Cunning Folk by Tabitha Stanmore — when magic was real

Generations of women have been taught that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Medieval women appear to have taken this advice to extremes: using supernatural gastronomy to seduce their husbands.

As noted in Tabitha Stanmore’s engaging new social history of magic, a 12th-century monk from Lincoln once warned against women who had taken to stripping off in the kitchen and kneading the family’s bread with their buttocks. If the bread was made with menstrual blood, or even served with a fish that had died inside a woman’s vagina, it stood an even better chance of inflaming the love of a husband.

To a contemporary heterosexual woman, with an array of sex aids from Viagra to Agent Provocateur at her disposal, this may seem like a lot of work. But in an era of arranged marriages, when husbands had license to beat their wives, nurturing spousal intimacy might feel essential to a woman’s safety.

Stanmore’s new book, Cunning Folk, is full of such magical tips and colourful vignettes. Her interest is “service magic” across the 14th to 17th centuries: the sort of functional help to solve everyday problems that a folk practitioner might provide to their neighbours for a fee.

As in the case of women deploying aphrodisiacs, the final part of the ritual might be completed by the client, but the instructions came from a “cunning man” or “cunning woman”. The concerns of their clients were routinely domestic, familial and financial; the difficulty of finding lost silver spoons — often the most valuable items a household might own — is a recurring theme.

A couple of the stories Stanmore tells involve higher melodrama. In 1371, we meet John Crok, who was arrested for wandering the streets of Southwark in south London carrying the “head of a Saracen” — probably a Muslim man whose mutilated body had been trafficked from Spain as a trophy. It’s a proper zombie tale: Crok had attempted to bring it back to life and ask it supernatural questions. Because he had not sought to harm an Englishman, he was released without real punishment.

More often, Stanmore’s sympathies are with ordinary people and ordinary problems. This makes her reluctant to judge either their motives for unleashing magic on their neighbours or the efficacy of their methods. “It is not my place to say whether the magic practised by cunning folk was real”, she writes. “I don’t know, I wasn’t there.” This social inclusivity often verges on the performative: even a man convicted in 1382 of defrauding a seriously ill woman with false hopes of a cure is given credit for trying his best.

One frustrating consequence of Stanmore’s refusal to dismiss magic’s efficacy is that she often avoids opportunities to assess rationally why it might have been perceived to have “worked”. She’s clearly a sharp reader of social realities, and sometimes offers clear-eyed social assessments of why magical rituals had real-world consequences. In criminal “trials by ordeal”, for example, where the suspects were forced to pass a magical test to prove their virtue, “the trick was to build up anxiety in the suspect”. More such rational analysis would have been welcome.

The bigger problem with Stanmore’s book is her wide canvas, which takes in four centuries and flails from time period to time period — and sometimes from England to Russia — without offering a consistent analysis of how magic fitted into a metaphysical worldview.

She accepts the axioms of Keith Thomas’ classic 1971 Religion and the Decline of Magic, which blamed the English Reformation for cracking down on folk magic. Yet there’s little interrogation of how magic related to theology, or how different branches of knowledge might be distinguished; a topic fruitfully covered in Anthony Grafton’s recent book Magus.

Stanmore sweepingly introduces priests as just another set of practitioners who “fundamentally work with supernatural forces”. In 1589, the Catholic dissident Mistress Dewse attempted revenge against a series of leading Protestant figures within the City of London, who had probably subjected her household to fines and arrests. Stanmore tells the story with verve and vim, but offers no scrutiny of Dewse’s belief that attempting to kill her enemies by stabbing magical effigies would “greatly please God”, or how these practices might square with her Catholicism.

Stanmore’s great strength is as a social historian, and her research has won plaudits among her fellow academic historians for combing through church and legal records, and digging up more incidents of people caught practising magic than had ever been found before. For the general reader, the result is this cheerful, colourful compendium of stories, which crackles with incident. Those of us less keen to embrace her characters as folk heroes — take Mistress Dewse, who pushed pins into the eye-sockets of her wealthy victim’s wax effigy — may hesitate.

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic by Tabitha Stanmore Bodley Head £20, 288 pages

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