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Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in 20 Medieval Manuscripts" (Yale UP, 2025)
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Morteza Hatizadeh
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hatizadeh. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers about a recent book that just published with Yale University Press. The book is called the Magic A History of enchantment in 20 medieval manuscripts. Dr. Ann Lawrence Mathurs is Professor of History at the University of Reading. She's the author of Medieval Meteorology and the True History of Marilyn the Magician and co author of Magic and Medieval Society. Anne, welcome to New Books Network.
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Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me.
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Morteza Hatizadeh
Like I told you before we started recording, I'm an enthusiast in the history of Middle Ages. When I saw the title of this book, I was really enthused. Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself and then tell us how the idea of this book came to you and why you decided to write this book?
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Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
Sure. Well, as you kindly said, I'm Ann Lawrence Mathers. I'm a professor of Medieval History at the University of Reading in the uk. And this book came out of the work I've been doing for, I guess, 25 years now on the history of medieval magic and its place in medieval society. And I started it because I was interested in it and I hope that students at the university will be interested in it. And of course, back Then about the year 2000, Harry Potter was a really big thing and that fed into a sort of increased general interest in magic. And it's always for me been magic rather than focusing just on the witch craze. And something that in a general way I find very interesting is the relationship between magic as a very broad term and that focus on witchcraft that led into the witchcrase of the early modern period. The work led me into becoming more and more convinced that magic was around and accepted as a part of life almost across Europe in the Middle Ages. But this book in particular the magic books, comes out of the fact that I just as well as being a fan of magic, I just adore medieval manuscripts and being able to go to an archive or a library and actually sit there with a handmade thousand year old book that you are turning the pages and getting to encounter directly. It's just such a privilege. And I had wanted to bring the two things together.
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Morteza Hatizadeh
I'm glad you mentioned that. About the idea of holding a medieval manuscript. It was a couple of years ago I was doing another podcast about the whole process of creating a manuscript in the Middle Ages. And we tend to think of it as only a book, let's say, but it's not. It's really a technology in and of itself given the amount of work that goes into it. Another.
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Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
Well.
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Morteza Hatizadeh
I'm really interested in the title of the book first. The history of enchantment in 20 medieval manuscripts. The idea of magic is very much misunderstood. For the layman, let's say magic has a different connotation in the Middle Ages. It would be great if you could just very briefly tell us what you mean by magic and enchantment in the context of your work and. And how. I'm also interested in your methodology. 20 medieval manuscripts. I'm sure it was very difficult from all those wonderful manuscripts to focus on 20. I'm interested.
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Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
Apart from Nightmare.
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Morteza Hatizadeh
Yeah, I can't imagine. Tell us about that Nightmare, let's say.
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Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
Well, I mean, where to start? I wanted to get across, if I could, something of the experience of having one of these manuscripts in front of you and as I said, being able to open it and encounter it sort of folio by folio. The idea of enchantment I wanted to bring in because really it's almost at the opposite end of the spectrum of ideas about magic from Witchcraft and True Confessions. Because this book focuses on manuscripts, we are mostly dealing with people in the church and people in the upper classes because precisely for the reason that you said that These books were incredibly labor intensive to produce. The materials were very expensive. A big illuminated manuscript, if you've only got maybe one scribe and one artist working on it, could take a year of skilled work, as well as incredibly expensive materials like gold leaf and ground lapis lazuli and other pigments that were expensive and slow to produce. So, I mean, they get more affordable as the medieval period goes on and as manuscript producing workshops spring up and so on. But even by the end of the period, you're still talking about an investment probably equivalent to buying a big car, something like that. So this is not something that the ordinary person would have access to. And most of the manuscripts I chose because they are special and were made to be almost publicly displayed as display items in high places. These are particularly expensive manuscripts. I also went for Enchantment because it covers a wide range. I mean, there's no claim that there was no magic being practiced or consumed by the middle and lower classes through most of the Middle Ages. But except where it came, unfortunately to the attention of the authorities and legal action was taken or a scandal happened, we really don't know about it. Whereas these manuscripts, which you'll know from looking at the book, cover a very wide range, from more or less, okay, using of the stars to make predictions about very broad and general coming events or harvest and things like that, right up to really complicated ritual magic involving summoning so called spirits, which a cleric or a theologian would have had very little doubt were probably demons in disguise. So it covers, or it's intended to cover a very wide range. And I also wanted it to cover a wide range chronologically. So as well as focusing on different types of magic, each chapter focuses more or less on a different time period and often a different part of medieval Europe. Cause I wanted to show through the use of these manuscripts just how widespread it was and from how early.
