Medieval Guide to Magic

What did medieval minds truly believe about the cosmos, demons, and the hidden forces of the universe? Could ancient manuscripts still hold meaning, or danger, today? Matt Lewis delves into the world of medieval enchantment with historian Anne Lawrence-Mathers, author of The Magic Books. They discover how magic shaped decisions in royal courts, crept into monasteries, and influenced the balance of power across Europe. From forbidden knowledge to practical instruction, magical texts weren’t just superstition—they were tools of science, strategy, and survival. MORE: How to spot magic in medieval buildings > https://open.spotify.com/episode/35USSO9dEtLa2IBravNvto Supernatural Medieval Ireland > https://open.spotify.com/episode/05WoMMJK9VMM7LiKp3QQ0w Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. It was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here > https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

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• 2:32Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 3:13Matt Lewis?

  A medieval scholar hunches over a lavishly illuminated manuscript, the flickering candlelight dancing off pages inscribed with celestial diagrams, cryptic symbols, and whispered secrets of the universe.

• 3:29Matt Lewis?

  A king sits in his chamber consulting his astrologer before making a decision that could change the fate of his kingdom.

• 3:37Matt Lewis?

  A monk, torn between faith and forbidden knowledge, traces sacred sigils in the margins of a prayer book, hoping to glimpse divine wisdom, or perhaps something darker.

• 3:52Matt Lewis?

  Magic in the Middle Ages was not the realm of fairy tales and witches in the woods. It was a powerful and sophisticated practice woven through politics and religion into the highest levels of society.

• 4:07Matt Lewis?

  But who were the people using these magical texts? And why did rulers, scholars, and even the clergy seek their guidance?

• 4:18Matt Lewis?

  Today on Gone Medieval, we unravel the true history of medieval magic with renowned historian Anne Laurence Mathers, whose book, The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in Twenty Medieval Manuscripts, explores her research to uncover the extraordinary role of enchantment in medieval courts, monasteries and political strategy. From the mystical Ars Notoria, a book promising instant knowledge, to the magical manuscripts commissioned by kings. We'll explore why magic wasn't just superstition, it was science, politics and

• 4:56Matt Lewis?

  power. What did medieval people truly believe about demons and celestial forces? How did magic influence the rise and fall of rulers? And could these forgotten texts still hold wisdom or danger for us today?

• 5:19Matt Lewis?

  Welcome to Gone Medieval, Anne. It's good of you to join us. Can't wait to get stuck into some medieval magic. What's not to love? One of the things that you return to several times in your work is how the practice of magic isn't about poor people all of the time. So we think, you know, the Disney crone in the woods kind of image of this old woman remote from society practising magic. But for medieval people, magic was about power, real political power too. So I wonder if you could give us, for a start off, how involved were medieval kings, for example, in the practice of magic?

• 5:54Speaker 04

  The actual practice probably was pretty rare by kings themselves, because the evidence of all of the texts and the manuscripts and so on is, if you're going to do it properly, it was pretty much a full-time job. And also quite a dangerous one, because it's clear that you needed not only to be an expert in several languages and all this kind of arcane technology and be able to recite great long texts and stuff. But you need that because you're dealing with powerful and very dangerous spirits or intelligences. They use various words to skirt around it. Theologians would have said demons. Something that's much more powerful and scary than you.

• 6:39Speaker 04

  So you needed to feel that you were an expert and properly equipped and prepared for this before you would take it on, I think. So kings tended to employ professionals. And it's interesting, the famous ones are from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Elizabethan England, it's John Dee. But there are other examples of the Magus of the early modern period. But they were there at least back in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as well. And one person who fascinates me is Alfonso the Tenth of Castile, who seems to have employed a whole school of philosophers, translators, professional magicians,

• 7:24Speaker 04

  artists, sculptors, you name it, to produce all of the texts and the equipment and perform the rituals.

• 7:32Matt Lewis?

  And all of that culminates in this manuscript called The Book of Astral Magic of Alfonso the Tenth, which sounds incredible. Can you tell us a little bit about that manuscript? What is it and what's in it?

