The Magician the Witch and the Law Peters Review

REVIEWS and their link with levels of time, the part played by the crowd, and the use of parallel movements and thematic patterns, peculiarly cleansing and rededication. Despite some of the reservations mentioned in a higher place, Peterson's edition­ particularly his conscientious transcription of the manuscript, his thorough annotations, and perceptive introduction-sets a high standard for mod­ ern editions of medieval texts. His edition of Erkenwald richly deserves to become the "standard" edition of this frail alliterative verse form. ROBERT J. BLANCH NortheasternUniversity EnwARD PETERS, The Magician, The Witch, and The Police force. Philadelphia: Academy of Pennsylvania Press, 1978. Pp. eighteen, 218. $xv.95. The phenomenon of the judicial prosecutions of persons for the criminal offense of witchcraft in late-medieval and early on-modern Europe has occupied the attention of an increasingly large body of American scholars in the last decade. The result of this renewed interest is the availability of a large and growing, and respectably disinterested and detached, torso of scholarly literature which has elucidated many major questions of interest and laid to residue many myths. Professor Peters' book is in keeping with this tendency. More importantly, The Sorcerer, The Witch, and The Law is an important piece of work which both provides a new analysis of questions that have been central to recent word and draws attention to phenomena that have not previously figured very largely in that word. The main burden of the argument in this work is an amendment to the ascendant view that the stereotype of the witch that underlay the prosecutions of the witch-hunting period derived direct from heresy prosecutions of the twelfth through fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Peters argues that information technology was, instead, a growing business organisation over the general problem of magical practices that provided the context in which the stereotype of the typical witch was created. The report of learned magic was beginning to appear as an important activity in diverse circles during the twelfth century, and, as this became more widely understood in the belatedly twelfth and early on thirteenth centuries, the fear that magical prac­ tices were linked to demonic beings was voiced with increasing persua197 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER siveness. Ultimately, information technology proved impossible for the advocates of learned magic to convince their contemporaries among the intellectual elite that magic could be practiced without demonic help. Magic was found to be necessarily demonic amongst the theologians and canonists of the menses and, therefore, declared to be heretical. The fear of the Crimen magiae grew in the tardily thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries when information technology became clear that magic was beingness used as a tool or weapon in many of the royal, princely, and ecclesiastical courtroom circles of Europe. As Peters points out, there was a veritable demimonde of sorcerers and their as­ sistants fastened to the major courts, fifty-fifty if simply marginally. The apply of magic to eliminate rivals or to attain success and the discovery of the political uses of making accusations of sorcery led to a series of fourteenth-century trials in which the stereotype of the magic practitioner every bit the frequenter of demons, in pact with Satan, became stock-still. By the terminate of the fifteenth century, Peters argues, most government were not able to perceive a real difference between the learned sorcerer and the low magic that had e'er been a feature of peasant life. Equally the phenomena of low magic came to the attention of the authorities, they simply in­ cluded its practitioners in the adult stereotype. The relationship betwixt the fearfulness of learned magic, especially in po­ litical contexts, and the long evolution of that mental attitude, from the early on awareness of learned magical practices to the culmination in the political trials of the fourteenth century, has been very ably set out past Professor Peters. However, it must be noted in criticism of this work that the author passes over the trouble of heresy and the elaboration of the demonological stereotype of the heretic as it developed in the Cathar trials in Languedoc in the fourteenth century. He has suggested addi­ tional facets to the larger problem, but he has non succeeded in weaken­ ing the argument that the witch stereotype owed an enormous burden to heresy, and...

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Source: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/653468

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