When all this is said, there is a general agreement among historians that official attitudes to magic underwent a significant change in Western Europe during the decades around 1300, because of the impact of the elaborate and ceremonial variety that first appears in late antique Egypt.58 This was imported during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries through the translation of Greek and Arabic texts, and represented a serious challenge to Christian orthodoxy. For one thing, it represented a new form of magic to medieval Western Europeans, unprecedented in its elaboration and sophistication and disproving the long-cherished expectation that continued condemnation of the traditional, simpler kinds of magical remedy would gradually eradicate resort to them or at least confine it to the poorest and least influential levels of society. On the contrary, the newly arrived texts of complex magic relied heavily on transmission of written figures and formulae, and those subsequently developed from them often demanded knowledge of Christian liturgy and clerical conventions of behaviour. Hence they appealed to the most educated, wealthy and sophisticated social groups, and above all to the churchmen who should have been the guardians of religious orthodoxy. While texts that openly required the invocation of demons would always remain outside the likely bounds of officially acceptable practice, those that claimed to manipulate the natural forces of the universe, and above all the influence of heavenly bodies, were far less easy to condemn out of hand. Even the sub-class which recommended the employment of demons sometimes made a direct and reasoned riposte to orthodox teaching by claiming that the proficient magician could compel and control evil spirits and so force them to work for benevolent ends, so striking a resounding blow for Christianity. For two hundred years, learned authors in Western Europe conducted a debate over how far forms of the new complex magic could be assimilated into orthodoxy and be used for human benefit. By the early fourteenth century, however, the majority of them had swung firmly against such a rapprochement and reinstated the Augustinian orthodoxy that all magic was inherently demonic, whether its practitioners were conscious or not that they were working with demons.
This development accompanied and overlapped with another, which was inspired largely by the appearance of widespread heresy in Western Europe between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries and the increasingly savage, and successful, Catholic counter-attack upon it, using crusade and inquisition as its main weapons: it was between 1224 and 1240 that burning came to be adopted as the standard mode of execution for heretics, as it had long been for magicians. They were routinely portrayed as devil-worshippers as part of that counter-attack, and this strategy encouraged an outbreak of political trials between 1300 and 1320 in which prominent individuals and organizations were accused of worshipping Satan in secret, and often ruined as a consequence. King Philip the Fair of France became the most ardent practitioner of this technique, using it to attack a bishop who was one of his own councillors, a pope and then the crusading order of the Knights Templar, and it was continued under his successor Louis X. In England, the bishop of Lichfield was accused in 1303, and suspicion of magic seems to have quickened at a local level, as a woman was banished from Exeter in 1302 for entertaining notorious magicians from South Devon, and in 1311 the bishop of London ordered measures to be taken to curb the growth of fortune-tellers.59 Both developments, the condemnation of magic and the escalation of political trials for devil-worship, were accompanied by a growing fear of the power of Satan in the world; which may itself have been generated, and was certainly reinforced, by the twin new threats posed by large-scale heresy and ceremonial magic.60
In this manner the scene was set for a direct and comprehensive attack on ceremonial magic, as demonic, launched by Pope John XXII between 1318 and 1326. He was already inclined to use the charge of malicious magic against personal opponents, having had a bishop burned as a result of it in 1317 and going on to deploy it again thereafter. In 1318 he appointed a commission to root out ceremonial magic from his own court at Avignon, and in the 1320s four other trials of alleged magicians were held in different parts of France, some directly encouraged by the pope: churchmen were accused in all of them, although sometimes assisted by lay practitioners. In 1326 John decreed that ceremonial magic had grown to the proportions of a plague, and excommunicated all concerned in it.61 Magic was thus at last identified directly with heresy. His actions seem to have had knock-on effects, as the use of magic as a political charge returned to nearby royal courts, once in that of England and twice in that of France between 1327 and 1331; while a woman was burned in the south-west German province of Swabia in 1322 for using a consecrated communion wafer in a magical rite.62 Pope John’s influence reached as far as Ireland, where one of his protégés became bishop of Ossory and provoked a sensational and subsequently notorious trial at Kilkenny in 1324–5. Twelve people were accused, of whom the most prominent was Alice, Lady Kyteler. The charges arose out of a feud within a prominent local family, and became the subject of a power struggle between different factions in Church and state among the English settlers in Ireland. In the short term the bishop won this, and the accused were convicted of being ‘heretic sorcerers’63 who abandoned Christianity to worship demons, and gained from them the ability to obtain their own desires, which included the injury and murder of selected human victims. Some of them, including Lady Alice, escaped by fleeing, and others were absolved upon doing penance, but one woman, Petronilla of Meath, was tortured into confession and then burned to death, the first person in Ireland to suffer this fate for heresy.64