• 7:44Speaker 04

  No, it's only a sort of fragment because it had a long and chequered history. And sadly, the fact that it's lost its beginning and its end means that there's no dedication to the king or no inscription that it belonged to him. But it looks so like other manuscripts that were made for him. And it corresponds with entries in the catalogues of royal libraries in fifteenth century France and so on. So it's a kind of compilation of instructions and pieces of information that you get in the other manuscripts made for the king. And it basically tells you if you are a professional magician or you want to be a professional magician.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  What rituals you can perform and in what way on given days, depending where the chosen planet that you want to call upon for your magic is in relation to the zodiac. And you need robes in the right colours, you need the right kind of animal to sacrifice, you need the right kind of location. And it's all there, spelt out in 13th century Castilian, I guess it would be, and beautifully illustrated to show you the gestures that the magician will be performing and so on. And of all unlikely places, it's the Vatican now.

• 9:04Matt Lewis?

  Oh, wow. I mean, that connection of the church to magic is something we'll come on to a little bit later, which is a fascinating aspect of it, too. I'm just interested in who Alfonso is bringing together to create this, because it sounds like we've got this whole group of people coming together. Have we found the missing Spanish Hogwarts?

• 9:21Speaker 04

  It's for adults, not children. There's no schoolkids here, I don't think. And some of the most important people, the ones who actually get named, are the translators, because this is a multicultural society, and he's drawing upon both traditional Jewish and Islamic Arabic language magic, and having it translated into his own first language of Castilian or Spanish. And mostly the texts then get translated from that into Latin. So in the case of the manual known as Picatrix, we only have Latin versions. His Spanish version has been lost, but we do know that it was translated from that. So we know that his

• 10:05Speaker 04

  school, if you like, had pupils who took the message even further. But once the works had been translated, they seem to have been edited, and a whole raft of manuscripts cross referring the text to one another and linking them to information about the zodiac.

• 10:27Speaker 04

  A whole set of what were called lapidaries, encyclopedias of precious and semi-precious stones with information about what they look like and where they could be sourced from and what you could do with them is put together. And that also is key to this information about the zodiac and the planets and what stars or bits of stars are powerful at given times on given days and so on. So it really was a full-time job.

• 10:58Matt Lewis?

  And is Alfonso the Tenth unusual in this? Do we have other examples of famous magic compendiums? And do we know who those books might have belonged to?

• 11:06Speaker 04

  Later in the 14th century, we get magic compendiums and we actually have names of the individual professionals who put them together, like Berengaria Sgonellus. And we know that he worked for the ruler of Mallorca, at least for a while. Others are more anonymous. Magic is reaching the academy. Authorities in universities like Paris are starting to get very worried about it by the end of the 13th century. And yet, at the same time, you have universities investing in astrology and astronomy right alongside secular rulers because they do believe that it's not only acceptable but practical to consult the stars

• 11:51Speaker 04

  and the influences of the stars and what their pattern is going to be at some chosen time in the future so that you can understand what planetary influences you will be dealing with. The key thing about the magic, of course, is that it claims to provide you with the tools to intervene in that and via summoning spirits, call down the powers of the planets. We think that we can link one of the manuscripts or the texts that I talk about, first of all, to maybe the Emperor Frederick II in 13th century Italy and the early Holy Roman Empire. By the late 14th, early 15th century,

• 12:35Speaker 04

  we know that kings of France were employing astrologers who were also physicians. And one of them was the father of the famous French writer Christine de Pizan.

• 12:48Speaker 04

  It's less well recorded for England. In England, the best recorded patron of professional semi-professional magicians is Eleanor, the Duchess of Gloucester, who is tried for treasonous necromancy, or treasonously employing necromancers, supposedly in the hope of getting rid of Henry VI.

• 13:10Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, her husband Humphrey Duke of Gloucester is one of the people that fascinates me during that period.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  Yes, if Henry VI had been bumped off, her husband was next in line to be king.

• 13:18Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And were these books, I mean, it doesn't sound like they were a kind of abstract academic exercise. They were like practical, usable textbooks for how to affect the course of the future?

• 13:33Speaker 04

  Mostly, yes. They're long because the rituals are long. But by a certain point, certainly by the late 13th, 14th century, they stop worrying too much about theory and theological correctness and so on. And they just set out, here is a ritual for doing this. And if you want to do it, this is when you do it, what you do, what you need. Here are the words that you should say, and this is what your outcome ought to be.

• 14:02Matt Lewis?

  Wow. So without risking casting any magical spells, can you give us an idea of some of the unusual guides and instructions that are in the book for how to perform magic ceremonies?

