Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Monks and Their Magic Texts at St. Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury
2 Natural Magic: The Basilisk and the Lodestone
3 The Liber vaccae: Magical Uses of Monstrous Creations
4 Image Magic: Harnessing Power in the Harmonious Universe
5 The Liber de essentia spirituum: Magic, Revelation, and Fellowship with Spirits
6 The Ars notoria and Its Monastic Audience
Epilogue John Dee, St. Augustine’s Manuscripts, and Renaissance Magic
Appendix 1 Translation of the Glossulae super Librum imaginum lunae
Appendix 2 Translation of the Liber de essentia spirituum
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Sophie Page is a lecturer at University College London, UK.
“In addition to exploring manuscripts and their contents in detail,
Magic in the Cloister is original in its focus on a known group of
men who owned and read these books and perhaps tried out some of
the rituals in them. This is unusual because many manuscripts of
magical texts have been lost, or we do not know who owned them. The
book therefore presents much new information about the readers of
magical texts. It also approaches this issue from a new angle.
Sophie Page shows that magical texts could appeal to people who
were part of the religious establishment (monks in a wealthy
monastery) and who had a monastic vocation.”—Catherine Rider,
University of Exeter
“Magic in the Cloister offers a fascinating picture of learned
monks reading and even putting into practice magical texts that
were kept in the library of their monastery. St. Augustine's,
Canterbury, offered not only a haven for prayer but also a
laboratory for occult activity.”—Charles Burnett, The Warburg
Institute, University of London—School of Advanced Study
“There is something thrilling for the researcher about working in a
library for the first time, familiarizing oneself with its
contents, both their riches and their lacunae, figuring out its
organizational principles, stumbling upon evidence of past users
and important benefactors, and then by ever more extended use,
discerning the patterns and trajectory of the library’s development
over time. . . . As Sophie Page demonstrates in Magic in the
Cloister, the thrill is not limited to a summer spent in a
scrupulously maintained Fachbibliothek at a twenty-first-century
university institute, but can also be won through a more
constructed visit to a library in the distant past.“The library in
question in Magic in the Cloister is the late-medieval library of
the Abbey of St. Augustine in Canterbury, especially its collection
of learned magic. . . . Magic in the Cloister is a stimulating
work: its research is meticulous, its insights compelling, and its
prose limpid. For this reviewer, the first visit to the library of
St. Augustine’s was thrilling indeed.”—David J. Collins, S.J.
Catholic Historical Review
“Page contextualizes licit and illicit forms of magic and the
reasons for their classification in the medieval mind, focusing
upon magical practice in the monastery. Each chapter is thoroughly
researched enough to be of interest to the specialist in the field
but also provides enough details regarding the texts and concepts
in question to appeal to the non-specialist as well.“. . . Magic in
the Cloister is well worth the read, particularly for the academic
audience who is coming to these texts for the first time.”—Michael
Heyes Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent
Religions
“Sophie Page’s insightful and absorbing contribution to the study
of Western learned magic brings together many strands that comprise
‘approaches to the medieval universe’ to focus on the place of
magic within it; and in so doing, she demonstrates how the monks at
St. Augustine’s were able to incorporate the study of magic into
their traditionally Christian view of the world.”—Elizabeth
Wade-Sirabian Preternature
“Page’s work marks a significant contribution to an emerging area of
the study of the history of magic, one that has the potential to
bridge a gap between what we know of magical texts, and what we can
infer about magical readers and practitioners. As such, it has
earned a welcome place in my own magical library at home.”—Nancy
Mandeville Caciola Renaissance Quarterly
“Engages from the start. . . . Delivers beautifully clear guidance
through a complex and technical body of material.”—Anne
Lawrence-Mathers Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies
“An important contribution to the recent wave of scholarship on the
history of European magic. . . . Page’s portrayal of monasteries as
centres of magic puts us in a much better position to assess the
complicated institutional context of ‘magical’ heteropraxy.”—Egil
Asprem Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies
“All histories have limits, but the core of this study is full of
rich detail and judicious analysis. Page deftly illuminates not
just the contents of a major library of medieval magic but also the
intriguing intellectual and spiritual contexts in which it took
shape.”—Michael D. Bailey American Historical Review
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