Conformity and Originality in Middle English Charms

Abstract

When compared with the use of charms in various other cultures, charming in late medieval England might well seem to have offered little scope for originality. Whereas in some other European language-communities the expert ‘charmer’ has often been a person apart, perhaps somewhat shady, and his or her reciting of the verbal element of a charm has been an individual performance of a variable version of the inherited words and ideas, in late medieval Western Europe — north of the Alps and Pyrenees at least — the use of verbal charms was evidently quite different. In England in particular, in the fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, charms were not the arcane material of personal performance, but rather something to be shared, often in writing. Within the literate stratum of the population written charms circulated in manuscripts that survive in their hundreds (the charms of course only one part of their content), with particular charms surviving in scores, sometimes many scores, of copies. Altogether, far from being the preserve of the ‘cunning’ man or woman, the white or off-white witch, late medieval healing and protective charms in England seem usually to have been openly disseminated and perfectly respectable — socially, medically and doctrinally.