Textual Amulets Research Articles

Magical Objects, Magical Writing: Amulets Across the Ages

This note focuses on recent discussions on gemstone amulets from Late Antiquity through insights offered in two contributions to the volume Textual Amulets from Antiquity to Early Modern Times: The Shape of Words (Theis and Vitellozzi 2022). After a general presentation of the volume, I turn to the first two chapters, penned each by one of the volume’s editors. Paolo Vitellozzi’s paper examines the evolution of the textuality of magical gems in light of speech act theories and taxonomies elaborated in earlier secondary literature. Vitellozzi also analyses the complex interaction of medium (the gemstone), text and image in the course of this evolutionary process, showing how writing progressively assumed magical efficacy. In the following paper, Christoffer Theis analyses a specific category of magical gems, namely those which represent divinities with multiple heads. Theis’ observations implicitly complement Vitellozzi’s conclusions on the textuality of gemstone amulets. In the final paragraphs of this note, I briefly comment on Christian amulets and isopsephisms.

To Measure Is to Feel: The Mathematics of Middle English Metric Relics

Christian devotion often focused on holy measurements such as those of Christ's height, side wound, and the nails that pierced him. This article focuses on ones occurring in English manuscripts, primarily from the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century. The devout touched, kissed, beheld, and wore these measures, drawn scaled or life-sized, in expectation of protections in life or indulgences after death. These metric relics are considered in light of the mathematics of medieval measurement, which essentially comprised laying one body against another to deliver some kind of ratio or relation. None of the textual amulets delivers a discrete statistic but instead requires a gauging operation, such as multiplying a length fifteen times, thereby placing the worshipper in the position of measurer. By imaginatively measuring the wounds and nails, as if present at the Passion, the votaries interrogate even as they touch.

Ritualizing the Size of Books

Rhetoric about books usually emphasizes their semantic contents. Larger-than-average and smaller-than-average books, however, draw our attention to their material form. Size therefore provides one means for ritualizing the iconic dimension of books. While enlarging books quickly exceeds any practical purpose for the sake of public display, shrinking books tends to carry with it pragmatic rhetoric about portability, low expense, and mass production. Yet the popularity of textual amulets across history and cultures suggests that private ritualization drives much of the market for miniatures.

Arms against Demons and Death: Text and Image in a Catalan Amulet of the Mid-Fifteenth Century

This article presents new evidence concerning the interrelation of apotropaic texts and images of Christ as the Man of Sorrows with the arma Christi in handwritten and printed textual amulets of the fifteenth century. Also known as the Instruments of the Passion or the Weapons of Christ, the arma Christi served as reminders of Christ’s suffering and triumph over death. A Catalan textual amulet of the mid-fifteenth century offers insight into the magical uses of Passion imagery and mythology (Princeton University Library, Princeton MS. 235). This article comprises a contextualizing introduction to the amulet and its text, followed by a transcription and translation.

Wearing powerful words and objects: healing prosthetics

ABSTRACTIn Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Freud proposed that in striving to overcome the vulnerability of our bodies in the face of nature we create supplementary tools (including writing) in order to remove the limits to human functioning. He famously envisaged a civilisation trajectory in which man, striving to overcome his limitations, would increasingly resemble a ‘prosthetic God’ [James Strachey (ed), Sigmund Freud: Civilization and its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere (London: The Hogarth Press, 1963), p. 29]. This essay offers a window of understanding onto pre-modern involvement in the ongoing process of extending the limits of self-hood and making the vulnerable, sick and suffering body comprehensible through the prosthetic use of words, symbols and narrative. Studying the widespread medical use of apotropaic textual amulets, word charms and talismans, this essay asks questions about the imagination, memory and healing, arguing that wearing word prosthetics (attached to the body or inscribed on the skin as tattoos) and performing the rituals they often prescribed (reciting, counting, praying, remembering) constituted a highly affective and valuable form of placebo medicine in earlier periods. Further, it contends that complex textual amulets can be apprehended as narrative prosthesis and thus as precursors to the novel in their ability to extend the limits of self-hood and impose some kind of narrative order on chaotic and painful life experience.

