Cunning Folk
Life in the Era of Practical Magic
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Cunning Folk
Narrated by:
Anna Wilson-Jones
Buy Now for £14.09
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Narrated by:
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Anna Wilson-Jones
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By:
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Tabitha Stanmore
"Rich and lively."—New York Times Book Review
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.
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Critic reviews
With hundreds of colorful incidents drawn from legal records, court chronicles and contemporary accounts, Stanmore hopscotches through history, exploring the uses to which cunning folk were put.
Despite an eventual government crackdown on the dark arts, between the 14th and 17th centuries folk magic stayed very much alive across England, according to this rich and lively account. Everyone from courtiers to peasants secretly consulted diviners, astrologers, charm makers and healers. How effective were they? It’s impossible to know, but fun to speculate.
Charming . . . Stanmore persuasively argues that [the cunning folk's] stories provide a window on the everyday life of premodern Europeans that proves more intimate than other forms of history.
An insightful book about medieval life and the power of belief.
As Tabitha Stanmore delightfully recounts, magic played a major role in everyday life from the 1300s to the late 1600s, sometimes conducted by fraudsters but even more often by people who genuinely thought they had supernatural powers . . . Who could argue with Stanmore’s eloquent plea to treat the belief in magic by our ancestors with compassion rather than disdain? And, anyway, don’t we share their fascination in a magical universe?
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.
A delightful excursion . . . a window into the lives of medieval people whose worries pretty much line up with our own.
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.
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