* but it is not until 1987 that the first notice of a connection between the monk described here and an actual text in a manuscript in the Bayerische Staats- bibliothek is suggested in a footnote to an article on the Ars notoria by Jean Dupébe.” In the 1990s, independent discoveries of several more manuscripts (by Sylvie Barnay in France, and myself and Nicholas Watson in Ontario)!* show that the Liber florum did not in fact come to the abrupt end that one might have been tempted to assume from the Chroniques account. Indeed, the work contin- ued to be copied and used through the fifteenth century, largely in a monastic context, the latest known manuscript dating from the early sixteenth century.” We are now aware that there are two surviving authorial versions of this text.' The earlier version (or “Old Compilation”), which John completed between 1310 and 1313, culminates in a Book of Figures that may have incorporated as many as ninety-two figures to go with the prayers, probably intended to be used in simi- lar fashion to the notae of the Ars notoria. Unfortunately, most of these are not included in the only known Old Compilation manuscript.” In the later version (or “New Compilation”), dated 1315, John completely rewrote the text of the Book of Figures and cut the number down to eight: seven iconic images of the Virgin and one image of an apocalyptic Christ. In my own contribution to this volume, I look at the way John casts the rela- tion between the Old and New Compilation texts as parallel to the relation be- tween the Old and New Testaments; his own Old Compilation is, like the Old Testament, superseded by the new work, which is its fulfillment; but the Old Compilation nevertheless remains sacred in its own right. I go on to compare the Liber florum with another work that, in one version at least, makes similar claims related to the idea of sacramental supersession: the Liber iuratus Honorii. INTRODUCTION 7 The Liber iuratus Honorii or Sworn Book of Honorius As it turns out, the Sworn Book of Honorius, previously known only through the version found in a handful of manuscripts in the British Library, is extant in another version as well, as reported by Jan Veenstra in chapter 4 of this volume. This newly discovered version is witnessed in a manuscript of the Summa sacre magice, a massive compilation of magic texts circulating in Spain that was com- piled in the first half of the fourteenth century by a redactor named Berengario Ganell. Like most of the works in this volume, the Summa sacre magice has only recently been found worthy of examination.” Veenstra’s analysis of the Ganell version demonstrates conclusively that it belongs to a different tradition of redaction—a tradition clearly prior to that in the English manuscripts that were, until now, the only known witnesses of the text. The date of origin of the Sworn Book has not been pinpointed with certainty (in fact, Veenstra’s discover- aes have overturned some of what was thought to be known about it), but cir- amnstantial evidence still points to the early fourteenth century, certainly for the London version and perhaps for the earlier one as well.”! Like the Ars notoria, the Sworn Book is fundamentally concerned with seek- ing heavenly knowledge from angels, though what is sought in this case is not knowledge couched in the hierarchical structure of the seven liberal arts but rather a transformative vision: it claims that its ritual will induce a vision of God, face to face, as Adam and the Prophets saw him. It opens with a reference to the “greate name of God which the Hebrues call sememphoras which dothe consyst of 72 . . . letters”? John of Morigny, too, refers to the “Semhemphoras,” giossing it as a Hebrew word meaning “most elect name of God” and noting i as another term for the tetragrammaton.”’ This much was common currency for educated Christians from the works of Jerome and Isidore. The reference to the name of seventy-two letters, however, was not a patristic commonplace, and it seems to derive from some more direct contact with Jewish tradition.% The seventy-two-letter name referred to here, together with a number of other as- pects of the text, show that the master of the Sworn Book was drawing con- sciously, though not always in a fully informed way, on ritual information from non-Christian Abrahamic traditions.

I didn't want the whole essay to be about theurgy. Integrate this discussion of theurgy into the Fanger section from the larger essay you wrote above.

This is an essay about the contributions of all four scholars, not just Fanger's

Why did you leave out Klaasen? I liked the original essay better.

I'd like to expand the section on Klaasen. First of all summarize his author bio. Frank Klaassen is author of The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance (Penn State University Press, 2012), winner of the Margaret Labarge Prize, Making Magic in Elizabethan England (Penn State University Press, 2019), The Magic of Rogues: Necromancers and Authority in Early Tudor England (Penn State University Press, 2021), and the forthcoming Everyday Magicians in Tudor England (the last two co-authored with Sharon Wright). His numerous articles (see Publications) concern various aspects of magic in the late middle ages and early modern period, focussing in particular on manuscript evidence. In recent years he has engaged in various forms of public history including several museum exhibits and historical games. In 2020 he was awarded the Medieval Academy of America Teaching Prize. His poetry has appeared in numerous international literary journals.

add a summary of klaasen's book on rogues. The Magic of Rogues Necromancers in Early Tudor England Frank Klaassen and Sharon Hubbs Wright “This short scholarly study has two key virtues: it teases apart two muddled-up historiographies and unites two unnecessarily distanced ones. First, it clears a distinct space in the historical record for practitioners of magic, who as religious and legal deviants too often get absorbed into the academic discussion of witches and witch-trials. Secondly, it exploits the fact that 16th-century magical texts tell us little about the people who used them, while legal records of prosecution — magic was first criminalised under the 1542 Witchcraft Act — tell us a lot about the magicians but frustratingly little about the technicalities of their offences.”

Now give me a section on Klaasen for the essay that highlights his contributions to the study of magic rather than giving me a biography of the guyt.