Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England

Across five meticulously written chapters drawn from over 1,100 remedies spanning more than 800 years, Katherine Storm Hindley's excellent first monograph builds toward its final sentence: “Users both medieval and modern—soldiers on their way to battle, travelers in unfamiliar lands, expectant mothers, farmers with sick animals, victims of theft, patients of all kinds—believed that the power of charm language could literally change their world” (p. 257). Indeed, what John Miles Foley defined as “word-power” in The Singer of Tales in Performance (Indiana University Press, 1995) permeates texts dedicated to healing, protection, and all manner of well-being in medieval England and beyond. Hindley's Textual Magic contributes importantly to the burgeoning field of medieval health and healing in two directions: first, in narrowing her scope specifically to written speech acts (what she terms “textual magic”); and, second, in expanding her analyses to encompass both early and later medieval periods of English-language history.In treating “textual” charms, Hindley is not referring simply to remedies that are preserved in writing upon vellum (which would encompass virtually the entire surviving corpus), but more specifically—and interestingly—to a smaller subset of common remedies “whose efficacious words must be written down in order for the charm to perform its function” (p. 18: emphasis added). Hindley works deftly across diverse languages (Old English, Middle English, Latin, Greek, and Irish) and writing systems (Roman, Cyrillic, runic, and even hieroglyphic), making this book an invaluable resource for comparative research. Hindley's work promises to be immensely valuable in facilitating folklore research within the field of medieval studies, less for its subject of “magic” (a deeply fraught term that Hindley never directly defines or fully unpacks) than for its consistent attention to variants of traditional remedies and formulae, its focus on the complex interface of orality and literacy, and its creative exploration of performance and performativity.The introduction's subsection, “Charms, Literacy, and ‘Elite’ and ‘Popular’ Culture,” will likely interest folklorists. Its discussion of orality and literacy somewhat oddly begins and ends in the 1980s with Brian Stock's Implications of Literacy (Princeton University Press, 1983) and Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy (Routledge, 1982), overlooking more recent and relevant work, such as Mark Amodio's Writing the Oral Tradition (University of Notre Dame Press, 2004) or Heather Maring's Signs That Sing (University Press of Florida, 2017). Nonetheless, Textual Magic productively and generatively complicates “modern assumptions about charms” (p. 7) by attending to their infinitely varied and complex routes of transmission. Hindley astutely notes, for instance, that “spoken charms certainly circulated orally—a mode of transmission which unfortunately leaves no trace—but they were also sometimes recorded by university-trained physicians and surgeons” (p. 7).Chapter 1 argues that “charms, and written charms in particular,” had the capacity to “straddle the boundary between sacred and profane, acting both as earthly medicine and, sometimes, as conduits of spiritual power” (p. 34). This chapter's numerous close readings treat examples spanning the full spectrum of medieval English healing, such as a tenth-century remedy for fever found in Bald's Leechbook, a late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century blood-staunching remedy in which “Veronica” is written on the forehead of the afflicted, and a fourteenth-century childbirth remedy that directs women to drink the text of the Pater Noster dissolved in a mixture of water and wine (p. 50). Chapters 2, 3, and 4 in turn treat the book's subject chronologically: before 1100, 1100–1350, and 1350–1500, respectively.Hindley's argument emerges most clearly and convincingly in chapter 4, where she observes that by the later Middle Ages, “English had become a common language of power in spoken charms,” that “the types of efficacious texts that were recorded also became more comprehensible to a greater number of users,” and that “the rise of lay literacy” (particularly urban literacy) corresponded to suspicions surrounding “unknown words and familiar characters” (p. 241). The book's approach is somewhat less effective in chapter 2, which collapses almost 900 years of medical history into a single discussion, as opposed to the more precise and focused arguments in subsequent chapters. While Hindley's work in isolating and identifying points of connection across the early and later medieval period is one of its greatest assets, unqualified applications of such categories as charm, prayer, and liturgy in periods that did not always make such distinctions risk obscuring important differences in how verbal healing was conceived in pre- and post-Conquest England.The underlying premises of the book's later chapters are more compelling in part because the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts that Hindley analyzes explicitly invoke the same genre categories that Textual Magic employs, such as a “charme de seinte Susanne” and a “charm for theuves” (pp. 161, 196; emphasis added). The unifying word “charm” of the book's subtitle, however, is unattested in English until 1300 (Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, June 2025, s.v., charm). Thus, as a genre category, the term does not map nearly as readily onto the early medieval period, as Hindley occasionally notes. Nevertheless, Textual Magic remains deeply invested in such categorical distinctions as what counts as a charm, what counts as oral or written performance, and who counts as a doctor. Similarly undeterred by such work as that of Karen Jolly on pervasive liturgical influences in Old English healing traditions, Hindley “restricts the term ‘liturgical’ to charms that incorporate a full mass” (p. 136). Such choices as cross-listing the Old English galdor, a multivalent word frequently applied to healing incantations, with the much broader notion of “divination,” risk further undercutting the book's own admirable efforts to work against “the term's modern connotations of magic and superstition” (p. 91). But these misgivings are slight, and my observations about quantification and categorization would not even be possible had Hindley not been so admirably clear and transparent in her methods. Many scholars would (and have) glossed over such choices, making them difficult or even impossible to recognize, much less critique.As a testament to its thoroughness, Textual Magic includes close to 150 manuscripts in its appendix of Manuscripts Cited. Hindley acknowledges, however, that still “more examples can undoubtedly be found elsewhere” (p. 189) and eagerly invites future analyses of additional texts. One such addition might be the Harley 6258B, which includes twelfth-century versions of the Old English Herbarium and the Medicina Quadrupedibus, an extremely rare example of a post-Conquest copy of a pre-Conquest text.Hindley's approach throughout is thorough, direct, and, most importantly, refreshingly honest. The 26 boxes scattered throughout the text are immensely valuable for both teaching and research purposes, not the least because Hindley, unlike in many editions that make silent modifications, clearly and transparently denotes every manuscript emendation and offers a clear rationale for every dicey choice in translation. Hindley's work provides a welcome model of integrity in editing, translation, cataloging, and analysis. Given the crucial importance of design elements such as text formatting, photographs, and inset text boxes, the University of Chicago Press has created the best kind of digital edition: one that retains all of the book's visual information. In these ways and many more, Textual Magic offers an exemplary research model for students and scholars of medieval literature and folklore studies alike.