• 14:14Speaker 04

  Let me think. The one that comes to mind is from the collection that was translated and known as Picatrix. And for instance, this ritual, which again, I think it's to call upon Mercury. And of course Mercury's Day, if you're going at this the fairly simple way, is Wednesday. You see it in the French and Italian and Spanish names for that day of the week. So very possibly you would choose Mercury's Day. If you're going with the theory of planetary hours, you would also use an hour of Mercury on Mercury's Day. But for this, you need to be outside and you need a set of ostrich eggs

• 14:55Speaker 04

  and a set of metal sensors and a set of candle holders. And you draw yourself a circle, of course, with yourself in the centre. You also need a cockerel, possibly black, but from memory, I can't remember.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  And you need to have written magical symbols onto the shells of your ostrich eggs. And you pace out your circle and space out your inscribed ostrich eggs with censers and candle holders in between. And you start burning your incense. Then in the centre of the circle, you sacrifice your cock, having first cut off its comb. And then you enunciate your ritual words and call upon the planetary spirit that you want to summon.

• 15:49Matt Lewis?

  It sounds quite bizarre to us. But did people just genuinely believe that this would really work?

• 15:56Speaker 04

  That it could work, yes. And evidence of that in my mind is the kind of practical hints and tips that you get in some versions of these things. Because they added in elements from traditional Jewish magic as well, which required the performer to wear not only special robes in special colours, but to have the names of God or ceremonial names of spirits being summoned sewn into the garments. And one text says, if you can't afford a set of special robes for every ritual and every spirit and so on, just write the words and the names very carefully

• 16:37Speaker 04

  on pieces of vellum or paper and fasten them inside your robe so that they are touching the appropriate part of your body, depending on which bit of the human body this spirit is linked to. So that gives the impression that the text expects to be used and that relatively hard up people are studying it and training themselves to do this stuff.

• 17:01Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I like the idea that it's giving you budget options for how to perform these ceremonies if you're not the kind of person that can afford the top equipment.

• 17:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, another practical hint is if you look at some of the rituals that look relatively straightforward, that actually in astrological terms. They need quite rarely occurring conditions because I've talked about how, you know, you want a planet on a particular day and everything is going to depend on what zodiac sign that planet is in. But also you don't want your key planet to be in a difficult relationship to a powerful negative planet like Saturn, because that might well hinder your ritual or bring about unintended consequences. Often the position of the moon is important because

• 17:49Speaker 04

  the moon receives the influences of all the other planets and inflects them before they come down to earth and to the practitioner. So again, you want your moon in the right phase and you don't want it in a negative position to your key planet. And if you actually, I'm enough of a geek that I had written this all down and tried to figure out how often combinations of planets like this would occur. And you need to remember that Jupiter, for instance, which is the most powerful positive planet, takes about a year to go through each zodiac sign. So if it's just come out of the zodiac sign that you wanted,

• 18:30Speaker 04

  you're going to wait 12 years before you can do your ritual. So it's not surprising that in this case, I think it's Pica Trics that says, I know if you can't get all of this sorted out, just look for these pair down conditions. And if your client's in a real hurry and it just comes to the worst, just wait for the right day with the moon waxing and give it a shot.

• 18:52Matt Lewis?

  Just have a crack anyway.

• 18:54Speaker 04

  I guess that answers the question of what happened when it didn't work.

• 18:57Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, you could blame maybe not having the perfect conditions for not getting the outcome that you wanted.

• 19:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:02Matt Lewis?

  And given that we tend to think of magic as being considered a bad thing and a feared thing, which I think is much more of an early modern view of magic and the practitioners of magic. And lots of royalty and nobility are keeping these books and involved in these practices. Are there dangers in being caught with these books? Is there such a thing as bad magic? Could you be in trouble for practicing magic?

• 19:24Speaker 04

  You certainly could be. And it would all depend on what people thought you'd been doing with it. We've already mentioned poor old Eleanor Duchess of Gloucester, who In a way, got off relatively lightly, considering that she was accused of trying to have the king bumped off by magical means. She claimed sanctuary in Westminster Abbey and kept on claiming that the last thing she intended was to kill Henry VI, or even to know when he would die, effectively that what she wanted was to know how to become pregnant with her husband. But the witch that she employed, Marjorie Juddamain, she

• 20:06Speaker 04

  was burnt. And the very learned university principal astrologer astronomer priest, Bolingbroke, who was one of the main people accused of actually doing the image magic to get Eleanor what she wanted, he was hung, drawn and quartered as a traitor. So it's not so much owning the magic books as what they think you're doing with them. The famous example of all of this is Pope John the Twenty Second in Avignon in the first half of the 14th century, who seriously believed not only that political rivals in Italy, but also cardinals and bishops

• 20:49Speaker 04

  in his own papal court were trying to use similar kinds of magic to assassinate him. And he has them arrested and questioned and tortured and, in at least one case, executed.