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Morteza Hatizadeh
And through all these manuscripts you kind of explore. One of the things you explore is how magic, astrology, divination rituals, and angelic magic, anyhow, even they all were practiced and they were valued by rulers, by scholars, and by the clergy. So I'm keen to know in what way your book sort of challenges that traditional narrative. The medieval magic was just irrational and it was a fringe endeavor, maybe. And another second part of the question that I have is whether magic was confined to the poor or was it also something that in respected intellectual circles it was also pursued.
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Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
Well, I think that's quite tricky to unpack, but I'll have a go. I think there were really almost Two largely separate but slightly overlapping levels of magic. There's popular magic, which involved non learned, non rich people both in the towns and out in the countryside, using materials that they had available, using traditions, using things that they picked up almost from church services. Because of course, church services across Europe through the Middle Ages were in Latin and everybody by law had to go on a Sunday morning. They weren't allowed to work and they had to be present, usually standing up, because only a very few people got to sit down through a church service in this period. So kind of standing up, listening to this chanting and special language that they couldn't understand, but picking up a few phrases at crucial moments and listening to sermons, hearing the names of saints, sometimes readings with the names of spiritual beings and angels and archangels and so on, and kind of feeding that into what they were trying to do. So there's a 13th century preacher's story. I don't know if it's literally true, but it'll give you the idea, which tells of a widow with a small holding. She's a peasant woman in a region of Germany who got into trouble because when the consecrated host, the consecrated bread was put in her mouth during the mass on a Sunday, she didn't swallow it. She kept it in her mouth, got it home and dried it out, believing that it still contained the religious power of being part of the body of Christ. Why she wanted it was she broke it up and she sprinkled it on her vegetable plot because it was being eaten by caterpillars. Her local priests found out about this and convicted her of effectively heresy. Now, to modern readers, that certainly looks like magic. To the priest, it was mostly wrong because it was misuse of the body of Christ and a very serious heresy. It was, it was really a serious crime in religious terms. I think most historians of magic now would classify it, what she was doing, as use of a charm. And in confessor's manuals, again from the 13th century, we hear advice for confessors hearing confessions really for the first time in the Middle ages and the 13th century, from quotes, ordinary people and being puzzled by the strange words and sounds and addresses to unknown beings that they were using over sick people or sick animals and so on to try to heal them. And the priests had clearly been asking advisors what to do, Is this okay? If it's not okay, how is it not okay? And so on. And so you get all these issues about, well, who can put their hands on a sick person and claim to heal by laying on their hands, which is of course Modeled on the Gospels. If they start saying words, is that okay? If the words are in an unknown language or using weird names, is that going into a dangerous territory? And so on. So mostly the priests were advised, okay, these people just don't know what they're doing. Let them get away with a warning. But if they keep doing it, then it becomes a problem. So the concept of magic is very blurry because what people at the time, or what the religious authorities at the time were worried about was really, is it heresy? And magic was not yet specifically defined theologically as a crime of its own. It's when magical practices verge into forms of. Of heresy that it really becomes an issue. And similarly, in secular law, magic was clearly around, though it's incredibly rarely recorded, mostly because a lot of the time it wasn't really a legal problem. Magic becomes a problem for the secular authorities either if it does provable harm, kills someone, makes them ill, or causes a disability, causes economic hardship, that kind of thing, or if the practitioner is a fraud, if they offer or sell a magical service, take what's usually quite a high price, and then the promised outcome is not delivered. So it's harm or fraud rather than magic per se. That shifts, really, as the 14th century goes on, and by the 15th century, we're getting the early versions of witchcraft, where devil worship is coming in and those ideas of harm are being linked up with demons and the devil, and practitioners are starting to be seen as enemies of society now, for a long time, really separate from all that was learned, magic, which is what my book, the Magic Books, is really focusing on. And this is magic as performed in royal and aristocratic and imperial courts, magic as performed by scholars and students in universities. It's all in Latin. It's all written down. It's all inexpensive books, often with beautiful paintings in them. So this is. I mean, almost linking it up with the popular kind of magic that I was just talking about, almost creates a false impression. I think this is very privileged and protected magic until the theological authorities at the University of Paris and in the papal court start to become worried that it's being practiced widely by students. And, you know, it's never a good idea to let dodgy stuff like summoning unknown spirits get into the hands of too many students. Does that cover what you were asking?
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Morteza Hatizadeh
It does, yeah. But as you said, it's quite complex. And I know that I'm asking two broad questions that it's really difficult to. But the idea, like I said, is to provide an overview of different topics you cover throughout the book to our list, hopefully get them to read the book, and especially this one. I mean, apart from the interesting read it is, it's filled with a lot of color pictures of different manuscript, medieval manuscripts. So it also makes it a visually appealing book to read as well. And on that topic, that visual appeal of the book, but let's say of the manuscripts, because these are pictures of the manuscripts. Do you think that the art of producing a manuscript, especially an illustrated manuscript, and that luxury production, let's say, play a role in elevating the status of magic in the Middle Ages in the period you cover?
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Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
I think so. I mean, these books would have been artworks treasures really, in their own time. I don't think they would have had the level of incredibly expensive binding that books of holy scripture would have. They were enclosed in sort of caskets of precious metals and jewels, almost like relics. These books wouldn't be quite like that. But they're clearly intended for open display and they do often claim to be the products of very special learning, going all the way back to biblical times and using figures like King Solomon or angels named in the Bible and so on to legitimize the magic. So I think they were intended as display objects mostly. They're not very obviously thumbed. You can tell when a manuscript looks a little bit more. Not exactly homemade, but sort of slightly scruffy, when it was a practicing magician's or an individual scholar's personal property because the vellum or parchment isn't so beautifully smooth and white. There aren't the big full page expensive paintings, and there's far more little annotations in the margin and mucky thumbprints and so on. The books, mostly in the magic books, are really kind of art and display objects and treasures. But what I'm saying, I think, is precisely for that reason. They show that this is not some kind of irrational or marginalized or illegal activity. They're displaying the specialized knowledge and patronage of their very privileged and powerful owners. I mean, I can also go on at length, but you probably don't want me to, about how to make parchment and vellum and how to make the paints and how to apply them and how long it takes, because I am a real nerd about all that stuff, but it's not really magic.
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Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
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Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
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Morteza Hatizadeh
Terms apply if you're interested. I'm sure our listeners are interested to know about it as well, so if you could briefly talk about that, that would be great.
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Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
Well, you will know having gone into it yourself, but if you go right back to the early chapters of this book, the Carolingian Empire and then Anglo Saxon England, most manuscripts, certainly the ones that survive, were made in monasteries because they were the places where all the different material resources and human skills that were needed were brought together. Because, you know, you literally had to start with the skins of maybe 100 animals, depending whether we're talking about a fairly large veal calf to make vellum or a sheep to make more ordinary parchment. And you know, the animals have got to be skinned, the skin's got to be treated with lime so as to get rid of the subcutaneous fat and the hairs that treated skin has got to be stretched and scraped. You've got to do all of that without distorting it or causing rips or tears. Then you've got to smooth it down with pumice. You've got to cut it into folios. You've got to rule those out. You've got to decide on the size of your book, how many gatherings of folios it's going to have, how many scribes you can afford to have working on it at one time, what range of pigments you're going to have used, how many artists you've got available on and on. So even relatively modest looking books like the Prayer Book or Handbook of the Anglo Saxon Abbot that I talk about would really be very special monastic products. The big change I think comes in the 12th century when the economy takes off, the population takes off and you get new towns, big cities, universities, and wealthy international merchants and elite people with I guess what we would call money to spend, though it's not necessarily literally money. And then you get far more professional scribes and artists working in the courts of people like Alfonso the 10th in Spain or the Emperor Frederick II who ranged from what we think of as Germany down to southern Italy. And that's when the price of the manuscript starts to fall. But universities were not for everybody. I mean, there is no doubt in the chapters of my book that mostly they are dominated by male writers, male scribes and male owners. That's why when I could, I focused on women like the sister of one of the learned monks who is taught the magic by her brother John. Or in the 15th century, at the royal court of France in Paris, the famous writer Christine de Pizan, who talks at length about the King Charles V of France and his special interest in magic books and astrology.
