Download PDF | ( Oxford Historical Monographs) S. Ravi Rajan Magic And Impotence In The Middle Ages, Oxford University Press (2006).
269 Pages
Preface
I first began to wonder about the relationship between sex and magic in the Middle Ages while reading Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan as an undergraduate. However, it was only when I began to examine the canon law relating to magic as a cause of impotence (at the suggestion of David d’Avray), that I thought of turning my initial curiosity into a serious research project. This eventually became a Ph.D. thesis (Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages, University of London, 2004). As I worked through this material, and later through the theological and medical texts and confession manuals that discussed the subject, I noticed that they contained a surprising amount of information about what looked like popular magical practices. Moreover, most of this information had not previously been noticed by historians of medieval magic, and could only be found in manuscripts or in early modern printed books.
Much work on medieval magic has tended to focus either on the origins of the early modern witch-hunts or, more recently, on the transmission and impact of the Arabic magical texts that were being translated into Latin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Popular magic, by contrast, has been relatively neglected, and the sources for it are scanty and often difficult to interpret. In this book, I have tried to add to this body of sources by publishing the information about popular magic that can be found in legal, theological, and medical discussions of magically-caused impotence. I have also examined how much the academically-trained authors who wrote about impotence magic can really tell us about popular magical practices, and I argue that they can tell us a great deal. Although they also had other concerns, for example about Arabic magical texts and about the powers of demons, many writers recorded popular magical practices relatively accurately. This was especially true in the thirteenth century, when a wider interest in the pastoral care of the laity brought many churchmen into contact with popular beliefs to a greater extent than in earlier periods.
Acknowledgements
I have accumulated many debts of gratitude both while writing the original thesis and while rewriting it as a book. David d’Avray supervised my thesis, and also provided numerous helpful suggestions during the rewriting process. The task of writing it would not have been nearly so enjoyable without his many stimulating thoughts and continuous enthusiasm. Peter Biller and Charles Burnett examined the thesis and made many valuable comments both about points of detail and about overall presentation. Two anonymous readers for OUP made further perceptive comments. I am also grateful to Peter Heather, Lea Olsan, Sophie Page, Miri Rubin, and Sam Worby for commenting on various chapters of the thesis or book. Janet Nelson and Caroline Oates gave advice on specific points, and audiences at the Institute of Historical Research in London provided helpful feedback. My fellow Ph.D. students at UCL and elsewhere, in particular Emma Beddoe, Sally Dixon-Smith, Marigold Norbye, and Theo Riches listened and offered much advice. Chris Jones offered hospitality in Paris.
Librarians at several institutions have been invaluable to my research, in particular at the British Library, UCL Library, and the Warburg Institute.
The Arts and Humanities Research Board funded my Ph.D. research at University College London and provided extra resources for a research trip to Paris. The Graduate School and the History Department at UCL provided funds to attend the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds in July 2003. The charity Grain d’Espoir provided accommodation in Paris at short notice. I am also grateful to the Max-Planck-Institut fiir Geschichte, the Mission Historique Frangaise en Allemagne, and the British Centre for Historical Research in Germany, who jointly organized a British-French-German summer school on “The Construction of Identities in Medieval Society’, held in Gottingen in September 2000; and to the Volkswagen Foundation who financed it. Most recently, much of the rewriting of the thesis was done during a Research Fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and I am grateful to my colleagues there for providing a stimulating and supportive environment.
Some of the legal history material in Chapters 4 and 7 appears in a different form in “Between Theology and Popular Practice: Medieval Canonists on Magic and Impotence’, in Boundaries of the Law: Gender, Geography and Jurisdiction in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Musson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
Finally, I am also very grateful to several non-historians for their continued interest and support: Laurence Bassett (who always managed a good-humoured answer to the question, ‘Your girlfriend’s studying what?’); Emma Crowhurst and Louise Ellis; and my family, especially my parents.