• 21:03Matt Lewis?

  One of the other books that you mention in your book is the Ars Notoria, the magic book that promised instant knowledge, like a cheat code to learning everything in the universe. What was that book and why did scholars kind of risk using it? Because it could be dangerous, right?

• 21:20Speaker 04

  Yes. Again, it seems to be a balance between being able to achieve things that otherwise you couldn't achieve, and the dangers, particularly of contact in this case with demons, that you were opening yourself up to.

• 21:37Speaker 04

  We first get mentions of it in thirteenth century. It maybe can be traced back earlier than that. It circulates, first of all, mainly in Latin. We know a lot about it because of a French monk called Jean de Morigny, who produced his own version, from which demons he hoped had been expelled, because he recorded why he felt called upon to produce a new version of this thing. And it was that he was introduced to it because he was poor and he couldn't afford year after year in a university. He was supported to go to a cathedral school,

• 22:20Speaker 04

  but that didn't satisfy his ambitions. And so, an older scholar said to him, "What you need is this Ars Notoria." And as you said, it's an introduction to all the sort of formal subjects, effectively, that you might study at university, going right up to the top level. And so, with this, in theory, you didn't need to pay your way through university. You just sat with this book and performed your rituals. Now, if you read it, it seems to me you actually still do need support and resources, because as the user, you've got to shut yourself away in a room for several days and nights at a time. And again, you've got to have equipment.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  It's simpler than the stuff we've been talking about, but you still need freshly picked and dried examples of certain types of leaf from certain bushes. You need certain types of water. You need ink with which to write words and then wash them off into your water and things like that. And you need to guarantee that you won't be disturbed while you are going through all of this, ritually preparing yourself, reciting your prayers, then gazing fixedly at the strange images that occupy whole pages of copies of the Ars Notoria. And reciting these almost unpronounceable strings of words and names,

• 23:49Speaker 04

  all of which has to be done with the moon in the right position and the right day of its lunar month. So you've actually got to start your planning in advance so as to get through the preparatory stage. And if possible, have copies of the right university textbooks around you because as well as performing the ritual and gazing at the images for your chosen subject, it helps if you can have open copies of key textbooks in front of you to look at or leave through at the same time. So again, you know, you need to plan at least a lunar month ahead. And sometimes you need the moon

• 24:30Speaker 04

  in the right phase on the right day of the week. So it might be more than one lunar phase ahead. But anyway, John says that he was really enthusiastic about this. It really worked for him to the extent that he actually started teaching it to his sister because she seems to have wanted to be a nun and was encountering even more of the same problems that he had. So as a good and actually quite unusual brother, he starts to teach her as well as teaching her Latin. And they both have these terrifying experiences of nocturnal visits from what are described as pretty clearly effectively demons, which convinced John that this is a very dangerous text.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  He flees for sanctuary into the church and experiences visions of the Virgin Mary, who encourages him to produce his tidied up version with the demons or the danger of demons removed. And much more of the images and text given over to recognizable prayers and copies of it actually have quite recognizable angels drawn on the pages. And yet, his version still ends up being burnt as heretical.

• 25:43Matt Lewis?

  I'm trying to think of students who, you know, revising for GCSEs and A levels and exams and things. And maybe this is a bit of extreme form of revision, shutting yourself away for a month with a load of textbooks and not sleeping so badly that you have visions and all that kind of thing. But he claims it worked for him.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  Clearly it did something to him because he has these terrifying visionary experiences of this kind of monstrous being.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  That appears and threatens him. And then also, at the opposite extreme, he has these inspiring visions of the Virgin.

• 26:13Matt Lewis?

  Which I guess is a weird balancing point for the magic, because you've got people who are taught to be afraid of demons, and yet they're trying to practise magic which will teach them they can control these demons. So you're quite often invoking demons, but trying to control them, which seems really frighteningly dangerous if you've been taught all of your life that demons are Satan's allies, kind of thing. You're toying with some really dark stuff here. If you can't control the demons you summon.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  Yes. One way round that was to say, no, no demons here. I'm dealing with non-corporeal intelligences, which fitted easier into a sort of Islamic worldview than they did into a Christian one. Increasingly, Christian theologians are pretty dubious about this concept. But of course, it was part of Orthodox Christian teaching that angels do not have material bodies. They are effectively disembodied or non-bodied super intelligences, occupying a different level of reality. So the idea that there might be less powerful versions

• 27:20Speaker 04

  of that, who could be invoked by Christian prayer, and who could be controlled by human beings through using the word of God, the hidden and special names of God, that some of these texts claimed to teach you, and by having the names of God embroidered or pinned all over you, and so on. You could dodge the demon issue.

• 27:45Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, but it still seems to have that element of going into battle. You need to be wearing the right armour to protect you and to be able to control. Otherwise, you are going to be at serious risk.

• 27:54Speaker 04

  And in some texts, you actually make yourself almost a kind of physical fortress. There are instructions for going out and having not just a magic circle, but a kind of magic circular building, almost, constructed for you. And you want specially cleansed sand, beautiful, flat paving stones, special stones for making the circular low-level walls of your thing. You construct what's virtually an altar in this. And if you are not a priest yourself... You need the services of a priest to say mass over you in a church and then to come and also chant psalms and perform a mass for you in your sort of magical stone-built circle.

• 28:36Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 28:46Matt Lewis?

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• 29:30Matt Lewis?

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• 31:41Matt Lewis?

  And if we could just move on a little bit to kind of astrology. So medieval astrology, we've mentioned a couple of times, sort of factors into magic and the operation of magic. How different was medieval astrology from what we would recognize as astrology today?

• 31:54Speaker 04

  Not so very different, really. At the basic level of calculating the positions of the planets, entering them into a diagram or chart, and calculating their direction of movement, their speed of movement, and their interrelationships with one another and with the zodiac. I think that's all pretty recognizable. They were dealing in the Middle Ages with an increasing problem of the growing gap between the established calendar and astronomical reality. Because there were very small but real errors

• 32:38Speaker 04

  in the lunar calendar and the solar calendar.

• 32:42Speaker 04

  Built into the Julian calendar, the traditional one. The error in the solar calendar by the fifteenth century actually was not that small at all. It's about ten days. So your traditional calendar, if you relied on that, would be telling you that the sun would move from one zodiac sign to another, still around the traditional day of about twentieth of each month. But astronomy would be telling you that the sun had actually moved into that sign a week or so earlier. And so you needed proper planetary tables, even for the sun, let alone for all the planets

• 33:23Speaker 04

  whose movements are too complicated to go into an ordinary calendar. Because if you're an astrologer, you had to deal then, as you do now, with retrogrades, points when the planet in question seems to stop moving in its usual direction around the earth, stand still, known as station or stationary, then apparently go backwards and then start going forwards again. So it will be in a zodiac sign for much longer than normal. And those are regular, they can be predicted, but only an expert astronomer could do the calculations. And so you needed not only a basic set of planetary tables, but all the rules and regulations

• 34:07Speaker 04

  about when this particular planet will go retrograde, how far it will go, when it will turn back in the right direction. And then you had to recalculate all of that based on where exactly you were located. Because all these basic calculations were made for where the astronomer was located. If you were doing a proper job and being paid enough money to put in the time, you would recalculate for your particular location, or of course, your patron's location.

• 34:39Matt Lewis?

  And how influential is astrology, again, you know, in the big political decisions that are being taken at royal courts and things like that? How much are people relying on astrology? Do we see examples of them making decisions because the stars said it was the right thing to do or a good time to do something?

• 34:55Speaker 04

  Yes, some people were more open about this than others. And it's particularly Italian astrologers who write into their books, almost self advertising claims that they have been employed by the rulers of city-states on things like which dynasty to choose a wife from, or when to get married, or when to start trying for a child if they want the first born to be a boy, and all of that sort of thing. One of them even claimed that while the army of his ducal employer was riding out to battle, he was located on top of a

• 35:36Speaker 04

  tower with a large bell to ring and rang the bell to say when the planets were in the right alignment for the troops to go into battle. Now, how practical that is and how much it could really have been done, I don't know. But certainly the view is that rulers of late medieval, early Renaissance city-states were quite openly consulting astrologers.

• 36:01Matt Lewis?

  You pull out a couple of examples as well in the book of the influence that it had on things like the Battle of Poitiers.

