Sometime in 1492 in Whitstable, a woman named Alice Breede went to visit a local soothsayer. She wanted assurance about the sort of life that her young child could expect, the kind of comfort any parent might seek, even today, never mind in an age of high infant mortality. What she learned, however, was no comfort at all. It could hardly have been worse, in fact. The soothsayer told Alice that her child would be hanged.

It’s not hard to imagine Alice’s state of mind when she returned home. Still, what she did next is shocking. She decided to hang her child herself. She could ensure that the prophecy was fulfilled, she thought. She could also ensure that the hanging wasn’t fatal. Alice’s neighbours found her decision just as shocking as we do and reported her to the ecclesiastical courts, which, until the Reformation, adjudicated on most issues relating to the supernatural. Alice’s punishment was to do public penance in the streets of Canterbury, confessing what she had done – a small price to pay for saving a child’s life, she must have thought.

Desperate cases like this run through Tabitha Stanmore’s Cunning Folk, a primer on the world of what the author calls ‘service magic’. It is structured as a series of ‘How to…’ chapters, each exploring a practical problem: ‘how to get rich quick’, ‘how to save lives’ and so on. Within