Introduction
MAGIC AND IMPOTENCE
‘It happened once in Paris that a certain sorceress impeded a man who had left her so that he could not have intercourse with another woman whom he had married. So she made an incantation over a closed lock and threw that lock into a well, and the key into another well, and the man was made impotent. But afterwards, when the sorceress was forced to acknowledge the truth, the lock was retrieved from the one well and the key from the other, and as soon as the lock was opened, the man became able to have intercourse with his wife.”*
This story, told in around 1216, illustrates the link between magic and impotence as it was most commonly presented in the Middle Ages. The belief that magic can make a man impotent in this way has existed in many societies and many periods of history. It appeared in ancient literature, was widely feared in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in places as far apart as France and Russia, and in some areas has persisted into modern times.” Anthropologists have also found similar ideas in Sudan, Ethiopia and the Middle East.3 It is not surprising that the belief is so widespread, because impotence is a mysterious complaint which can come and go for no obvious reason. It also has a psychological component, so that a man can be impotent with one woman but not with another; and in cultures with a strong belief in magic, a man who thought that he had been bewitched could well have been affected by his own anxiety.
Although the belief that magic can cause impotence is widespread, the sources are exceptionally rich for late medieval western Europe because in this period the subject found a place in three university disciplines: canon law, theology, and medicine. In the years around 1150, magically-caused impotence was mentioned in the Decretum of Gratian, a work that became a basic canon law textbook, and in the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which became the set text for teaching theology in medieval universities. Canon lawyers and theologians wrote commentaries on these texts for the rest of the Middle Ages, and so were forced to discuss magically-caused impotence, alongside many other questions. In medicine, magically-caused impotence was first discussed in detail in the Pantegni of Constantine the African, a medical compendium of the late eleventh century that was mostly translated from Arabic. The Pantegni did not receive commentaries in the same way as the Decretum and the Sentences did, but it circulated widely and was imitated by later medical writers. The Pantegniwas also the main source of a short text describing various ways of causing impotence by magic and curing it, sometimes entitled Remedies Against Magic. Both works were edited from four manuscripts and two sixteenth-century printed editions, and discussed in detail by Gerda Hoffmann in 1933,4 but more manuscripts have been found since so I have produced a fuller edition and list of manuscripts in Appendix 1.
These works were produced in medieval universities or by authors who had been educated there, but magically-caused impotence also appears in other sources that reflect the concerns of a wider range of people. Narrative works such as histories and saints’ lives occasionally contain information about what their authors claimed were real cases of impotence magic, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries records survive of several court cases in which people were accused of causing impotence. These cases are listed in Appendix 2. Pastoral manuals summarize the canonists’ and theologians’ conclusions for priests and friars engaged in the pastoral care of the laity, and so can tell us which information was deemed to be useful for this audience. Surviving magical texts contain a number of rituals that they claim will cause impotence. Finally, there are a few examples of impotence magic in fiction, such as in the late twelfth-century chansons de geste, Raoul de Cambrai and Orson de Beauvais, and the thirteenth-century Icelandic works Njal’s Saga and Kormaks Saga.> All of these sources give a different perspective on impotence magic from that of the university sources. They often say more about the circumstances behind accusations of impotence magic, and about ways of causing or curing the problem.
Taken together, these sources contain a substantial body of information relating to magically-caused impotence. They tell us about magical practices and who might be thought to use them, and about learned attitudes to these practices. In each of the three academic disciplines, it is possible to trace in detail how ideas about magically-caused impotence developed over time, and to examine the reasons for these developments. However, the existence of the other sources that refer to cases and practices makes it possible to do more than simply write an intellectual history of the subject. By comparing the academic sources with the more practical ones, it is possible to analyse the relationship between academic writing on magically-caused impotence and the world outside the universities. Was impotence magic a rare occurrence that medieval academics discussed simply because it appeared in their set texts, or was it a widespread reality? Did magical practices affect academic discussions of magically-caused impotence and, if so, how?