• 36:06Speaker 04

  Yes. And not Christine de Pizan's father himself, he was Tommaso de Pizano, but a man who said he'd been taught by Tommaso claimed that Tommaso had used image magic, literally making wax or plaster images of the human individuals you want to influence. And I think harming them in some way and burying them. In order to make sure that the English army would lose the battle and the French army would win.

• 36:38Matt Lewis?

  But it didn't work on that occasion.

• 36:40Speaker 04

  No.

• 36:40Matt Lewis?

  No, you must have used one of the cheats or or the wrong time of the year or something. It didn't quite work at that time.

• 36:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, that type of magic, the making of wax images of chosen individuals, really only seems to be associated with negative magic. So I don't know that it came up in the book, but in medieval England, as well as the Duchess of Gloucester, who supposedly had an image, a wax image of the young Henry VI made. In England, there's the amazing example of the sort of mayor and burgers of Coventry in the 14th century, who hire a professional magician and his assistant. Because they're so fed up with King Edward II and also with the prior of Coventry, who they think is running the town very badly.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  And they hire these magicians, they hire a house outside of town for them. They pay for their board and lodging, they provide them with materials to make a lot of large images of all of their political targets. And then they decide to hold an experiment to see if it's going to work. So they choose an unlucky citizen of Coventry, baptise one of the images after their chosen citizen and stab it, as you do. And the poor man starts to scream in pain and I think dies. And it's at this point, I think it's the assistant training magician panics

• 38:15Speaker 04

  and runs off to the court and turns what we would call king's evidence. And that's how we know about it, because the case then gets written up in official English records.

• 38:27Matt Lewis?

  And it's striking how often people genuinely seem to have believed that magic had killed that man, that it was a real part of the world in which they lived. I wonder if you could give us a a little bit of an idea as well about what geomancy is, because that sounds fascinating too.

• 38:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, that brings so many levels of things. Together, it's another form of magical ritual that traced its origins supposedly back to the ancient world, in fact, can't be traced back earlier than the Arab Empire. When it started, geomancy, of course, is mancy or divination by earth. And Christian readers knew from reading quite early Christian sources, that was a known form of magic in the ancient world. This, by the time it gets written into books, has got nothing to do with the earth at all. What you need is a supply of pen and paper, or pen and vellum.

• 39:21Speaker 04

  And you make rows of dots in order to generate either one odd dot or a pair of dots at the end of each of your rows. Then you organise those into sets of four, and each vertical set of four, single or double dots, is a character, a geomantic character. In the European version, these are given sort of astrological qualities and characterisations, and linked up with zodiac signs. That wasn't the case in the earliest versions, as far as we can tell. So what you're doing is doing a version of divination by earth, although, as I say,

• 40:05Speaker 04

  you've come a very long way from earth, and doing a kind of DIY astrological consultation, without needing to be an astrologer or pay an astrologer. And it continued to be taken seriously in practice well into the 17th century. Simon Forman, in early modern London, who's mostly famous as an astrologer, actually also practised geomancy. And the person coming to consult would do 16 rows of dots, out of which four sets of four would be produced. And then there are rules, which I tried to set out in the book, though most people who

• 40:48Speaker 04

  read it went, duh, but that was as clear as I could be with this, to generate another set of four, and another set of four, and so on, until you've got 15 or 16 geomantic figures, which have to be arranged in a sort of descending triangle, or it's sometimes referred to as a shield. And that's important, because in this version, each position also corresponds to a point in a horoscope. I don't know if I'm still making anything like sense.

• 41:17Matt Lewis?

  No, no, it's fascinating. It sounds like it's almost like a medieval kind of magic eight ball. You're sort of asking a question of it and trying to get it to give you an answer, a way to behave, a path to take.

• 41:29Speaker 04

  Yes. And if you do the full version with all these sets of geomantic figures, having tried it, I can tell you, it takes quite a long time. And then consulting not only the basic meaning for each of your figures, but what it means on its own in the position that you've given it in your geomantic tableau or shield, and then what all the interrelationships are, that is a lot of interpretation.

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• 42:56Matt Lewis?

  And is there any science behind what is going on there? Is this like an early form of data analysis? Or is it simply random almost?