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Morteza Hatizadeh
Can you talk about the role that divinatory texts in monastic manuscripts play in, let's say, what do these texts tell us about the role of magic in monastic life, especially in Anglo Saxon England? And you have several examples. Would be great if you could give us an example as well.
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Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
Well, we don't know how they were used and I mean it's that both the Anglo Saxon example and the 13th century manuscript from St. Albans that was almost certainly produced by the well known chronicler and writer and artist Matthew Paris are kind of classic examples of how magic just got written out of history. For a long time, people historians, book historians and other groups of medieval historians really couldn't find what seemed to them like a satisfactory explanation for the presence of these little divinatory texts in manuscripts. So they just ignored them. I remember coming across Matthew Paris collection of divinations when I was doing my PhD on medieval manuscripts and asking about it and I was, oh, he just did it some rainy week to entertain his fellow monks. You know, no need to worry about this, nothing to see here, let's move on. You know, and it's a bit the same with the Anglo Saxon prayer book because it contains stuff that's really not only surprising from a theological point of view, but also from a practical point of view. I mean, what is the dean and an abbot of a monastery doing with a text which can tell you the future life chances of your unborn baby? Not a big issue for monks, you would have thought. And again, other ones that use various techniques for picking out what day of a lunar month is good or bad for particular types of occupation. Now, in fact, at the time that one, the so called lunary about the days of the lunar month would as likely have been seen as scientific knowledge as it was likely to be seen as magical. Going back to what I was saying before about the fluidity and the kind of overlapping boundaries, and my argument in the book is that the reason that this abbot has these texts for making predictions of various sorts, a lot of them very secular in their concerns, copied into his prayer book, is because one of his functions was as a royal counselor and advisor. And a king that he attended on, or would have been expected to attend on, was the one known to us as King Canute. And Canute had only converted to Christianity when he became king of England. Back in Scandinavia, he and his father Sweyn were practicing pagans, as almost everybody was, and so Christianity was something new to him. And my hypothesis can't really prove it, but we do know that the settlement of pagan or semi pagan Vikings down the eastern side of England in the period running up to and into the early 11th century does seem to have brought back a revival of paganism. And we've got sermons being preached in English about what paganism is, how dangerous it is, all sorts of pagan stuff that you shouldn't be doing, some of which overlaps with practices that would now be seen as magic. And suggesting to me anyway that pagan religious advisors offered this kind of advice and predictions about the future as a means of guiding rulers or trying to help them in some way. And this is a kind of Christian competition pushing at the boundaries of what's okay, but presumably staying within them, since there's no attempt to hide this stuff in the manuscript and offering much the same kind of information about coming events and coming dangers. Matthew Parris stuff is more complicated where he got it all from Israel, quite tricky to unpick. People who've looked at his divinatory text, which, it's a thing of beauty, it's in the Bodleian library and you can look at it online, have identified them as versions of divinations with a very long history that can be traced back as almost all these things can to regions of the Mediterranean and centuries old already. How Matthew got hold of them we don't know. But his copy is a thing of beauty, and it suggests that his book was intended not just to convey information, but to be a sort of divinatory tool in its own right. Because you come along with a question and you pose your question to the operator of the book, very likely Matthew himself, since the book ends up in the collection of St. Albans Abbey. And either by rotating a special wheel inside the binding or maybe by casting a dice or something, you are guided through from asking a question to identifying the source of the answer that you want. So you might pick. You want an answer from birds, the realm of the birds which were believed because they occupy the air, to be more in touch with planetary influen. Or you might decide you wanted an answer from a figure from the Old Testament or from a famous prophet or philosopher like Aristotle or somebody. So that guides you to a particular part of the book. Then you find the closest match for the question you want to ask. You do your randomizing turning of the wheel or casting of the dice or something, and then it takes you through about four stages of being guided through different bits of the natural world or different bits of the imaginary fortress of a planet or something like that, until lo and behold, you get an answer which actually matches the question you originally asked. So if you say, I think I would like to go on pilgrimage to Rome, is it a good idea to set off now? Will this be a fortunate thing to do? Lo and behold, after all those complicated stages, what you get at the end is, yes, this is a good time to set off, or no doom is predicted. Stay home. And I think it says a lot about the impact of the Enlightenment and the sheer strength of rationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries that all of this stuff was just kind of too embarrassing to be mentioned.