In 1331 the English royal council ordered a hunt for magicians in London, and three goldsmiths were caught in the act of a magical ceremony in the suburb of Southwark: one was a semi-professional, hired by the others, and he and his main accomplice were remanded in custody while their bishop was consulted about whether their actions were heretical.65 The bishop concerned was that of Winchester, whose jurisdiction extended to Southwark, and the case seems to have triggered a wider crackdown on magic in his diocese, where two more trials were held, over the next six years, of villagers who had sought or provided magical aid. The punishments were confined to whipping, however, while the Southwark magus was exiled.66 The next pope, Benedict XII, had himself been a notable inquisitor, and an avid hunter of heresy and magical practices, and in 1336–7 he took a personal interest in legal cases involving magic in various parts of Italy and France.67 At about that time an Italian professor of theology, Bartolus of Sassoferrato, redefined the ancient terms for child-killing nocturnal demonesses, striga and lamia, to mean ‘a woman who renounces Christianity, and deserves death’.68
There was, however, no sustained momentum behind this sequence of persecution. Benedict seems to have been as interested in ensuring that justice was done in the cases in which he involved himself as in pursuing the accused, and in one instance he directed fresh investigation of a charge of using image-magic to kill John XXII, which the latter had believed but which Benedict thought could be fraudulent.69 The pope who followed him in 1342, Clement VI, was apparently not concerned with the issue, while the French and English royal families entered a period of internal unity and stability. No local tradition seems to have been established of a popular fear of magic-workers or a crusade against them by inquisitors or secular magistrates, and so prosecutions seem to have died away at all levels of society. This makes their revival from the mid-1370s all the more remarkable. It was not led by the papacy, which in 1378 ruptured into the Great Schism, forty years in which rival popes strove for supremacy with the different Catholic states supporting one or the other. One of the last pontiffs before the division occurred, Gregory XI, was asked in 1374 by the chief inquisitor for France for renewed powers to repress ceremonial magic, which was allegedly rife and attracting priests: he thought that no such authority remained to him from the earlier period. Gregory gave them, but only for two years.70
There is more purchase for the idea that renewed political insecurity readmitted the charge of magic to high-level dirty poli
tics, which put it back into the limelight. In 1377 England found itself with a senile king besotted with a mistress, and a child heir. The mistress was promptly accused of using spells to gain the old king’s love. When that child heir succeeded, one of his ministers was accused of demonic magic after that man’s fall and execution. The young king concerned, Richard II, was subsequently deposed, inaugurating a long period of turbulence in English dynastic politics which culminated in the Wars of the Roses; and five out of the six reigns between 1411 and 1509 were marked by at least one accusation against somebody, usually a member of the royal family, of using magic to try to kill the current monarch.71 In the 1390s the reigning king of France went mad, and this was blamed on witchcraft, especially as the resulting power vacuum engendered a particularly vicious and prolonged struggle between other members of his family in which the same charge played a prominent part; as it continued to do when that struggle led to the collapse of France into civil war during the following decades. By 1398 it had already provoked the University of Paris into reaffirming the doctrine that ceremonial magic, as assisted by devils, constituted heresy, and further discussions and condemnations of it by intellectuals associated with the warring parties followed.72 The duke of neighbouring Savoy duly claimed to uncover a magical murder plot against himself in 1417.73
