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Abstract
This dissertation investigates instances of "textual magic," a general term I use to cover protective or healing processes associated with written amulets, efficacious texts, and certain figures and visual images. It explores how the vast increase in literacy between the early Anglo-Saxon period and the Reformation is related to changes in attitudes towards words at their most powerful – words expected to produce a physical effect. The most startling examples include written words dissolved into water, hung around the patient's neck, carved onto food and eaten, or written onto the patient's body. Practices such as these use text in ways that do not primarily rely on the ability of words to record or convey information, or to refer to objects or concepts in the real world. Instead they transfer their power through ink, form, materiality, and physical contact. To examine the full range of ways in which efficacious texts were used, I draw on an original database of more than a thousand medieval charms and medical recipes that make use of powerful spoken or written words.
The first three chapters of this study focus on three different time periods: before 1100, 1100 to 1350, and 1350 to 1500. Chapter One explores different kinds and levels of literacy in Anglo-Saxon England. I reveal how powerful words – both spoken and written – were used for protection and healing, and analyze which types of words were thought to have power in which situations. In particular I address the instruction to say a Mass over the ingredients of a medical recipe, a practice usually recommended when the condition to be treated is a mental illness or a disease caused by elves. This is in contrast to the use of written charms and spoken charms that use words other than those of the Mass, both of which treat a wide range of conditions.
The period from 1100 to 1350, examined in Chapter Two, has been described as a time from which almost no charms survive. Where other scholars have found a hiatus in the copying of charms, my research has uncovered a rich and flourishing tradition in Latin, Anglo-Norman, and - more rarely - English. This chapter focuses on the movement of motifs between the three languages of medieval England. It argues that written charms, which have often been considered as a way to make the power of spoken charms permanent, instead evolved largely separately. While spoken charms made extensive use of vernacular languages, written charms almost exclusively used Latin or unknown words, or aimed to create the impression of textuality without conveying any literal meaning.
Chapter Three covers the period from 1350 to 1500. It draws a parallel between certain spoken charms, written charms, and amuletic manuscripts, arguing that they function by creating alignment between present and biblical time. It also notes an apparent increase in concern about the use of unknown words in charm texts, studying three different examples in which the authors of recipes attempted to hide the efficacious words of the charm from their patients.
The final chapters are thematic. Chapter Four deals with the relationship between religion and texts associated with healing and protection. It explores medieval arguments comparing efficacious texts with saints' relics, demonstrating that the power of such texts and the power of relics were assumed to be transferred in almost identical ways. Inscriptions could also be used to give objects a status that was in some ways comparable to that assigned to relics.
Chapter Five, my final chapter, deals with the relationship between such potent texts and their treatment in English literature. It explores both the literal and metaphorical presentation of spoken charms and efficacious texts, using five literary texts: Beowulf, Solomon and Saturn I, The Siege of Jerusalem, Troilus and Criseyde, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Drawing on contextual information about charm use established in the chronological chapters of my dissertation, I argue that these texts engage with a deeply-rooted medieval culture of charms. The written and spoken power that words could channel was regarded as a major force to reckoned with.