• 43:05Speaker 04

  It's almost random. I would say that one of the advantages, if you like, of geomancy is that if you have the education, the time and the will, you can do it yourself. There's a manuscript now in the Bodleian Library, which I talk about, which was made for and given to Richard II, King of England. And the idea, which is spelt out quite explicitly in the prologue to this thing, is that he could do a geomantic reading for himself. And the back part of the book, in effect, gives you elaborate versions of each of the geomantic figures that you might cast. And if he wants to, the king doesn't even have to put himself to

• 43:48Speaker 04

  the trouble of doing all that dots that I was talking about, because all he needed to do was close his eyes and put his finger on one of the tabs that run down the outer edge of the book, and he will have picked a geomantic figure. And then if he opens the book at the tab, he will get the meaning of his geomantic figures. You can do yourself a kind of instant reading very quickly. The idea seems to be, if you're taking it seriously, that you, the question asker, are the link between the earth and the planets, because it's important that

• 44:27Speaker 04

  you should really focus and concentrate. And then somehow, the planetary powers that you are receiving, because we're all receiving planetary influences all the time, the planetary powers that you are receiving will make themselves felt and be revealed in the figures that you cast.

• 44:51Matt Lewis?

  And throughout the medieval period, do we see a change in the attitude to magic? Because by the time we get to the early modern period, it becomes something that is increasingly feared, and practitioners of it are people to be wary of, whereas it seems like a few centuries earlier, it was something that the elite were getting involved in too. Does it undergo a change from being this intellectual pursuit to being more like a criminal offence? Or has there always been that divide between good magic and the bad magic that could get you into trouble and maybe even get you executed?

• 45:22Speaker 04

  I think there was, in some ways, a lot of magic unless it was pretty clearly summoning demons. But most magic didn't, as we've been talking about. So it's not so much a case of the magic itself being evil, as what the human beings want to do with it.

• 45:39Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 45:40Speaker 04

  So if it's almost a form of advanced technology for understanding the universe and God's creation and how it all works, there's nothing wrong with that. Universities in the late Middle Ages had university chairs for professors, not only of astronomy, but also of astrology. And it was part of the professional job of those professors of astrology to do wide-ranging forecasts for the whole year ahead. In the case of city universities in big European cities, they would then announce these publicly to public meetings of the great and the good.

• 46:22Speaker 04

  And this is not demonic or magic in a negative sense at all. It's almost what we would call applied science. So my own view, and it's in English history, it's Tabitha Stanwell from Exeter, who's done more on sort of popular versions of magic for the middle and lower classes. But it seems to me that it's the democratization of magic that the authorities are reacting against. The fear is that you don't have to be rich and powerful to have access to magic, but anybody with a bit of cash can go and consult a magician.

• 47:04Speaker 04

  Plus, the lower-level practitioners of magic didn't claim that they had learnt their magic by high-level study. They seem to have used very simple techniques that are nothing to do with all the learned stuff that we've been talking about, involving kitchen equipment like sieves and scissors and shears and stuff like that. And you do strange rituals of spinning a knife or a pair of scissors, or balancing things on a sieve or whatever. The idea being that these people just somehow have inborn magical powers. So we're almost coming closer to the world of Harry Potter, where you're just born special.

• 47:45Speaker 04

  And it seems to be that idea which is feared as heretical, because it goes against so much serious doctrinal teaching. Plus, there is the fear that if this magic might work, well, it's dangerous.

• 48:01Matt Lewis?

  And I guess there's an element of the elite wanting to protect what the elite had access to, you know, they want the power and the information and the knowledge that goes with all of that. And they don't want just anybody to be able to have the kind of knowledge that will tell you, you know, when to make good investments or good marriages or when to win battles and things like that. They want to kind of preserve that. So when that, as you said, becomes democratized, that's something to fear and therefore maybe to criminalize.

• 48:27Speaker 04

  Yes. And there is almost a complete disconnect between all of this and the witch craze, because the witch craze really only kicks off at the very end of the 15th century and builds in the 16th century, goes on into the 17th century. And yet, our famous Renaissance maguses and powerful people and even medium level people like Simon Forman in London carry on regardless. So it really isn't the case that all magic is hunted down and exterminated. It's people who have the bad luck. Really, you have to be denounced as a witch, I would

• 49:07Speaker 04

  say, but I am not an expert on the witch craze. Medieval magic is my thing. Gender does, I think, have a lot to do with it.