Magically-caused impotence can thus be used as a case study to explore the relationship between ‘popular’ and ‘learned’ culture. The questions asked above fit into a wider debate among historians of the Middle Ages, especially historians of medieval religion, about how great the differences were between learned and popular culture, and how far sources which were produced by learned writers can tell us about popular culture.° On the one hand, Eamon Duffy and John Bossy focus on the beliefs and practices that were shared by medieval people of all social levels to argue that popular religion was not radically different from the elite variety.” For other historians, the relationship between the two is more complex. Peter Burke argues that until the eighteenth century, learned writers shared the culture of the rest of the population, butalso had another, learned, cultural tradition which most people could not access.§ Alan Bernstein describes learned and popular culture as different ends of a spectrum, along which different sources can be situated in different places.° Aron Gurevich and Alexander Murray agree that some sources are more ‘popular’ than others, arguing that because works like sermons and pastoral manuals were designed to address popular concerns, they can tell us about those concerns.!°
Questions about the relationship between learned and popular culture have also dominated much recent work on late medieval magic, because historians have looked at the Middle Ages in order to find the origins of the early modern witch trials. They have shown that the early modern image of the witch who flew on a broomstick, worshipped the devil at meetings called sabbaths, and inflicted all kinds of magical harm on her (or, less often, his) neighbours had deep roots in both learned and popular culture. Norman Cohn and Richard Kieckhefer argued persuasively in the 1970s that the image of the sabbath and the devil-worshipping witch was developed gradually by learned lawyers, inquisitors, and theologians during the later Middle Ages, as these writers responded to changing ideas about demonic power and to the existence of magical texts which really did call on demons. Once magic was seen as devil-worship, it became associated with heresy, and existing stereotypes of heretics were then applied to magicians (such as the idea that they held secret meetings and orgies, and sacrificed children).!!
Cohn and Kieckhefer were arguing against an earlier view popularized by the Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who argued that what judges interpreted as devil-worship was in fact a surviving pagan fertility cult, and they did so very successfully. However, historians remain interested in the relationship between witchcraft and popular beliefs, and have recently emphasized how the confessions of suspected witches resulted from a process of ‘negotiation’: “The question indicated the kind of answers required, but the details were supplied by the accused, drawing on a common stock of stereotypes.’!2 Carlo Ginzburg has taken this idea furthest, arguing that the image of the witches’ sabbath originated not only in learned fears of a secret sect, but also in a very widespread popular belief that certain people acted as shamans, and had ecstatic experiences during which they flew and talked to the dead.!3 Most historians do not go this far, however. Gabor Klaniczay, Gustav Henningsen and Wolfgang Behringer have explored the possible links between witchcraft and shamanism more cautiously, and their works suggest that the relationship between the two was both complex and geographically variable.'4 Recently, Hans Peter Broedel has approached the question of interaction between popular and learned ideas about magic in a different way, by focusing on the issue of magical harm. He argues that one of the best-known witchcraft texts, Malleus Maleficarum, was successful precisely because it drew heavily on popular beliefs about harmful magic.!5
The question of harmful magic points to another historiographical debate that is relevant to magically-caused impotence: the relationship between medicine, magic, and religion. In the early modern period, a wide range of healing techniques might be used to combat illnesses that were believed to have been caused by magic, and medieval medical discussions of magically-caused impotence offer a similar picture. Some of these techniques might look ‘religious’ or ‘magical’ by modern standards, but historians have recently begun to ask how medieval people viewed practices that to us seem irrational. For example, Lea Olsan and Michael McVaugh have recently examined the use of prayers and charms in medieval medical texts.!
The sources that discuss magically-caused impotence thus add a new dimension to the history of interactions between popular and learned culture in several fields. They present a body of sources that have for the most part not been studied in detail before. They also span a number of genres so that, for example, the way in which theologians interacted with popular beliefs can be compared with the way in which medical writers did. Taken together, these sources show us how interactions between popular and learned culture varied between disciplines, over time, and according to the interests of particular writers. In some cases concerns about magically-caused impotence arose from the intellectual climate of the time and the books that individual authors had been reading: for example, some theologians cited magical texts when they discussed metaphysical questions about demons. More often, however, writers were interested in how the belief in impotence magic functioned in the world around them. Many discussions were driven by the legal problems posed by cases of impotence magic and, above all, by the interest of certain churchmen in reforming popular beliefs and religious practices.