Most of this renewed royal, aristocratic and scholarly interest seems, however, to have followed and become meshed with a new hostility to magic at a local, and especially an urban, level. In 1376 the inquisitor for Aragon in Spain, a Dominican friar called Nicholas Eymeric, issued what was to become an immensely influential handbook for the definition and detection of heresy.74 This made the first unambiguous declaration that ceremonial magicians were to be regarded, hunted down and punished as heretics. Even Eymeric ruled that some of the simpler practices of service magicians which did not require the conjuration of spirits, such as reading palms and drawing lots, were not to be the concern of inquisitors, but in practice the new drive against magicians, of which his manual seems as much a symptom as a cause, sometimes seems to have elided the two. In 1390 the Parlement of Paris declared sorcery to be an offence within its own jurisdiction, and proceeded subsequently to try two women from the city for attempting to work love spells, a third who had offered a range of magic to customers and fourth who had tried to use it against her abusive husband, and burned them all for devil-worship.75 The same thing happened in the same year at Milan to two women who had sold magical services to clients, services which they claimed to have learned from the superhuman ‘lady’ whom they followed by night.76 A confession of diabolism was likewise wrested from a woman at Geneva in 1401, who had claimed to consult a spirit in order to help clients find stolen goods and protect livestock.77 There were no cases of magic in the secular courts of Florence between 1343 and 1375, but three convictions and two executions between 1375 and 1412: all seem to have been of people who had practised it for their own ends or offered to perform it for a fee.78 The same courts at Lucca tried nobody for magic between 1346 and 1388, yet convicted three between 1388 and 1415, two of them foreigners offering services for hire.79 The element of diabolism appeared occasionally in cases in both cities. In London, people who offered magic for hire were punished in the 1390s and 1400s, and the bishop of Lincoln received a royal order to do the same to all in his diocese in 1406.80
The reasons for this upsurge in accusation and prosecution, across Western Europe and at different levels of society, may not be possible to discern confidently in the present state of knowledge. Michael Bailey has noted the number of treatises published between 1405 and 1425, by French and German scholars, which applied demonological theories to simple and mundane spells and charms; and related these to a broader move among churchmen to a practical and pastoral, rather than a cosmological, theology.81 The groundswell of such a movement may have helped create the conditions for the renewed persecution of magicians, though the texts concerned are all too late to have played a part in starting it. It is easy to believe that most of the people accused of practising ceremonial magic actually did so, because many examples of it have survived, which contain rites and spells, both to help the practitioner and to hamper or injure enemies, similar to those cited in the court records. It is also quite credible that some practitioners would actually have invoked demons, as those surviving texts of ritual magic sometimes contain instructions on how to do so; the presumption, of course, being that the magician would be constraining the devils concerned to his or her own will.82 When a Greek woman tried at Lucca in 1388 is recorded as summoning infernal spirits in the names of God and the Virgin Mary, to aid in rites to gratify her clients, there is no paradox in the statement: she would have been using these holy names to gain power over the demons concerned.83
What is much more in doubt is that any of those tried in this period actually worshipped Satan or his lesser devils, as some were convicted of doing. For the charge of heresy to stick to magicians, this is what they had to admit. Norman Cohn made a convincing argument that no widespread sect of Satanist magicians existed.84 It is considerably harder to determine whether or not individuals, or even small groups like that around Alice Kyteler, forsook Christianity to give allegiance to the Devil or a devil. It would have been against the whole tradition of ceremonial magic, as expressed in its known texts, to do so; but the existing evidence is not adequate to suggest any final answer to the problem. What it does strongly suggest is that some of the magical practitioners who were accused claimed to have relationships with spirits, as helpers or servants, which those interrogating them turned into demons; but how far this explains the charges of devil-worship in general is, again, hard to decide.
There is, on the face of things, no reason why the upsurge in official attacks on magic at the end of the fourteenth century should not have subsided as those in the early part of the century had done. Instead it blended seamlessly into what turned out to be the beginning of the early modern European witch-hunt. In 1409 one of the contending popes in the still persistent schism, Alexander V, sent a decree to the inquisitor general whose territory covered the western Alps, ordering him to proceed against new forms of deviance which practised heresy, usury and magic there. The definition of magic included the elaborate literary kind, divination and peasant superstitions: so if the groups that practised them were thought to be new, there is no real evidence that what they did was regarded as novel.85 The document was probably sought by the inquisitor himself, and there is nothing out of the ordinary about it: its treatment of magic fits into the general crackdown of the age and is a papal equivalent to (for example) the order sent to the bishop of Lincoln, so that the pope concerned was belatedly following current trends rather than leading them. What makes it more significant is that the inquisitor in question was Ponce Feugeyron, a Franciscan who less than three decades later was to be involved in some of the earliest witch trials of the early modern kind.
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