Tis Magick, Magick That Will Have Ravished Me

Medievalists, especially philologists, are often seen as preoccupied with dead languages and cultures, a pursuit that appears useless in a utilitarian, techno-bureaucratic university. Rather than surrender this love of the past, the author proposes transforming it from a mere fondness (philia) into a form of necromancy (necromantia), which involves discovering hidden knowledge and creating the future through engagement with the dead past. This reclamation reframes scholarly work with historical texts as a prophetic and creative act, not an abject one.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Medievalists, especially philologists like me—and perhapslike some of you as well—weplay with dead things. With-in the late capitalist, utilitarian, increasingly techno-bur-eaucratic and determinedly non-magical University, our fondness for the impractical arts and humanities and such, our philological and historical pursuits may well ap-pear an unseemly(or at least useless) preoccupation with the past, a philia(or paraphilia) for“dead”languages and cultures.Necrophilia, not to put too fine a point onit.But in the face of such institutional abjection, let us not sur-render our philiaso much as transform it—into mantia. Let us (re)claim and reconstruct our engagement with the “dead” as necromancy—from the Latin necromantia, bor-rowed in turn from post-Classical Greek νεκρομαντεια (nekromanteía), from νεκρος(nekrós) “dead body” and μαντεια(manteía) “prophecy or divination”—the discovery of hidden knowledge and especially the prediction or perhaps rathercreation of the future through intercourse (pun intended) with the “dead” past.