This link between reforming churchmen and learned discussions of impotence magic meant that many authors mentioned magical practices that they thought their readers might encounter in the world around them. As early as the ninth and eleventh centuries, many of the first authors to discuss the problem in detail did not draw significantly on surviving earlier sources, and claimed instead to have encountered cases of impotence magic. Real practices again became an important source of information in the thirteenth century, when the church began a drive to teach the laity more about the Christian faith and enforce orthodox practices. This pastoral movement led writers of confession manuals, canon lawyers and, to a lesser extent, theologians to record information about impotence magic that they or their colleagues had heard in confession or in the church courts. This flow of information from the pastoral movement tailed off in the fourteenth century, but in the fifteenth, a further drive towards pastoral reform, combined with new fears of devilworshipping witches, brought a new wave of information about practice into learned discussions of magically-caused impotence. This is especially true in medical texts, which had not previously shared the other sources’ interest in reforming lay magical practices.
DEFINITIONS OF MAGIC
So far I have talked about ‘magic’ and ‘magically-caused impotence’ in general terms. However, the question of what these terms mean is central to many of the issues in this book. For a modern historian the question is doubly complicated because the term ‘magic’ can refer either to the various medieval concepts of magic, or to the modern analytical concepts which have been debated by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists of religion since the nineteenth century. At some points medieval and modern concepts overlap, but at others they do not. It is therefore necessary to disentangle some of these concepts, in order to establish which phenomena are covered by a history of ‘magic and impotence’.
I will begin with the medieval concepts. Most medieval writers from the twelfth century onwards had a very clear concept of the phenomenon that I have termed ‘magically-caused impotence’. This concept was originally formulated by canon lawyers, and was followed by the theologians and authors of confession manuals. The term that they used was usually maleficium, a Latin word that could refer to any kind of crime, but that often denoted the causing of harm by deliberate but mysterious means. The influential Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (d. 636) spelled out that these mysterious means involved the invocation of demons. Thus Isidore’s malefici, so-called ‘because of the magnitude of their crimes’, ‘shake up even the elements, disturb human minds, and without any drink of poison kill merely by the violence of a spell . . . For, by summoning demons, they dare to set them in motion in order that each one might destroy his enemies by evil arts. They also use blood and sacrifices, and often touch the bodies of the dead.’!7
When they discussed maleficium in the context of impotence, however, medieval canon lawyers were concerned with something more specific. They began with what they called ‘natural impotence’, impotentia naturalis. This kind of impotence had an inborn, physical cause such as a deformity of the genitals or an imbalance in the body’s constitution. Opposed to this was ‘accidental impotence’, impotentia accidentalis, which was inflicted on a person later in life. This category was subdivided into castration and maleficium. Maleficium was thus used to denote impotence that was caused not by an inborn defect, nor by a subsequent physical injury, but by a non-physical means such as locking a lock and throwing it down a well, as in the example quoted above. Consequently, non-physical methods might be required to solve the problem, and most canonists recommended prayer, almsgiving and other devotional exercises. The earliest medical discussion of the subject, in the Pantegni of Constantine the African, used the term maleficium in a similar way, to denote impotence that was inflicted by non-physical means like putting substances under the couple’s bed, in their house, or by a road where they would walk.
This concept was used very consistently by late medieval authors but, as will be seen in Chapters 2 to 4, it was not fully articulated before the twelfth century. The Church Fathers, whose views of both marriage and magic influenced medieval writers profoundly, do not seem to mention that maleficium can cause impotence. As will be seen in Chapter 2, St Augustine admitted that impotence might come and go mysteriously, but he saw this as a punishment for Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden and did not mention any other cause. By contrast, some early medieval writers do mention that impotence could be caused by non-physical, mysterious means, but they do not clearly distinguish this condition from related phenomena such as love- or hate-magic. Chapters 3 and 4 will discuss how a few writers between the ninth and the eleventh centuries began to make that distinction, and how their views became accepted in law, theology, and medicine.
