Ronald Hutton
Hocus Pocus
Grimoires: A History of Magic Books
By Owen Davies
Oxford University Press 384pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Owen Davies has now achieved the position of our nation’s foremost academic expert on the history of magic, and this book is the proof. It is a comprehensive account of the nature and use of books intended to aid practitioners of ritual magic by prescribing the ceremonies, spells and materials (allegedly) required. The story is a long one, beginning in the Hellenistic world, a few centuries before the Christian era, and ending at the moment at which Davies’s manuscript went to press. Long scholarly narratives tend of necessity also to be thin; but not this one, which follows the dispersion and multiplication of the texts across the world, into every continent, ocean and hemisphere. The trail is pursued all over Europe, and into North and Latin America, and the islands of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, with the same meticulous care. That this is possible is due to an extraordinary synthesis of secondary works by scholars in English, French, German, Spanish, Swedish and Danish, many of which will be totally unknown to, let alone read by, most specialists in the English-speaking world.
At first sight, the very existence of so many studies in different languages seems to give the lie to the commonly made declaration that the history of magic has been, until recently, a neglected subject in the academic world. A closer look at the list, however, serves to
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger