Euan Cameron’s Enchanted Europe is an important study of the literature of superstition in medieval and early modern Europe. Cameron’s book is not a study of the people who believed the superstitions, nor what they believed; rather, it is a history-of-ideas study of those who wrote about superstition in the five-hundred-year period, 1250-1750.
Cameron begins his book with a section called “Discerning and Controlling Invisible Forces: The Image of ‘Superstition’ in the Literature” in which he seeks to “represent, describe, and in some modest degree to analyse the image of the folkloric world of pre-modern Europe presented by the literature on superstition” (29). His portrait of the beliefs of the period in this section is accurate and presents an important baseline from which to understand the works of the writers on superstition.
From this section he moves to the most important contribution of this book, his analysis of the literature of superstition from 1250-1750. His approach to the materials is that of the historian of ideas, as expressed through the close reading of the important (and some less important) works on superstition of the time. The first of these sections is “The Learned Response to Superstitions in the Middle Ages: Angels and Demons.” He examines closely the sources and influences for the writers of books on superstition in four thematic chapters: “Scholastic Demonology in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” “The Demonological Reading of Superstitions in the Late Middle Ages: Areas of Consensus,” “The Demonological Reading of Superstitions in the Late Middle Ages: Areas of Difference and Disagreement,” and “The Pastoral Use of the Scholastic Critique of Superstitions.” Thomas Aquinas emerges as perhaps the most important writer on superstition, “his massive and magisterial works [becoming] quarries from which later generations of ecclesiastical writers could source authoritative principles to apply in their own writings.” “There can be,” Cameron concludes, “no more compelling tribute to the influence of [Aquinas’s] principles on this issue than the rapidity with which they became common currency among theological writers” (102).
But even with Aquinas’s great influence, theological commentary on popular religion and superstition continued to develop. In the next section of the book, Cameron turns to the controversies and writings that arose concerning superstition in Renaissance and Reformation Europe. He open this section with chapters examining the writings of the Christian humanists and Martin Luther, which are then followed by chapters on “Prodigies, Providences and Possession,” “The Protestant Critique of Consecrations: Catholicism as Superstition,” “The Protestant Doctrine of Providence and the Transformation of the Devil,” and “Reformed Catholicism: Purifying Sources, Defending Traditions.”
He concludes with chapters entitled “Demonology Becomes an Open Subject in the 17th Century,” “Defending the ‘Invisible World’: The Campaign against ‘Saducism,’” and “Towards the Enlightenment,” which examine the important shifts in writing about superstition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is in this period when superstition is no longer considered to be a part of theology, or even a pastoral concern. Yet this change did not mean that superstition was necessarily less important in the lives of people, only that it ceased to be a concern of learned theological writing.
As Cameron shows, many of the key examples in treatises on these topics are shared among the treatises, with later books often drawing freely from earlier works. This means that the later works, which are often our primary sources for supernatural beliefs for a given period, must be used cautiously as evidence for popular beliefs of their time and place, for what is in these books is often drawn from earlier writers and from many different regions in Europe. Used cautiously, however, the books still retain their value as witnesses to the supernatural beliefs of medieval and early modern Europe, but, as Cameron shows, they are even more revealing as to what people thought about superstitions during the period.
There is one point on which I think Cameron goes astray: he believes that in studying medieval superstitions the scholar is dealing with “utterly disjointed and incoherent bodies of ideas” and that “[it] is precisely this incoherence and disjointedness that modern superstition shares with its medieval and ancient equivalents” (314). Yet, as many studies of both medieval and modern supernatural belief systems have shown, even though these systems are not rational according to scientific or elite theological thinking, they do have a coherence of their own within a folk system of belief.
Enchanted Europe is an important addition to studies of superstition, witchcraft, and popular religion. Cameron’s use of the history of ideas as his method in reading medieval and early modern writers on superstition demonstrates clearly the influences that the various writers on these topics had on each other, as well as the development of ideas about superstition across the time-frame of his book. By drawing our attention to the history of ideas as a method for studying the literature of supernatural belief, Cameron enables us to more effectively describe the belief systems of earlier periods.
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[Review length: 832 words • Review posted on September 10, 2013]