Magie oder Die Wiederherstellung der Ordnung

Folklore, April, 2006 by Jonathan Roper

Magie oder Die Wiederherstellung der Ordnung. By Monika Schulz. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000. 439 pp. 37.00 [pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 3-631-36643-4 Beschworungen im Mittelalter: Einfuhrung und Uberblick. By Monika Schulz. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2003. 184 pp. 30 [pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 3-8253-1438-3

Historically speaking, German-language scholarship has been pre-eminent in the field of charm studies. As interest in charms recovers from its post-war lull, it is only to be expected that German-speaking scholars should return to the production of significant studies. The two books under review here are by a single author, yet with very different audiences. The earlier, and longer, work is a more theoretical study of magic, while the latter work, as the title reveals, is an introduction to and overview of medieval German charms.

One of the world's greatest collections of charms is the Corpus der deutschen Segen und Beschworungsformeln, held in Dresden. This was, for instance, the collection that Spamer drew on for his classic work on the Romanusbuchlein, a study hailed in these pages by Ellen Ettlinger as "the new standard-work." This corpus of material is what Monika Schulz has, almost half a century later, drawn on for the two works currently under review. In the first of these works, whose title translates as "Magic, or the Restoration of Order," Schulz declares her aim as being the demystification of magic by revealing the rational principles by which (it is claimed) it works. The material she draws on in her discussion comes from the Dresden corpus, which is generally early-modern or late-modern in date, although at times she also draws upon older Latin, Anglo-Saxon or Mesopotamian texts.

The meat of the work comes in three long chapters, each of which is over one hundred pages long. The first of these, entitled "Causae et curae" (a title derived from Hildegaard of Bingen), deals largely with notions of supernatural aetiology and supernatural healing. The second chapter addresses "the intrinsic working principles" of magic, again in a thorough manner. But, for me, the most interesting part of the book is the third of these giant chapters (pp. 285-378), where we find her treatment of the "historiola," the narrative segment of certain charms, which provides a model of past successful healing that is then to be applied (it is hoped) in the present. Here, she notes that that historiolas featuring the interaction of a holy personage with an evil being stereotypically have a tripartite structure of a encounter, question, and statement of intent to harm made by the evil being, and she is able to draw upon numerous examples from the corpus to demonstrate her case. The work is concluded with a brief summing up of magic as the restoration of order, followed by a substantial bibliography. This is not a book that will appeal to everyone, being written in dense academic German, and containing more than one page on which two lines of text are supported by forty-five (!) lines of footnotes, but it is certainly substantial and scholarly.

The second of Schulz's works under review here is a much more approachable one, with the more concentrated aim of providing a presentation of medieval German charms. These healing charms are grouped by Schulz according to the ailment they address. Now, if we compare this work with its closest potential competitor, Veronica Holzmann's "Ich beswer dich wurm vnd wyrmin," a systematised catalogue of early German charms (reviewed in Folklore, December 2004), we discover a strange paradox--it is Holzman who orders the material according to its inner logic, whereas Schulz, who has a monograph on the topic of the inner logic of magic, organises the material according to its goal. Schulz's headings are: charms against the demonic worm (an interesting group including Tres angeli, Job sedebat in sterquilino, Super petram and other charm-types), wound charms, blood-staunching charms (including an excursus on the universality of the Flum Jordan type), charms against fever, gout and epilepsy, charms for eye complaints, charms for sprains and lameness, horse charms, pregnancy charms, birth charms, and theft charms. The last three groups are covered rather briefly, but the other seven discussions are thorough, full of parallels, and well-exemplified with Latin and German charms. Some of material from Schulz's earlier book, especially from the key chapter dealing with historiolas, reappears, albeit in altered form, in her second work. This is not at all a bad thing--it is rather a necessity if the latter work is to be a self-standing one. But, nevertheless, it does encourage me to say that if I had to plump for just one of the two Schulz books, it would be Beschworungen im Mittelalter that I would choose. All in all, these two interesting works are another sign of the ongoing renaissance in charms studies.

Jonathan Roper, National Centre for English Cultural Tradition, University of Sheffield, UK