A lot of modern fantasy literature is set in a vaguely medieval world, but one equipped with working magic. There are castles, kings, peasants, riders on horseback, and wizards. (This characterizes my own fiction as well as that of many others.) But how did the real Middle Ages view magic?
Well, it was different. For starters, no wizards, no wizards' schools, no magical talents developing within the young person who (maybe) is prophesied to save her people. Although there might be some practitioners who were more versed in magical knowledge than others, magic was primarily worked by people themselves. For example, a woman might glue caraway seeds to the insides of her legs in the hope of conceiving a child.
Many churchmen worried about the rituals and incantations that could accompany the caraway seeds (or whatever). Anything they found worrisome could be promptly labeled paganism, saying it compared to whatever the Romans had been up to before they converted to Christianity. For example, exchanging gifts on January 1 was declared a pagan practice.
Modern scholars have tended to believe the early medieval priests, saying that the "simple folk" continued to follow pagan practices long after they theoretically became Christian, and that anything called Christian at the time was doubtless just superstition.
But this is an attempt to impose modern ideas of correct religion on people 1500 years in the past. The magical practices that early medieval lay people attempted to carry out were, to them, part of Christianity, a way to get the attention of God and the saints. The priests might think they were going about it the wrong way, but they agreed with the underlying premise, that the divine was accessible in times of danger.
For early medieval magic was not something opposed to the church and its teachings (as it is in most modern fantasy stories) but rather something parallel to it. Its incantations, spells, amulets, potions, and herbal remedies were all intended to access the supernatural. Wise practitioners might be holy hermits (I'm not talking here about the witch scares of the end of the Middle Ages). The real fear for priests was that incautious lay people might summon a demon when they thought they were invoking a saint, with predictable consequences.
Indeed, priests were often the source of amulets, that were used to protect against fire, or against violent weather, or against various diseases. The amulets might be made from plants, or from bones, or have touched a saint's relic, or incorporate a few words from the Bible on a scrap of parchment. Church councils routinely told priests to stop providing such amulets, an indication that the practice was very common. After all, who better to help access the supernatural than a priest?
An important part of magic was divination, determining what would be a good direction to follow, or for that matter what was the cause of illness, or if someone was trying to poison you. If someone was, you really were not supposed to poison them right back, unless of course they deserved it.
Divination could be done at home by interpreting dreams or the roll of the dice or strange signs, or by consulting practitioners with their collections of mouse bones or understanding of what a lightning strike meant. Early medieval people did not follow the early Roman practice of divination through examining chicken entrails, as they all agreed that was pagan.
William Klingschirn discusses Merovingian-era magical practices in the volume The Oxford Handbook of the Roman World (ed. Effros and Moreira, 2020).
© C. Dale Brittain 2025
For more on tmedieval religion and society, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.