• 49:16Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, we've mentioned particularly Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, as a kind of high profile, but we tend to have this image of it being women who are persecuted for magic more often than than men are. In men, it can almost be passed off as this intellectual pursuit, this high minded thing that you're doing, whereas in women, it's always seen as something more dangerous with a less noble motive behind it?

• 49:40Speaker 04

  Yes and no, because Marjorie Georgiame, the professional witch, apparently of I near London, who was employed by the Duchess of Gloucester, she was known as a witch. She'd been consulted by ladies of the court for years. And she'd actually got into trouble and been carted off to Windsor Castle a few years earlier. But as far as I remember, she was simply fined and her husband had to come and pay and promise never to let her do magic again, which she obviously broke because it was obviously a good little earner. So, you know, you could be prosecuted and it was just almost apparently a sort of business

• 50:22Speaker 04

  expense. So as I say, I think there's a difference between magic and witchcraft. Because in full-blown witchcraft, which, as I said, really only starts to take off from the end of the 15th century, what makes that so awful in the eyes of various authorities is that human beings are knowingly and deliberately and willingly consulting with the devil.

• 50:48Matt Lewis?

  It's been fascinating to learn about the kind of interplay between magic and politics, because presumably you could get yourself an awful lot of political power by being considered good at magic, but then magic also becomes a weapon that can be deployed against very often noble women like Eleanor Duchess of Gloucester. It becomes a weapon, a charge that you can lay against them, that they're using magic and witchcraft for nefarious means. So it's kind of this double-edged political sword, almost.

• 51:17Speaker 04

  Yes, but I think, as we've discussed a lot, on the whole, the powerful and the would-be powerful are not practitioners themselves. So if you look at the big scandals, particularly in the French royal court in the 14th century, being caught supposedly employing professional magicians to do harm to your political rivals could get you into political disgrace, and you might have to leave court for a period of time and go and languish in your country estate. But it would be the professional magicians who get tortured and executed. But on the other hand, if you seriously can cause harm to your political

• 51:56Speaker 04

  rival, or simply know what's likely to happen politically in the future, whose star is on the rise, who's likely to be killed in battle, whatever it might be, you can see the attraction of that kind of future knowledge.

• 52:11Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, knowledge is power. Just to wrap up with it, I wonder if I could ask you a couple of quick-fire questions. If there was one medieval magical ritual that you could witness, what would it be?

• 52:23Speaker 04

  I would love to see the full-blown ritual for calling down the spirit of the planet Mercury in a specially-built little room, and with all of the equipment that's described in the manuscript, and having the spirit appear riding on an elephant.

• 52:41Matt Lewis?

  Wow. Is there a spell that you've come across that you would most like to find worked?

• 52:47Speaker 04

  Not really, because I'm just happy in the belief that none of this works, except maybe on a psychological level. I couldn't pick one out for that.

• 52:56Matt Lewis?

  What would you say is the biggest misconception that you most often come across about medieval magic?

• 53:01Speaker 04

  Probably still that it was all so stupid that only the poor and uneducated could possibly be interested in it.

• 53:10Matt Lewis?

  And are there any figures that you've ever come across that you think might have influenced our pop culture perception of wizards? You think of people like Merlin and Gandalf and the way that they look and the way that they behave. Do you come across figures who resemble them?

• 53:23Speaker 04

  I suppose the claims made by some individuals, those Italian astrologers who claimed, as I say, to be able to direct the political decisions and even the military actions of the rulers they were advising. That would be one. And also, I've talked a lot about the sheer quantity of stuff and equipment you would need. So I think descriptions of fictional wizards like Merlin and the range of strange creatures and supplies and equipment and books and things that they need, that would be another thing, I think, that's been influential.

• 54:01Matt Lewis?

  Well, it's been incredible to get between the pages of these manuscripts of medieval magic. And I encourage people to go read your book if they want to find out even more about the magic that was contained within medieval books and the medieval mind. It's been absolutely fascinating to talk to you about this. Thank you so much for joining us, Anne.

• 54:17Speaker 04

  Thank you very much for the invitation and for all those questions. Thank you.

• 54:23Matt Lewis?

  I hope you've enjoyed that chat as much as I did. Anne's book, The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in Twenty Medieval Manuscripts, is available now if you'd like to find out how to access all of the knowledge of the universe from your bedroom. Although, what more could you need to do just that than more History Hit podcasts? There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free.

• 55:08Matt Lewis?

  Head to historyhit.com/subscribe. Let me just see if there's a spell here to encourage you to sign up. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.

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