Magic and Magicians is a volume of collected scholarship. Scholars interested in particular topics will find the quality of individual chapters generally quite good, but the volume as a whole does not have a driving focus or sharp organizing principle, as might be guessed from the broad subtitle.

Many chapters examine magic as a theme in literature, as, for example, Clason's chapter on the magic of love in Gottfried's Tristan and Wolfram's Parzival, and Pigg's exploration of magic and science in two of Chaucer's tales. Tormey takes a different approach, examining magical associations with blacksmiths across Germanic and Scandinavian literature. Other works focus on practitioners of magic and their opponents: Fanger expands on her work on John of Morigny by comparing his autobiographical writing to that of another premodern magician, the Tibetan monk Milarepa. Ayanna analyzes several smaller works of Heinrich Kramer to shed new light on his Malleus Maleficarum. Drawing attention to magic in art, Peacock's study of van Oostsanen's captivating painting “Saul and the Witch of Endor” is most welcome, especially with four full-color illustrations. Other works take a high-altitude look at overarching questions: Willard investigates “magic of the word” in a survey that extends from Isidore of Seville to Martin Delrio, and Coudert returns to Weber's disenchantment thesis to offer a revisionist rejection of it.

The most dissatisfying aspect of the volume is the editor's own 108-page introduction, in which he points to the church's opposition to magic as the volume's overarching theme. “What this book is all about,” Classen alerts the reader, is how the cult of magical practices was the church's “self-chosen enemy” against which it unrelentingly “battled” (2). Medieval and early modern, Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity (6, 24–25) are indicted ecumenically for dedicating themselves “from very early on” to eliminating magic “systematically, energetically, and sometimes even very aggressively” (39). “The Church persecuted anyone accused of practicing [magic],” with a wave of the hand toward Giordano Bruno as a case in point (67).

This framing confuses for two reasons: first, most of the chapters are, in fact, not about the church's opposition to magic, even less about its persecution, but, rather, about how creatively and diversely magical practices and discourses thrived within medieval and early modern worlds of literature, religion, and science. One walks away from the twenty-four contributions with the sense that magic flourished within this Christian society, not that it was persecuted. Second, reference to “the church” in the Middle Ages and early modern period is all but meaningless, and Classen neither persuasively designates a coherent institution nor effectively generalizes the range of agents operating under the rubric “Christian.” Whatever these persons and entities—popes, bishops, abbots, and priests; monasteries, orders, and provinces; schools and faculties; preachers, canonists, inquisitors, reformers, and theologians; the semi-religious and the laity; some learned, some illiterate; some orthodox, some heterodox—might have had in common, a stance toward magic (also a highly equivocal term) was not part of it, and certainly not over time. Classen ducks this problem.

What gets further lost with Classen's undifferentiated use of “the church” is all the subtlety that the individual contributors capture in their works about how magic was understood, utilized, and reacted to in premodern Christian society. Indeed, Classen's own chapter on the fifteenth-century poem Maligis offers the case of a magician not persecuted by “the church” but celebrated for the biblical authority of his expertise and for surpassing his contemporaries working in approved disciplines (544–45). Such chapters stimulate the reader to wonder what “the church” really was in light of this highly complex and ever-changing relationship between it and magic. A monolithic, persecuting church is certainly not what the chapters point to, but Classen sidesteps hard thinking about alternative descriptions that could accommodate the variegation in the evidence his contributors provide.

In well-edited volumes, the editors’ framing of issues can make the value of the whole greater than the sum of the parts. This volume, however, is merely as good as its parts.