What Has Magic to Do with Prayer? Unorthodox Minitexts in vade mecum Prayerbooks for Priests

Abstract

In recent years, a growing number of studies of smaller, simpler and much tattered liturgical manuscripts that were produced for the use of missionaries, priests of small churches and itinerant preachers, have contributed immensely to our understanding of early medieval liturgy, and of what pastoral care really consisted of in the early medieval West. Many of these vade mecum handbooks for priests also contain some small, unorthodox texts of magical nature. Notwithstanding the fact that throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages such texts and the worldview they represented were repeatedly questioned, denounced and condemned by Christian authorities and policy makers, they were copied into, or attached to, Christian handbooks for priests. This paper looks at a few examples of such texts, and attempts to explain their presence in liturgical codices by referring to the nature of magic and magical practices in the early medieval West.