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Call Your Local Wizard

The medieval service magicians who would find missing spoons, identify a thief, or help you win at cards.

A “cunning” woman or man was a wise person specializing in “simple spells.” These included charms designed to find lost or stolen items, predict the future, inspire love, win disputes, heal illnesses, make money, and inflict revenge. They proliferated in the early modern period, and while Stanmore does not explore theories about what caused this in Cunning Folk, historians increasingly view Europe’s witch hunts as a symptom of social upheaval and competing faiths following the Reformation. “In England,” she writes, “only a handful of wise women and men were tried as witches: for every one that was, there would have been hundreds who continued their practices unhindered.” As peculiar as some of the spells described in Cunning Folk seem, as Stanmore observes, the motivations behind them are not just relatable, but expressive of eternal human concerns.

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