| Preserved
in the Bavarian State Library in Munich is a manuscript that few scholars
have noticed and that no one in modern times has treated with the
seriousness it deserves. Forbidden Rites consists of an edition
of this medieval Latin text with a full commentary, including detailed
analysis of the text and its contents, discussion of the historical
context, translation of representative sections of the text, and comparison
with other necromantic texts of the late Middle Ages. The result is
the most vivid and readable introduction to medieval magic now available.
Like many medieval texts for the use of magicians,
this handbook is a miscellany rather than a systematic treatise.
It is exceptional, however, in the scope and variety of its contents—prayers
and conjurations, rituals of sympathetic magic, procedures involving
astral magic, a catalogue of spirits, lengthy ceremonies for consecrating
a book of magic, and other materials.
With more detail on particular experiments than
the famous thirteenth-century Picatrix and more variety than the
Thesaurus Necromatiae ascribed to Roger Bacon, the manual is one
of the most interesting and important manuscripts of medieval magic
that has yet come to light. |
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| Richard
Kieckhefer is Professor of Religion and History at Northwestern
University and an acknowledged expert on medieval magic and witchcraft.
His publications include European Witch Trials: Their Foundations
in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300-1500 (University of California,
1976), Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany (University
of Liverpool, 1979), Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints
and Their Religious Milieu (University of Chicago, 1984), and Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1990). |
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