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Morteza Hatizadeh
Yeah. And that's why they were sort of ignored or written out of history, let's say.
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Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
Yes. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's perfectly acceptable or believable, apparently that uneducated people out in the provinces could be doing all sorts of weird stuff, but highly educated scholars and politically successful rulers indulging in this stuff, that's very challenging. Until quite recently.
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Morteza Hatizadeh
Another part of the book that I was really interested in, and again, to me, it's sort of debunking some of those myths around magical divination. What I was interested in, that tension, there was a tension between theological condemnation of divination, and it's also practiced by Clerics and scholars in medieval England. So how did it work? How did they navigate the risks of, let's say, practicing divination?
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Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
I guess that the answer, like a lot of dangerous behaviorists, they thought the gains or the potential gains were worth the risk. I mean, the most surprising example may be of the ones that I talk about in the book is the material that comes from Canterbury cathedral in the 12th century and the time of Thomas Becket, and the fact that they're in a very expensive and incredibly scholarly copy of the Book of Psalms, complete with translations into different languages, different versions of Jerome's translation of the Psalms, complicated illustrations and so on. At the back, for no very obvious reason at all, but close to the full page self portrait of the man who says he was the scribe of this thing. We have the first known Latin text on how to read palms, closely followed by a shorter Latin text on doing divinations by giving number values to the letters of people's names or the days of the week. And I think it cannot be a coincidence that Becket's friend and supporter, John of Salisbury, who later became a bishop at Chartres in France, records in his book of political advice, his Polycraticus, that an unnamed high official did the wrong thing in consulting a diviner and a palm reader. And lo and behold, it worked out very badly. I mean, a lot of that book by John of Salisbury is warning about the dangers of magic. And he goes into quite a lot of detail, really, about different sorts of magic that seem to have been around in the court of Henry II of England at the time. But again, the traditional view of historians to this thing has been, oh, no, you know, this wasn't really happening in Henry II's court. John is getting it all from theological sources and from classical history, because, of course, it is recorded that there was a lot of magic going on in the late Roman Empire. So it's again, really quite recently that the presence of, of those divinatory texts at the back of this Book of Psalms from Canterbury Cathedral Priory has been taken seriously and that John of Salisbury's evidence has also been taken seriously. I mean, he does put a little personal anecdote into that book too, which helps to explain why he is very alert to the dangers of magic, because he talks about when he was a schoolboy and he and a couple of other pupils were being educated by a priest who inducted them into a ritual involving a container of water and the use of oil for reflection and so on. And the idea is that young children who are still innocent can look at the reflections and see images which will give insight into future events. And John sort of with relief records that he couldn't do this and was sent out of the room. His friend, who was more successful did see things. But the dangers of this for John were very forcibly demonstrated by the fact that later that pupil as an adult suffered ill health and I think went blind. So, you know, John is saying, look, this stuff really is dangerous, but if you've got to make a decision about I don't know when to send an army into the field, when to undertake a major political or economic undertaking and you're a ruler and this really matters, or even if you're an aristocratic landowner and you want to know whether it would be a good investment to try to found a new town on one of your estates, you can see the appeal of being able to get an insight into the likely outcome of what you want to do and when to do it.