Although the concept of ‘impotence caused by maleficium was very widely accepted from the twelfth century onwards, a number of writers did depart from it in one of two ways. Firstly, a few medical writers offered alternative, physical explanations for forms of impotence that most writers termed maleficium. Secondly, writers in all disciplines sometimes used alternative terms to describe what most canonists termed maleficium. Most common was sortilegium, which had originally referred to lot-casting but by the twelfth century included a much wider range of practices; the section on ‘Sortilegiun’ in Gratian’s Decretum included divination, amulets, incantations, and more.!8 Other terms were factura, which could refer to any man-made object, but could also refer particularly to magic, and veneficium, which had originally meant poisoning, but as early as Roman times had come to mean causing death by any clandestine means and from there was extended to any form of magic.!9 However, when medieval writers used these terms in relation to impotence, they referred to the same phenomenon as maleficium, that is, impotence caused by non-physical means. Some writers admitted that the terms were interchangeable: for example, the thirteenth-century canonist Hostiensis said when discussing impotence that ‘this maleficium is called sortilegium or jactura .?° Thus, despite these variations, medieval concepts of magicallycaused impotence were remarkably consistent.
When it came to cures for magically-caused impotence, however, things were more complicated.?! Indeed, from the late twelfth century onwards, writers in many academic disciplines were engaged in a lively debate about how certain kinds of cures worked and whether it was legitimate to use them. Unlike the concept of magically-caused impotence, which began with a specific phenomenon and then attributed this phenomenon to occult causes, definitions of magical cures were based on a general definition of magic that went back to St Augustine. This definition focused on the source of power that was believed to make a given practice work. A practice might rely on natural causes (however the writer defined these), or on the power of God (which would make it a miracle). If it did not rely on either of these causes, medieval theologians argued, then the power behind it must come from demons. In a section of his De Doctrina Christiana that was widely quoted in the Middle Ages, Augustine described these demonic practices using the terms superstitio and magicae artes.22 However, from the thirteenth century onwards, some writers also recognized another kind of magic: natural magic. This worked by means of hidden or ‘occult’ forces, which could not be explained but were nonetheless believed to be natural; the classic example was the power of the magnet to attract iron.
The definitions of magic summarized above dominated medieval discussions of cures for magically-caused impotence, and of other subjects connected to magic. They had the advantage of being clear and comprehensive, but they also had weaknesses. In particular, they did little to help churchmen decide whether any particular practice relied on God, manifest natural causes, occult but still natural forces, or demons. Nonetheless, they provide a good starting point with which to approach the subject, because they focus attention on what medieval writers thought was important.
In addition to these medieval concepts, it can also be helpful to consider some of the definitions of magic used by modern writers. A wide variety of these have been put forward since the nineteenth century, often contrasting magic with religion. According to these definitions, magic is sometimes assumed to work automatically, in contrast to religion which supplicates a supernatural being; or it is thought to have individual rather than communal goals; or it can be seen simply as a pejorative term used to label certain religious beliefs and actions as deviant.23 Other modern writers have attacked the whole concept of magic, either by denying that any universal definition of magic can be applied to all societies, or by arguing that magic cannot be distinguished from religion at all.24 These definitions are useful because they can offer new ways of thinking about historical sources, and suggest patterns that may not have been obvious to the authors of those sources, but seem to have existed nonetheless. For example David Gentilcore, in a study of religion in early modern southern Italy, has argued that despite the ecclesiastical authorities’ conviction that there was a strong distinction between magic and religion, the evidence of popular practices can be better understood if both are seen as part of a single ritual system.?5
In this study, I will use the term ‘magically-caused impotence’ to refer to the phenomenon described above that medieval canonists called ‘impotence caused by maleficium . When discussing medieval attitudes to cures, however, it is useful to bear in mind both medieval definitions of magic and the modern ones that draw attention to the characteristics that procedures on the borderline between magic, miracle, and nature might share. For example, the argument that ‘magic’ is a pejorative term that is used to criticize the rituals recommended by certain groups of people, can help us to understand why some canonists defined certain cures as ‘magical’. Gentilcore’s idea that both magic and religion can be seen as a single system can also shed light on some of the cures for impotence that draw on Christian rituals and scriptures, which can be found in medical texts. In addition to ‘magic’, I will use the term ‘witchcraft’ to describe the crime which became the focus of witch trials in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. As outlined above, although many witch trials began with allegations of harmful magic, witchcraft in its full sense was more than this, involving devil-worship and flight to the sabbath.
