Magic, Spectacle, and Morality in the Fourteenth Century

Abstract

Bringing together magic studies and medieval literature, this essay begins by exploring the ways in which literary representations of magic conform to and confound historical models, from the categories of natural and demonic magic to the stages in the evolution of magical practices. It identifies an important new dynamic that develops within literary texts during the fourteenth century: an interest in how spectacles could intensify or attenuate the moral effects of magical events. This interest draws on changing theories about vision and the increasing use of magic as a test of courtly love or chivalry in romance. The magical spectacles of language in Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Squire’s Tale’ indicate that the tale participates in this fourteenth-century trend while also demonstrating how much individual constructions of the relationship between magic, spectacle, and morality might vary; as a result, the essay concludes, we must reconsider our idea of the Middle English literary tradition and Chaucer’s position within it.