- [37:46]
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Morteza Hatizadeh
I'm also interested to know about the magical program of Alfonso X of Castile and in what ways his magical programs blend science, religion and politics.
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Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
Yes, he is fascinating because he quite openly put together a collection of books and scholars and specialists who worked on astrology, astronomy, ritual, magic, spirit summoning, and wove magic, or what we would think of as magic and astrology, into his law code, his history of Spain and everything. And not only that, but it was multicultural. He employed Arabic translators, Jewish translators, to create almost a kind of multicultural, though Christian magic. And I think the suggestion is he himself, the king, would not have had the time to perform some of these rituals, because the astrological calculations could take days, the ritual itself could take all day and all night and so on. But the idea seems to be that he was putting this range of materials together with their lists of resources, the precious stones that you need, and so on, so that it could indeed be put into practice. And presumably that is because he thought it would support his own political and imperial ambitions.
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Morteza Hatizadeh
There is one manuscript that I'm interested to know more about, would be great if you could talk about it, tell us why it was controversial, and that's the text called Ars Notoria. Why was it, first of all, so appealing to medieval scholars and students, and it circulated widely among them, despite its controversial nature. Why was it controversial and why was it popular among students and scholars?
- [41:10]
Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
The appeal to scholars was very direct, really, because it offered speeded up, in some cases, very speeded up knowledge of a very full range of all of the learned subjects you could study at medieval universities, which could take you at least up to 10 years, I guess, if you really wanted to work your way through all of them, as well as requiring a lot of money and support, because then, as now, students had to pay fees, they had to support themselves. And it was generally very rare for somebody to be able to do that, or in some ways, to need to do that. But anyway, the Ars Notoria claimed to be a kind of elaborated insight into the divine knowledge granted to the biblical King Solomon. And the text has prefixes which claim that this gives you insights into the knowledge of King Solomon, but it will also, through the intervention of various sort of religious and supernatural intermediaries, mean that by carrying out all of these very special and complicated instructions, you can gain, as I said, very speeded up. It's tempting to say instant, but it's going to take you a few days and nights of study and a longer period of preparation. So it's not quite instant, but the idea of being able to be on top of a university course of study that would take years in maybe a month or so, has to be attractive. And we know that it was because we have the personal testimony of a French monk known as Jean of Morigny, who records that when he was young he was very keen to study, and although he had some schooling, possibly paid for by a monastery or religious institution, he couldn't afford to be a full time long term student. And it was a fellow academic who recommended the book called the Ars Notoria to him. The text possibly originates somewhere in north Italy at the end of the 12th century. It's really, you can't pin it down, but that would make sense because that part of Italy was where the earliest medieval universities, kind of lingering versions in some ways of Roman institutions were found. Anyway, Jean goes off and tracks down this book, gets a copy and dedicates himself to following its instructions, only to discover that it is very dangerous because he has terrifying experiences, even more terrifying than the ones he'd had earlier in his life. And the same thing happens to his sister when he teaches it to her, along with teaching her the Latin, that you need to read the text. He thinks that he can produce an improved and safe version of this book, sanctified and encouraged by visions of the Virgin Mary, and so produces his own cleaned up version with all the more worrying and possibly demonic elements like unusual names and nonsense words in strange non existent languages and so on, mostly stripped out of it. But in fact, even though that was very welcomed at first, and he went almost on teaching tours to other monasteries and was famous for this, it's his version which ends up being condemned as heretical solemnly in Paris in the next century. The expert on Jean and his work on the Hours Notoria really is Claire Fanger. So, you know, I would recommend people to have a look at what she's written if they want to know more. But it's a fascinating text and it starts with instructions whereby you have to collect the leaves of certain plants, certain liquids, inks of certain sorts, write things, dissolve them, swallow them, lock yourself up in a room, wait for a particular day of the moon, which is a certain number of days before when you will be able to carry out a particular religious ritual or go to church and so on. So hence, as I say, it's complicated. And then this is another case of a book like Matthew Paris, Divinations only even more so, where the book itself becomes a kind of physical intermediary to the supernatural levels of knowledge and existence that you're trying to contact. Because when you're trying to learn a particular art, you have to have the book in front of you, you have to have memorized prayers and names and be able to recite them. You have to be fixing one of its really strange diagrams. You kindly said about the illustrations in my own book, and there are some there from a copy of this text, one of the earliest that we still have, with illustrations which show you how mysterious these diagrams are. They're not really representational, nor simply geometrical forms either. So you have to stare into these whilst reciting. And also, if at all possible, have textbooks for the art that you're trying to learn open in front of you as well. So, academically and mentally, it's a really complicated thing to do, and you would have the physical presence of the book and its images and its text, but you're doing all these other things and under very complicated conditions at the same time. So I guess maybe that helps to explain why an individual like John had such an intense experience while using it. Does that make sense?
- [48:03]
Morteza Hatizadeh
Yes. Yeah, it does. And it's quite fascinating text. And I didn't know about it myself before reading your book. Like, I'm not a professional medievalist, so I'm an enthusiast, so I was glad that I came across that in the book. But again, as I said in the beginning, I think one great. There are a lot of great things about this book. Well, one of them is that whole debunking about enchantment and magic and how widely and how different, of course, it was conceived in the Middle Ages from what we. We actually think. So I guess, in a way, you're putting it back in the center of medieval history, because it has been sort of written out in history, as you mentioned earlier.
- [48:46]
Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
Yes, yes. I mean, as I said before, you know, I'm trying to show. Well, it really picks up from that earlier book that I co wrote with my colleague Carolina Escobar Vargas, who's based in Medellin in Colombia, that if you look almost anywhere in medieval society, you will find references to or practices of some form of magic, or at least what we defined as magic. Now, the complicating thing being that there isn't any one really successful definition of magic that you can apply to all these things, because, as I say, it's so slippery. Almost everywhere you look, they're using more specialized terminology. And there's not a simple match between the terminology in Latin that the religious lawmakers and moral authorities and so on are using and the terminology in vernacular languages like English or French or German. Sorry. So it's a very important but sort of elusive area, and you can sort of see why everybody breathes a sigh of relief when we get to the 15th century and the stereotype about witches emerges, because here we go, we've got straightforward legal definitions. The secular legal authorities and the religious legal authorities are coming together. We know what we're looking for, we know what to do about it, and off it goes. And so it's much more straightforward for historians to know what they're looking for and how to define it.
- [50:21]
Morteza Hatizadeh
Yeah. And another question I have is about the rise of magical crimes. Let's say, what do they tell us about shifting attitudes towards magic?
- [50:36]
Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
I think, again, I find this fascinating because it's the 14th century where these magical crimes really start to become prominent in chronicles to some extent. In England though there it's more in the 15th century. In the 14th century, it's just incredible how much high level magical crime there is in the royal court of France. And I use the term magical crime deliberately because I'm avoiding the term witchcraft, even though some historians use the term witchcraft for all magical crimes. But I'm clinging to my view that witchcraft is a late medieval thing and it's separate from these vaguer, more fluid types of magic and their definition. But you look at the French royal court in the 14th century, it's just incredible how many people are quite openly hired as practitioners of magic to come and cure King Charles VI when his mental illness or disturbance, we don't precisely know what it was, starts to become obvious and is a real political issue now, sometimes. It's pretty clear that accusations of use of magic, hiring of harmful magicians, are being used as a political tool. There's a growing conflict which is going to erupt into civil war going on between rival aristocratic dynasties within the French royal family. And you can see that they're weaponizing accusations of magic to disgrace prominent members of the opposing dynasty. And a victim of this is Valentina Visconti, who has the disadvantages of being female and foreign. And accusing her of using magic to enchant the king because he's showing considerable preference for her, is a way of disgracing not only her, but her husband, who's a royal duke, and sort of putting him out of contention for political power. He hits back against the Duke of Burgundy. It all turns very nasty. Magicians get burnt alive, but other magicians are quite openly hired by royal officials because it is believed that they have at least a fair chance of curing the king or finding something important that needs to be found out or something like that. So, again, practices that you would expect to be clearly criminal and magical aren't, unless either it all goes horribly wrong or somebody chooses to issue an actual direct criminal accusation. So I guess then even more than now, something could be perceived as questionable. But it only becomes a legal issue if somebody uses their power and status to insist that it is. Then the magicians tend to be the ones who are punished. The elite people suffer through what I said, loss of prestige, being exiled from court and so on, but it's the professional magicians who get burnt alive.
