The Magic of Rogues: Necromancers in Early Tudor England by Frank Klaassen and Sharon Hubbs Wright

Necromancers in early Tudor England were generally not involved with the dead, and secular courts showed a curious disinclination to prosecute magic, while ecclesiastical courts punished it harshly. The book examines two case studies: William Neville, a minor poet who consulted a cunning-man and faced Thomas Cromwell in 1532 but was not convicted, and the Mixindale Fellowship, nine men tried in the Archbishop's Court in 1509 for treasure hunting with demonic conjuration, who were convicted of heresy, excommunicated, and did public penance. The authors challenge assumptions that magicians worked alone and that institutional Christianity uniformly opposed magic, highlighting the complex accommodations between permissible and prohibited occult practices.

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Reviewed by: The Magic of Rogues: Necromancers in Early Tudor England by Frank Klaassen and Sharon Hubbs Wright Carole M. Cusack frank klaassen AND sharon hubbs wright. The Magic of Rogues: Necromancers in Early Tudor England. University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021. Pp. ix + 161. This fascinating study situates primary sources for magic in sixteenthcentury England in the context of the two legal systems, secular and ecclesiastical, that dominated society in the immediate post-medieval era. The Pennsylvania State University Press series "Magic in History" has already yielded such gems as Claire Fanger's study of John of Morigny, Rewriting Magic: An Exegesis of the Visionary Autobiography of a Fourteenth-Century French Monk (2015), and this new book is another worthy contribution to the historicization of the study of magic and the occult within early modern Christian Europe. Frank Klaassen and Sharon Hubbs Wright note that necromancers are generally not engaged with magic involving the dead, and they highlight the tension between the Christian assumptions of magical practitioners themselves and the official church structures that institutionalized suspicion of their motivations and outcomes. The book focuses on the secular courts' unwillingness to punish practitioners of magic, the fact that such men were not generally working as individuals but instead participating in communities, and the difficulties of distinguishing pretended magicians from those who were engaged in actual magical practices. Chapter 1, "William Neville and His Magicians: The Legal Documents," focuses on the minor early-sixteenth-century poet (author of The Castell of Pleasure) who became embroiled in magic through his consultation of the cunning-man Nash of Cirencester. Initially, their relationship was about recovering stolen spoons, but it rapidly became focused on William's expectations of inheriting noble titles (Lord Latimer, Earl of Warwick). On December 30, 1532, after being apprehended by Thomas Cromwell, William Neville, his brother George, and various servants and associates made formal statements. No convictions resulted, evidence of "the curious disinclination of secular courts to prosecute crimes of magic" (28). Just under thirty pages of contemporary legal documents are appended to this short chapter, dealing with questions of prophecy, contact with spirits, issues of magic texts, and how these potentially intersected with treason and political crime. Chapter 2, "Power, Knowledge, and Influence: The Magic Texts," shifts attention to the role played by manuscripts and magical objects. Here are spells to produce the state of invisibility, explanations of sigil magic, spells to compel love and to procure sex, and the use of psalms as protective texts. This chapter ends the first half of the book, which focuses on the secular authorities and magic. Chapter 3, "The Fellowship of the Mixindale Hoard: The Legal Documents," challenges the assumption that magical practitioners [End Page 151] were largely individualistic and worked alone, by telling the tale of nine men who sought the Mixindale Treasure in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1509, and their subsequent trial in the Archbishop's Court, in which they "were accused of making sacrifices and prayers to demons" (88). They were convicted of heresy, excommunicated, and forced to do public penance over a lengthy time period. Chapter 4, "Treasure Hunting: The Magical Texts," is focused on the types of texts that the Mixindale Fellowship employed, which provided formulae for demonic conjuration (for example, the use of a lamina to summon the spirit Oberion), and also the employment of prayers, biblical texts, and ritual elements for magical purposes. Specific texts, including the Sworn Book of Honorius and the Treasury of Spirits, were used in the worldly business of treasure hunting. Klaassen and Wright are engaged in the business of exploding myths (the magician as solitary, magical goals as lofty, the opposition of institutional Christianity and magic) and have written an entertaining and informative short book. The contrast between ecclesiastical and secular courts in matters of magic is instructive; the stories of the various necromantic endeavors are interesting and often surprising. This work is recommended to scholars of late medieval and early modern Europe, and to all who are intrigued by the textual evidence for prohibited occult acts in overwhelmingly Christian cultures, and the convoluted accommodations made to integrate the practice of permissible magic, while condemning those...