Cunning Folk: Popular Magic in English History

Cunning Folk: Popular Magic in English History. by means of Owen Davies. London: Hambledon and London, 2002 256 pp Illus. 1999 [pound sterling] (hbk) ISBN 1-85285-297-6

This eminent study examines the liminal world of cunning folk in England. It tread on the heels ofs a welcome trend begun through a number of studies in the 1970 which examined the composite nature of the "witch" general [i]or[/i] abstract notion by moderating the notion of a witch baseed in demonological theology and its focus upon demonic pact with elements drawn from a wider range of folk beliefs about weather magic, delight in charms, cures, and night-flying. As a accrue the role of the magician in the community became clearer and certainly more composite and the term "cunning folk" has become quite widely used in one as well as the other popular and academic contexts as an accepted and all-embracing confine for practitioners of popular magic in the pre-modern era. The focus has also shifted from the idea of a witch as a category to studies that are more likely to focus upon specific individuals and the social network in which they operated.

In his inquiry Davies uses both the mete "cunning folk" and the universal of popular magic and in a quite specific way. "Cunning folk" are practitioners who could be described as magicians in the widest faculty of perception Their activities included healing (both spiritual and medicinal), cursing, casting charms and horoscopes. These activities involved a certain number of degree of literacy, and practitioners who specialised in, say, fortune telling, are not central to his regards Chapters four and five overlay the subjects of written charms and printed sources in deepness and these too highlight figures with a stage of literacy. In line with this approach, the first sum of two units chapters consider the legal position of cunning folk and the attitudes towards them. The legal position of these nation is made the more interesting since, although there were prosecutions, they continued to practise completely through periods of active persecution. The size of the study concerns the activities of specific individuals working at a local horizontal and the ways in which their magical activities affected their social clumps is varied. Most of the examples demonstrate a material part of active belief from the next to the first half of the fourteenth hundred (the earliest period for which information upon "cunning folk" is abundant) to the intellectual change in the perception of the reality of magic. There are many instances in which "cunning folk" were called upon to neutralise the power of a witch, rituals that range from "scratching a witch," face-to fact confrontation and elaborate recipes for "witch-bottles." However, the clash of John Collier with the Lancashire cunning man George Clegg in 1752 illustrates the somewhat patronising attitude typical of educated eighteenth-century middle class who regarded cunning folk as fraudsters and their clients as benighted. Collier played a potentially dangerous quip on Clegg, ridiculed him in print and refused to pay him for the "horoscope" he had commissioned.

This is essentially a historical close attention of cunning folk, but it cast in a winding directions into relief a number of folklore bear upons Davies points out (pp. 53-4) by what mode the collection of popular beliefs and customs became a middle-class pastime during the nineteenth hundred and how this, and the rise of the popular pres with its fondnes for human interest stories and the "odd" provides evidence for the continuing function of the services that cunning folk provided, as well as evidence of changing attitudes to them. The final chapter deals briefly with cunning folk in the twentieth hundred Indeed, one suspects that individual could follow changing attitudes and continued reinterpretation of this kind of magic end to the contemporary academic belong to with the social and cultural function of magical beliefs that provides the audiences for of the like kind works as Owen's own of the first grade study.

Juliette thicket Cardiff University, Wales

COPYRIGHT 2006 Folklore Society

COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group