![]() These were cures that had been observed to work, but which could not be explained by the theory of the humours, and so their basis was in experience rather than in medical theory. 4 Most recently Michael McVaugh and Lea Olsan have argued that medical writers did not categorize charms as ‘magic’ at all, but instead put them into a broader category of ‘empirica’ or ‘experimenta’. 3 Joseph Ziegler has found that Bernard’s contemporary Arnold of Villanova was similarly prepared to accept the curative properties of astrological talismans, while denouncing certain other healing practices as magic. ![]() For example Luke Demaitre has argued that Bernard of Gordon, a physician based at the university of Montpellier in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, rejected ‘suspending herbs around the neck… sorceries, incantations, and numerous other things which are better not revealed,’ but nevertheless recommended some charms and perhaps also astrological talismans (engraved images which were designed to draw down the power of the stars and which were denounced as magic by some theologians). 2 Studies of university medicine have offered more details about how medieval medical writers perceived magical cures. In the field of medical history, Tony Hunt has noted in his study of thirteenth–century medical recipes that many recipes mingle ‘charms and magic’ with pharmaceutical preparations. The use of ‘magical’ cures in the middle ages has attracted the attention of several scholars in the past few decades. For him, these verbal cures were ‘incantations’ and he went on to explain that they invoked the devil but he admits that for others, they were ‘blessings’, a term which suggested that they invoked God and could be seen as legitimate religious actions. John’s comments also suggest that there was no easy answer to the problem of definition. This was the question of how to define a magical cure, and how to distinguish it from other forms of healing, which might be deemed natural or religious. It points to a key difficulty that medieval churchmen faced when they thought about so–called ‘magical’ cures for illness. ‘Do you know any incantation for fevers and for any illness, which is called a blessing?’ 1 This was one of several questions relating to magic ( sortilegium) that the early thirteenth–century scholar John of Kent suggested that priests could ask penitents in confession.
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