3 - White Magic: Natural Arts and Marvellous Technology

Summary

While romance texts do not often engage with the minutiae of secular and canon law or patristic thought, they do engage with the attitudes and ideas that underlie these. The imaginings of romance writers and adapters spring from and respond to cultural contexts of different kinds: prohibitions, theological concepts, folk beliefs, and learned magic. Figures and artefacts from the classical world play a prominent part: Medea's story in particular is retold, and the East is consistently associated with magic and the marvellous. To some extent, the classical distinction between mageia, which can be positive, and goeteia, which cannot, is reinstated in the later Middle Ages, in the distinction between natural and fraudulent or demonic magic, ‘nigromancy’, which is carried over into romance. The biblical treatment of magic remains significant, and the opposition between divinely authorised and false or ineffectual magic finds its way into narratives that set the dangers represented by magic, especially the practice of enchantment, against the role of divine providence in preserving the individual. Romance rarely involves explicit conjuring of demons, although otherworldly beings are prominent; writers are more likely to hint at dark, potentially demonic, arts. They do not depict trials of practitioners of magic, but they do include punishment of those who meddle with ‘nigromancy’; they also allow for repentance. Such arts most often involve shape-shifting, a prominent romance motif, and they are shown to be fearful and dangerous.

It is particularly the area of natural magic that allows romance writers most freedom and scope for creative development. The motifs of magical or marvellous healing and protection recur across a wide range of works. Such emphases demonstrate how deeply folk rituals and beliefs reliant upon a broad idea of natural magic are embedded in medieval culture; romances reflect too the new learning that circulated from the twelfth century onwards. They rely in particular on more and less sophisticated ideas of the occult forces within the cosmos, and hence the potential for magic. The wonders of nature are a recurrent motif, and new interest in technology is apparent in the prominence of magical objects and sequences of adventure.