The Sacred and the Sinister by David J. Collins S.J

Author:David J. Collins, S.J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780271082400
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press

Real and Imagined Magic

The critique could be raised, at this point, that much of what I have described so far pertains not to how actual magical practices were shaped by or reflected broader currents of medieval history, but rather how clerical authorities’ perceptions of such practices were reshaped over time. This is true, and it is an inevitable problem that scholars of medieval magic must confront. Most of the surviving sources that discuss medieval magical practices are hostile ones: condemnatory accounts by theologians, jurists, moralists, and preachers, along with some scattered trials records, mainly from the late medieval period.40 The descriptions of magic that these sources present, from the supposedly pagan-inflected rites of early medieval discourse to the horrific imaginaire of the witches’ sabbath that emerged only in the fifteenth century, can be extremely formulaic. Of course, the history of medieval heresy raises the same problems, and in some ways so, too, does the history of religious orders. Certainly the hagiographies of their leading figures, through which the orders often constructed much of their own identities, are replete with stock formulas of sanctity. Some orders may even have recrafted their own early history in light of later developments and to justify later practices and organizational structures.41

Grundmann confronted this problem when he engaged with the history of heresy, and he certainly knew that clerical condemnations of heretical depravities could not be taken at face value. More deeply, he recognized a formulaic “Typus des Ketzers” that informed clerical accounts and even clerical perceptions of supposed heretical groups.42 Although he never discussed a “Typus des Magiers,” he recognized the applicability of his insights about heretics to later stereotypes concerning supposedly diabolical witches.43 Moreover, in Religious Movements Grundmann suggested that what ecclesiastical authorities constructed as the late medieval heresy of the Free Spirit never comprised a coherent sect, as Robert Lerner later conclusively proved.44 Grundmann’s skepticism did not run so deep with other heretical movements, such as the Cathars, but some scholars now suggest that even the great high medieval heresies existed more as figments of clerical imagination than in reality.45 Other scholars continue to see more substance to heresy’s existence, and I do not intend to venture too deeply into these debates here.46 I merely want to point out that, as the lines between “real” and “imagined” heresies become increasingly fluid, the reasons to bracket off the imagined sect of witches categorically from other heretical sects encompassed in Grundmann’s religious movement become less substantial as well.

In the history of witchcraft, one of Richard Kieckhefer’s early contributions was to show that elements of diabolism in witchcraft accusations emerged only at the very end of the medieval period, mainly in the fifteenth century, and then to demonstrate how those elements were, for the most part, grafted by clerical authorities onto more basic accusations of simple maleficium in the course of early trials.47 His conclusions in this regard have been generally confirmed by subsequent studies of late medieval witch trials.48 Although witch trials typically were driven

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