Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic
Ebook
Ebooks are designed for reading and have few connections to your library.
Overview
A vibrant look at an unsettled and strangely familiar time that overturns our assumptions about the history of magic.
Imagine: it’s the year 1600 and you’ve lost your precious silver spoons, or maybe they’ve been stolen. Perhaps your child has a fever. Or you’re facing a trial. Maybe you’re looking for love or escaping a husband. What do you do?
In medieval and early modern Europe, your first port of call might have been cunning folk: practitioners of “service magic.” Neither feared (like witches), nor venerated (like saints), they were essential to daily life. For people across ages, genders, and social ranks, practical magic was a cherished resource for navigating life’s many challenges.
In historian Tabitha Stanmore’s beguiling account, we meet lovelorn widows, dissolute nobles, selfless healers, and renegade monks. We listen in on Queen Elizabeth I’s astrology readings and track treasure hunters trying to unearth buried gold without upsetting the fairies that guard it. Much like us, premodern people lived in a bewildering world, buffeted by forces beyond their control. As Stanmore reveals, their faith in magic has much to teach about how to accommodate the irrational in our allegedly enlightened lives today.
Charming in every sense, Cunning Folk is at once an immersive reconstruction of a bygone era and a thought-provoking commentary on the beauty and bafflement of being human.
A vibrant look at an unsettled and strangely familiar time that overturns our assumptions about the history of magic.
Deft writing, impeccable research: Tabitha Stanmore strikes the perfect balance of serious scholarship that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Her book is highly informative but never heavy.
Magic in the air: From the rediscovery of Wicca and shamanism to the rise of cottagecore, there has been a renewed interest in folk wisdom and spiritual practices, which this book speaks to directly.
A major UK publication: CUNNING FOLK will be a lead title in 2024 at Bodley Head, drawing high-profile attention that would help set up US publication.
Crossover to fantasy readership: As with Shelley Puhak’s The Dark Queens, there will likely be interest in the book among the audience for fantasy, where Bloomsbury has strong connections.
The achievement of Cunning Folk is to make pre-modern magic seem not only real, but also reasonable, interwoven into everyday life in ways that don’t feel antiquated. Through lively and extremely well-researched storytelling, Stanmore shows readers that for many people both medieval and modern, to believe in magic, to hope for magic, is part of being human.
Before, during, and after the witch trials, purveyors of magic were in fact common, helpful community merchants. Cunning Folk brings us into this fascinating era with personal accounts that deepen and complicate the history of spellcasting, and offer inspiration for today’s practitioners.
A significant follow-up to Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s seminal Witches, Midwives & Nurses, Cunning Folk offers a nuanced view into pre-modern spirituality, dispossessing us of the idea that all supernatural belief was relegated to ‘devil’s work.’ Service magic, as Stanmore illuminates for us, is not the same as witchcraft: in fact, cunning folk played an important role in medieval society as skilled practitioners of their crafts. Deeply researched, Cunning Folk is rich with primary source accounts that elucidate how service magic was used to treat the ills of everyday life in pre-modern and medieval Europe. Cunning Folk would make a welcome addition to any history-buff’s bookshelf. Connecting past to present, Stanmore proves that magic-seeking is deeply human; that medieval desires and impulses were not so different from today’s.
Packed with vivid historical anecdotes, this is an intriguing insight into the magical lives of past people and the history of our own superstitions today.
The best introduction to late medieval and early modern popular magic yet written. Comprehensive, humane, lively, and a great read.
This is a brilliant book, written with wit and vigor. Tabitha Stanmore explores the pre-modern places where magic was real, offering not only practical solutions to ordinary problems but a way of feeling about the world, an emotional relationship between cosmic forces, anxious humans, and the mundane mysteries of their lives.
I adore Cunning Folk. A truly fascinating and human book.
A stand-out look at the real people behind the folkloric magic of medieval and early modern England. No other book reveals the strange and wondrous details of magic in English society in the way this intelligently written narrative does. It is new required reading for students of traditional witchcraft and researchers alike. Truly a fantastic read.
- Title: Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic
- Author: Tabitha Stanmore
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 272
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781639730544, 9781639730537, 1639730532, 1639730540
- Resource ID: LLS:9781639730544
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T15:22:32Z
Tabitha Stanmore, PhD, is a specialist in medieval and early modern magic. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Exeter, UK, the first university to offer a master's degree in occult history. She has been interviewed on BBC Radio and TV. Her monograph, Love Spells and Lost Treasure, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Cunning Folk is her first book for general readers.