- [54:14]
Morteza Hatizadeh
And one. Sorry, go ahead.
- [54:17]
Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
I was only going to say so I know. That's another how long is a piece of string Answer. But it really is like that.
- [54:24]
Morteza Hatizadeh
One final question I have is about Christine du Pizon and how she used astrology. She was one of the of women who nowadays would call feminists. She wrote about women's rights in a way, in that sense. How did she use astrology to support her political and also her literary goals?
- [54:44]
Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
Well, she's fascinating because it's increasingly well known now, but still not, I think, entirely known that her father was a practicing astrologer and very skilled, and he was headhunted effectively by the king of France, Charles V, as a royal advisor, physician and astrologer. And Christine herself came to the royal court when she was still a child and grew up there as part of her family and of course, as a woman and someone who'd never had a formal church education. She had to be extremely careful. But you can see I kind of pick my way through some of the things that she wrote. You can see that she knows quite a lot about astrology and astrological medicine as well, and sees it as a very powerful tool for insight and understanding and wisdom, and in some ways goes out of her way. In her biography of Charles V, which was a public commission, she was commissioned by the successor, the next king, to write this biography, which was remarkable in itself for a woman. She goes out of her way to praise Charles V for his own study of astrology and, to a lesser extent, magic. Mainly she praises him for his study of astrology, and she says that it's almost a duty of a responsible king to consult astrologers. And she's not naive about this. She recognizes that different astrologers might come up with different answers. But she sort of says, well, that's because it's complicated and they used different techniques and it's why a responsible monarch should consult several and listen to their wisdom. And other political writers in the court or attached to the court at the time, expressed different levels of concern about all of this and kind of advise kings that they shouldn't consult astrologers on forbidden matters. And they themselves have got better things to do than spend too much time studying astrology. But none of them sort of directly attacks Christine herself. So I think she was accepted as a supporter of certain uses of astrology. Almost linking right back to what I was saying about the Anglo Saxon Court of Canute and how the learned Abbott used his sort of acceptable versions of divination to answer very related questions. You know how to make a particular important decision. What's the likely outcome of doing this? Is there anything favorable about putting a particular plan into operation and so on. So I think as a woman, she would have to be very careful about having two open political or military ambitions. I mean, we all know what happened to Joan of Arc, but it's interesting how she does stand up for the value of astrology, and that seems to be accepted.
- [58:13]
Morteza Hatizadeh
Before we come to the end of this interview, I'm keen to know if there is any other book or project you're currently working on that you might expect sometime soon.
- [58:24]
Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
Well, I'm hoping to do more work on Alfonso X and his open sort of sponsorship and use of magical expertise, because some of the books that were actually made for him and contain quite complicated ritual magic, as well as instructions about the supernatural powers of stones and stars and so on, still survive in various libraries. But most of the texts haven't been translated into English. One has the ritual magic collection called the Picatrix, but a lot haven't. So I'm hoping with my colleague Carolina Escobar Vargas, to do more work on that and to make those texts available and look at how they were produced and how they might have been used by Alfonso and his courtiers.
- [59:18]
Morteza Hatizadeh
Wonderful. Thank you very much, Dr. Ann Lawrence Mathers, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us on New Books Network. Really, really enjoyed talking to you and I strongly recommend this book to our listeners. The book we just discussed was the Magic A History of Enchantment and 20 Medieval Manuscripts, published by Yale University Press in 2025.
- [59:41]
Professor Ann Lawrence Mathers
Thank you very much for the invitation and for listening to me riding my hobby horse about medieval magic. Check.
- [60:02]
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