Where's the Beef? A Whirlwind Introduction to Anglo-Latin Charms
A historiographical exploration (+ worksheets!)
Early Medieval English charms are a fascinating genre, representing complex textual spaces that straddle the spectrum of medicine, magic and religion. Not unlike “prognostics” which can be found in manuscripts ranging from computi to psalters, charms occupy similar textual spaces, sometimes found in the margins of prayerbooks, medical manuscripts and even legal texts.1
This month, we explore the structure, content and context of early Medieval English charms, with worksheets aimed at helping learners build a small vocabulary to translate
some of these texts.
Image courtesy of The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College. CC BY-NC-4.0. p. 326. A charm appealing to God to help cure eyes of a supplicant appears in the margin. The use of the phrase hominis istius (of that man) suggests that this charm may have been performed by someone acting in a healing capacity on behalf of an invalid.
What are charms?
In his introduction to the edited volume, Charms and Charming in Europe, Jonathan Roper offers the definition of charms first supplied by the Brothers Grimm: charms are “verbal formulas, of Christian and non-Christian form, used outside of a Church context, and to which are attributed a supernatural effect, mostly of a protective, healing kind.”2 Roper goes on to suggest a simplification of this definition: “charms are the verbal element of vernacular magic practice.”3 While certainly pithier, this definition raises key questions: are charms “magical”? What is “magic”? And would the copyists (and presumably users) of these “verbal formulas” regarded them as “magic”?
As Kathryn Lynch noted, Old English charms “resist easy classification.”4 According to Lynch, charms may be found in over twenty manuscripts and “vary widely in date, content and provenance.”5 Lois Bragg counted some eight-six extant charms in Latin and Old English verse and prose, while Rebecca Fisher concluded that the number of lines in any one charm can range from one to fifty.6 Many charms were likely translated into Old English from Latin, others are presumed to be “native” to Britain, and many use “corrupt passages of liturgical Latin” or even Greek as part of their formulae.7
The performative dimension of many charms sets them apart from other oral material. As Leo Olsan suggested, in contrast to recitative material such as epic poetry, charms include “explicit directions for performance.”8 Olsan indicated that these texts are often “tagged” according to what they are intended to address and typically contain performative directions: their words can be spoken (cweþan), sung (singan) or even written (writan).9 This feature may also be extended to Latin charms, where the performer of the charm is instructed to write (scribe) or say (dic) a certain word or phrase.
In a now-dated study of medicine in early Medieval England, Wilfrid Bonser believed that the earliest charms were probably simple commands.10 Bonser, not unlike the early twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon scholar Felix Grendel, characterized many of the charms as containing “foreign or unintelligible [languages],” suggesting that these may have been “considered to be of special potency” by their users and copyists.11 Although many charms contain what, at worst, had previously been viewed as “gibberish,” Ciaran Arthur’s more recent contribution to scholarship on charms recast these “unintelligible phrases” as “powerful texts that could only be performed by those who knew how to read and decipher them.”12 Fascinatingly, Arthur’s examination of the late eleventh-century manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A. xv, led him to argue that the manuscript’s “close textual correspondences with other contemporary manuscripts that contain ciphers, foreign alphabets, and hermeneutic vocabulary may also indicate that its obscure rituals draw upon wider intellectual strategies of textual concealment [emphasis mine].”13 This also raises the possibility that some of these charms may have fallen within the realm of ‘illicit’ rather than ‘licit’ practices, leading us to wonder what types of texts we might be encountering when we examine a charm in its original manuscript.
Magic or medicine? Popular religion or pagan superstition?
The extent to which the term “superstition” can offer an unambiguous and even neutral category through which to read texts such as charms may be complicated by historical attitudes and entangled practices. As Karen Jolly argued in her study of pre-Conquest English elf charms, terms such a “magic” and “superstition” are modern values imposed by previous generations of scholars, often to the detriment of the subject studied.14 Jolly emphasized the need to situate elf charms within their cultural contexts, be they medical, liturgical or folkloric.15
Ian Wood’s study of paganism east of the Rhine in the early Middle Ages highlighted concerns around accepting normative Christian sources as testimony to the ubiquity of superstitious pagan practices.16 Considering the possibility that they represented familiar literary tropes rather than eyewitness accounts, Wood argued for considering “alternative” Christian practices as falling on a spectrum between pagan and orthodox religion.17
Finally, David Gentilcore’s more recent study of attitudes and behaviours towards the sacred in the Mediterranean between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries offers an instructive alternative to the categories of “superstition,” “folklore” and “popular religion”—all of which have been criticized for their individual limitations and ambiguities.18 Gentilcore proposed that practices appearing to fall outside the Christian mainstream could be viewed as active forms of negotiation where “subordinate classes of society…[created] their own patterns of behaviour and ritual expression” thereby producing “parallel systems” that borrowed equally from Church and lay culture.19 Although the monastic communities copying charms hardly represented the “subordinate classes” of pre-Conquest English society, the notion of “parallel systems” may be an interesting substitute for “superstition” or even “popular religion,” particularly at a time when orthodox Christian theology was still in a state of flux.20 Although Jolly, Wood and Gentilcore offer compelling perspectives for understanding how we could conceive of charms within the contexts of text and ritual, how these modalities were incorporated into and reconciled with normative Christian cosmological views may remain problematic.