PLAN OF THE BOOK
The subject matter of this book falls into three parts. The first, dealing with the period up to the end of the twelfth century, is discussed in Chapters 2 to 4. This period saw the emergence of a concept of ‘magically-caused impotence’ that was distinct both from other forms of impotence and from other kinds of magic. In the ancient world, magic that caused impotence featured in literature but except in these literary works, it does not usually seem to have been clearly distinguished from other forms of magic that caused love or hate. During the early Middle Ages a handful of writers, prompted by their observation of magical practices and by the gradual development of marriage law and medicine, singled out impotence magic for special discussion. This concept of impotence magic was developed further in the twelfth century, when it was incorporated into academic works of canon law, theology, and medicine. These twelfth-century works were often driven more by the need to harmonize contradictory statements found in earlier texts than by concerns about magical practices, but they determined where and how impotence magic would be discussed for the rest of the Middle Ages.
Chapters 5 to 9 form the main focus of the book, covering the period from the late twelfth century to the end of the fourteenth. In this period academic discussions of impotence magic reached new levels of sophistication, thanks to two wider developments in the intellectual and religious history of the time. The first of these was the translation of magical texts from Arabic into Latin, and Chapter 5 will outline what these texts said about causing or curing impotence, and discuss their impact on learned attitudes to magically-caused impotence. The second development was the pastoral movement of the thirteenth century. This had an impact on confession manuals, canon law, and theology, and I will discuss this in Chapters 6 to 8. In Chapter 9 I will compare these sources with contemporary medical texts, which also discussed magically-caused impotence but were not affected by the other sources’ pastoral concerns.
The third and final part of the book (Chapter 10) covers the first half of the fifteenth century, when new concerns about witchcraft affected writers in many genres, but especially in medicine. Although the belief in magically-caused impotence persisted after that date, I have decided to finish the study there because the history of magic in the late fifteenth to eighteenth centuries is very different from that of earlier periods. The records of witch trials and the inquisition, and learned writing about witchcraft and magic, provide a great deal of evidence and have attracted a correspondingly high number of historians. It would require a second book to do justice to what this material says about magicallycaused impotence, but the articles by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Kevin Robbins cited in note 2, above, and a recent book on witchcraft and sex by Walter Stephens?® suggest some of the interesting ways in which it can be used. Other sixteenth-century sources might include the famous case of Martin Guerre, who remained impotent with his wife for about eight years before being cured by having four masses said and eating sacred hosts and special cakes, or the votive mass to cure victims of magically-caused impotence that seems to have appeared at this time.?7
Other questions could also be asked about the medieval evidence for magically-caused impotence. For example, I have only touched on its implications for the history of gender and masculinity, and these could be discussed in more detail, as they have been for other periods by Christopher Faraone and Pierre Darmon.?8 Instead, the story told here is about the interaction between learned and popular views of magic, and about the various factors which determined that interaction. In focusing on the pastoral movement of the thirteenth century, my emphasis is different from that of the historians who look to the Middle Ages for the origins of witchcraft. Although the rise of witchcraft did affect discussions of magic and impotence in the fifteenth century, much of the information used by learned writers before that date came from popular magical practices. The sources thus reveal how academic authors learned about popular culture, and how they adapted what they learned to fit their own concerns, without necessarily interpreting it as demonic witchcraft.
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