‘Ye that pasen by pe Weiye’: time, topology and the medieval use of Lamentations 1.12

Lamed. O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite, et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus! quoniam vindemiavit me, ut locutus est Dominus, in die irae furoris sui. Lamed. O all ye that pass by t...

The Lord's Prayer and ΧΜΓ: Two Christian Papyrus Amulets

The last few years have seen a renewed interest in the study of papyrological remains as a means of shedding light on early Christianity.1To add further evidence to this discussion, I draw attention to two papyri in Yale University's Beinecke Library. In 1997, Yale acquired several papyri from Galerie Nefer in Zürich. The lot contained papyri ranging in date from the Ptolemaic era to the Medieval period. Two of these pieces (both, unfortunately, without specific provenance) appear to be Christian textual amulets.

Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages - By Don C. Skemer

Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages - By Don C. Skemer

Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (review)

Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (review)

Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages. Don C. Skemer

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsBinding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages. Don C. Skemer Edina BozókyEdina Bozóky Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 83, Number 3Jul., 2008 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713400015256 Views: 17Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 2008 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Magic and Ritual in Iron Age Veneto, Italy, Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 20, no.00 (Dec 2010).https://doi.org/10.5334/pia.342

Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages - By Don C. Skemer. Magic in History Series. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. viii + 328 pp. $75.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.

Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages. By Don C. Skemer. Magic in History Series. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. viii + 328 pp. 25.00 paper. - Volume 76 Issue 3

Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages. By Don C. Skemer

Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages. By Don C. Skemer

Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (review)

Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages. By Don C. Skemer. [Magic in History] (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2006. Pp. viii, 327. $75.00 clothbound, $25.00 paperback.) The topic of never fails to arouse interest, even in what Weber described as our disenchanted modern world. Yet I would contend that hardly any two of us can be found today to agree on exactly what the word means. Convinced that empirical historical research will do much to dispel the confusion, the Pennsylvania State University Press recently began its monograph series, Magic in History. Don Skemer's study on medieval represents the latest return on what is already proving to be remarkably profitable investment of scholarly and publishing resources. As Skemer makes clear at the start, the object of his investigation consists of apotropaic texts, handwritten or mechanically printed on . . . writing supports of varying dimensions and around the neck or placed elsewhere on the body for protection against harmful enemies and spirits or to bring health and good fortune (p. 1). He emphasizes that such textual amulets are to be distinguished from talismans - reserved for astrological seals and figures procured and worn for similar purposes - and charms - referring simply to speech acts though again performed with much the same ends in mind (pp. 8-9). The Latin terms signifying his intended objects were, among the church fathers, ligatura and phylacterium, but for most of the Middle Ages charta, cedula, scripttera, scriptura, or breve. Most common among Middle English equivalents were brief and writ. Though the author announces his intention to focus on and their use from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries, in fact his book covers the subject well for the whole of the European Middle Ages. What stands out in Skemer's approach is the commendable determination not to fall prey to preconceptions about the dividing line between magic and religion, warning us that rationalism and Orientalism have encouraged most modern scholars to regard medieval as residues of the primitive in ritual practices of the lower orders of society, he insists that an unbiased look reveals them instead as prevalent in the most orthodox Christian circles and just as - perhaps more - common among the elite as in the ranks of illiterate peasants. Late-antique intellectuals like Augustine might have fulminated against as either fraudulent or dependent on demonic intervention, and Caesarius of Aries condemned their use as at best sacrilege. But for most of the centuries between the sixth and the sixteenth, they were accepted by the majority of clergy and laity alike as - in Skemer's words - a renewable source of Christian empowerment (p. 1). No doubt the primary use to which Skemer's volume wEl be put is as guidebook to actual that have survived from the Middle Ages and index of amuletic practices witnessed in the extant sources. …

Binding words: textual amulets in the Middle Ages

Binding words: textual amulets in the Middle Ages