A Ten-Thousand Foot View of Anglo-Latin Charms
To provide an inventory of Anglo-Latin charms would be well beyond the scope of this article. This said, the sheer range of topics covered in charms ought to be addressed briefly. The manuscript context to which Lynch referred is indeed varied. While medical manuscripts invariably compiled as reference documents for monastic healers and leeches form a natural home for many charms, the seemingly more private devotional context of prayerbooks are an interesting locus.
London, British Library, Cotton Titus D. xxvi + xxvii, once belonging to Ælfwine, an eleventh-century abbot of the New Minster (Winchester), contains a Latin charm for finding a thief, while London, British Library Royal 2A. XX, commonly styled as the Royal Prayerbook and dated to the first-third of the ninth century, contains various charms relating to the staunching of blood.21 London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius E. xviii (Vitellius Psalter), in addition to possessing various onomamantic devices, includes charms to protect cattle and recipes to treat cattle with lung disease.
On the face of it, these may seem like peculiar texts in which to find charms, however, as Arthur observed in his study of Cotton Caligula A. xv, the manuscript context reveals much about the logic of scribal selection. In the case of Cotton Caligula A. xv, Arthur wrote that “the rituals have correspondences with the surrounding texts that are associated with Church Fathers” as well as “an interest in contemporary events at Christ Church Cathedral for which “a ritual to influence the king and other superiors” hardly seems out of place.22 A similar logic might be applied to the aforementioned manuscripts, with Ælfwine’s Prayerbook potentially supporting the performance of pastoral duties, and the Vitellius Psalter containing procedures that reflect a more agricultural flavour.
Finally, Jolly’s close reading of the well-known Æcerbot (“field remedy,” London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A. vii, ff. 176r-178r; an English translation is available here) demonstrates the complex spaces that remedies, such as this, occupy. Jolly wrote:
“By the standards of a later age, this remedy is problematic because it defies neat categories used to judge what is Christian and rational. The text was the product of the literate clergy who represented the formal church in late Saxon England. Yet it has enough identifiably pre-Christian elements to cause consternation among many later theologians and modern scholars, who see it as evidence of the retention of paganism in the practice of magic as a failure of the Christianizing effort in the late Saxon church.”23
Jolly goes on to contend that this is “not some kind of ‘Christian magic’,” but rather “evidence of the [Christian] religion’s success in conversion by accommodating Anglo-Saxon culture.”24 This echoes Valerie Flint’s arguments around “the unrelenting pressure of competing non-Christian magi upon the early church of Europe,” which almost demanded that the Church incorporate “superstitious” practices and thereby, in turn, giving birth to their own.25
Andrew Rabin, “Ritual Magic or Legal Performance? Reconsidering an Old English Charm Against Theft,” in English Law Before the Magna Carta: Felix Liebermann and Die gesetze der angelsachsen, ed. by Stefan Jurasinski, Lisi Oliver and Andrew Rabin (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 177-195 (p. 179).
Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854-1971), sv. ‘SEGEN’, §6, in Jonathan Roper, “Introduction,” in Charms and Charming in Europe, ed. by Jonathan Roper (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 1-7 (p. 1).
Roper, “Introduction,” p. 1.
Kathryn E. Lynch, “The Wiþ Dweorh Charms in MS Harley 585: A Union of Text and Voice,” in The Genesis of Books: Studies in the Scribal Culture of Medieval England in Honour of A.N. Donne (Turnhout: Brespols, 2011), pp. 51-68 (p. 51)
Lynch, “The Wiþ Dweorh Charms,” p. 51.
Lois Bragg, “The Modes of the Old English Metrical Charms,” The Comparatist 16 (1992), pp. 3-23 (p. 3); Rebecca M.C. Fisher, “Genre, Prayers and the Anglo-Saxon Charms,” in Genre, Text, Interpretation: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Folklore and Beyond, ed. by Kaarina Koski and Frog with Ulla Savolainen (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2006), pp. 137-151 (pp. 139).
Lynch, “The Wiþ Dweorh Charms,” p. 51; Wilfrid Bonser, The Medical Background of Anglo-Saxon England: A Study in History, Psychology and Folklore (London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1963), p. 245.
Lea Olsan, “The Inscription of Charms in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts,” Oral Tradition 14 (1999), pp. 401-419 (p. 401).
Olsan, “The Inscription of Charms,” p. 401.
Bonser, The Medical Background of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 241.
Bonser, The Medical Background of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 245.
Ciaran Arthur, “The Gift of Gab in Post-Conquest Canterbury: Mystical ‘Gibberish’ in London , British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.xv,” Journal of English and German Philology 118.2 (2019), 177-210 (p. 179).
Ciaran Arthur, “The Gift of Gab,” p. 179.
Karen Louise Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Charms in Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). p. 97.
Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England, p. 97.
Ian Wood, ‘Pagan Religions and Superstitions East of the Rhine From the Fifth to the Ninth Century’, in After Empire: Towards and Ethnology of Europe’s Barbarians, ed. by Giorgio Ausenda (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1995), pp. 253-289 (pp. 253-254).
Wood, ‘Pagan Religions’, p. 253.
David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1992), p. 2.
Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch, pp. 4, 259.
Carl Watkins, History and the Supernatural in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 11.
“283. London, British Library, Royal 2. A. xx, Private prayer book,” Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile <https://journals.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/asmmf/article/view/5435> [accessed 27 January 2025].
Arthur, “The Gift of Gab,” p. 181.
Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England, p. 9.
Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England, p. 9.
Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 83.