Frank Klaassen is one of our most assiduous investigators of magical manuscripts, particularly in England, and one of our most insightful explicators of both the changes and the continuities in magical traditions from the late Middle Ages into the early modern period. Here he combines these approaches to powerful effect. This slim volume undertakes to edit and analyze two sixteenth-century magical texts. Because of Klaassen's attentive reading, they yield a treasure trove of information not only about magical practices themselves, but also about the intellectual and cultural contexts in which the texts were produced.

The first text is the so-called Antiphoner Notebook, a small, oblong manuscript constructed from the cutoff and folded-over margins of a Catholic liturgical text. It was written in the second half of the sixteenth century and is now preserved in the Bodleian Library. Its first few folios include a couple of somewhat lengthy rites for conjuration or divination, but mostly it contains short charms, often for healing or other practical purposes. Whoever wrote the text had some Latin, enough to understand and (often poorly) copy Latin formulas, but not enough to compose in the language. Klaassen speculates that the author may have been among the final generation in England to have imbibed Latin by hearing it in church. The most remarkable feature of this text is that it includes several charms drawn from Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft. Although famously a skeptic, Scot nevertheless described a number of magical rites in some detail, such that his condemnatory accounts were later mined by magical practitioners as a source of information. Although the author of the Antiphoner Notebook was a Protestant, he excised most of Scot's anti-Catholic passages, as well as, obviously, his condemnations of the practices he recorded. What emerges is a text that is in many ways faithful to medieval magical traditions.

The second text, now held in the British Library, is known as the Boxgrove Manual. It was copied by a scribe commissioned by the Protestant priest of Boxgrove parish, Sussex, at the very end of the sixteenth century. This scribe was probably not the author, and the text is a synthesis of various works of ritual magic translated into English. Since it draws on the 1578 edition of Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia, it was clearly written in the late sixteenth century. In using Agrippa to provide some framework for its rituals, the work is fairly typical of its time. Klaassen stresses that, of all the magical texts produced by famous mages associated with the Renaissance, only Agrippa's work was widely influential among more ordinary magical practitioners. Since Agrippa offered a framework in which magical operations could be understood but did not provide instructive details, it was left to more commonplace works such as this compilation to connect his magical philosophy with actual rites.

As Klaassen expertly demonstrates, these two texts exemplify a number of transitions in the practice of magic and in the cultural context surrounding such practices: from Latin to vernacular, from clerical to lay, and from a world in which magical rites (even common charms) were often intimately connected to the rituals and formulas of the medieval liturgy to a world that, in England by the end of the sixteenth century, was becoming solidly Protestant. Through his close textual analysis, Klassen shows how the advent of Protestantism altered some aspects of magical operations but did not fundamentally disenchant the world. Even more importantly, though, he can show what did not change about magic in this period of tremendous intellectual and religious upheaval. With the exception of Agrippa, the great figures of Renaissance magic—Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, or even Dee in England—play no role here. The magic in these manuals, the practices sought out and presumably employed by what Klaassen likes to call ordinary magic enthusiasts, was drawn from late medieval traditions, remade and repackaged for a new world, and did not reflect any aspects of Hermeticism or Cabala that are often seen as constitutive of early modern magic. This is an important conclusion, here brilliantly demonstrated through two ordinary but exemplary texts now accessible to both scholars and students.