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U B
 THE MAGIC IN HISTORY SERIES

FORBIDDEN RITES
A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century
Richard Kieckhefer
CONJURING SPIRITS
Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic
Claire Fanger
RITUAL MAGIC
Elizabeth M. Butler
THE FORTUNES OF FAUST
Elizabeth M. Butler
THE BATHHOUSE AT MIDNIGHT
An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia
W. F. Ryan
SPIRITUAL AND DEMONIC MAGIC
From Ficino to Campanella
D. P. Walker
ICONS OF POWER
Ritual Practices in Late Antiquity
Naomi Janowitz
BATTLING DEMONS
Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages
Michael D. Bailey
PRAYER, MAGIC, AND THE STARS IN THE LATE ANCIENT AND ANTIQUE WORLD
Scott Noegel
Joel Walker
Brannon Wheeler
BINDING WORDS
Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages
Don C. Skemer
STRANGE REVELATIONS
Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV’s France
Lynn Wood Mollenauer
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Manuscripts of Learned Magic in the Medieval Libraries in Central Europe
Benedek Láng

The Magic in History series explores the role magic and the occult have played in European culture, religion,
science, and politics. Titles in the series will bring the resources of cultural, literary, and social history to
bear on the history of the magic arts, and will contribute towards an understanding of why the theory and
practice of magic have elicited fascination at every level of European society. Volumes will include both
editions of important texts and significant new research in the field.
 M       H      

U B
M  L M
  M L
 C E

B L

    

 , 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Láng, Benedek, 1974–

Unlocked books : manuscripts of learned magic in the
medieval libraries of Central Europe / Benedek Láng.
p. cm.—(Magic in history series)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
Summary: “Presents and analyzes texts of learned magic written
in medieval Central Europe (Poland, Bohemia, and
Hungary), and attempts to identify their authors, readers,
and collectors”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-271-03377-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Magic—Manuscripts.
2. Manuscripts, Medieval.
I. Title.

BF1593.L36 2008
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 C

L  I vii

A ix
L  A xiii
I: I S  M S 1

PART ONE: MAGIC

1 D  C 17

PART TWO: TEXTS AND HANDBOOKS

I: T S 
M 47
2 N M 51
3 I M 79
4 D  D 123
5 A 144
6 R M  C 162

PART THREE: READERS AND COLLECTORS

I: T M 
I  S 191
7 M   C C 194
8 M   C C 209
9 M   U C 241
vi C

C: Seven Questions 265

E: When Central Europe Was Finally Close
to Becoming a Center for Magical Studies 276
A 281
S B 295
D  S M 319
G I 329
I  M 333
 I

1 Magical cure against toothache. Prague, PNK XI C 2, fol. 146v.

Courtesy of the Národní knihovna ČR. 66
2 Bellifortis: a military instrument. Göttingen, Universitätsbibliothek,
Cod. Philos. 63, fol. 109r. Courtesy of the Universitätsbibliothek. 73
3 Bellifortis: a military instrument. Göttingen, Universitätsbibliothek,
Cod. Philos. 63, fol. 38v. Courtesy of the Universitätsbibliothek. 74
4 Bellifortis: summoning of spirits. Göttingen, Universitätsbibliothek,
Cod. Philos. 63, fol. 94r. Courtesy of the Universitätsbibliothek. 75
5 De septem quadraturis planetarum. Kraków, BJ 793, fol. 60r.
Courtesy of the Biblioteka Jagiellońska. 84
6 Geomantic divination. Kraków, BJ 793, fol. 67r. Courtesy of the
Biblioteka Jagiellońska. 86
7 Geomantic divination. Kraków, BJ 793, fol. 71v. Courtesy of the
Biblioteka Jagiellońska. 87
8 Geomantic divination. Kraków, BJ 793, fol. 73v. Courtesy of the
Biblioteka Jagiellońska. 88
9 Geomantic divination. Kraków, BJ 793, fol. 75r. Courtesy of the
Biblioteka Jagiellońska. 89
10 Sphera Pythagorae. Kraków, BJ 793, fol. 86r. Courtesy of the
Biblioteka Jagiellońska. 90
11 Picatrix: planetary figures. Kraków, BJ 793, fol. 190r. Courtesy of the
Biblioteka Jagiellońska. 99
12 Picatrix: planetary figures. Kraków, BJ 793, fol. 191v. Courtesy of the
Biblioteka Jagiellońska. 100
13 Picatrix: decanic figures. Kraków, BJ 793, fol. 193v. Courtesy of the
Biblioteka Jagiellońska. 101
14 Picatrix: decanic figures. Kraków, BJ 793, fol. 197r. Courtesy of the
Biblioteka Jagiellońska. 102
15 Liber runarum: magical runes. SLB N 100, fol. 198r. Courtesy of
the Sächsische Landesbibliothek. 111
viii L  I

16 Liber runarum: magical runes. BAV Pal. Lat. 1439, fol. 348r.
© Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican). 112
17 Rota runarum. BAV Pal. Lat. 1439, fol. 199r. © Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican). 113
18 De imaginibus septem planetarum by Belenus: karacteres planetarum.
BAV Pal. Lat. 1375, fol. 270v. © Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
(Vatican). 117
19 Chiromantia delineata. Kraków, BJ 551, fol. 117r. Courtesy of the
Biblioteka Jagiellońska. 127
20 Ciromantia ex diversis libris collecta. BAV Pal. Lat. 1396, fol. 91r.
© Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican). 129
21 Sphera Pythagorae with a cryptographic title. BAV Pal. Lat. 1375, fol.
44r. © Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican). 131
22 Cryptographic alphabets. BAV Pal. Lat. 1375, fol. 19r. © Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican). 132
23 Sphera Pythagorae. Prague, PNK I F 35, fol. 60v. Courtesy of the
Národní knihovna ČR. 133
24 Magical mirror. Dresden, Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon,
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen. Photo by Peter Müller. 139
25 Drawing on Solomon’s rings. Prague, PNK I F 35, fol. 466v.
Courtesy of the Národní knihovna ČR. 141
26 The Holy Spirit as the supervisor of the alchemical process. Kraków,
BJ 837, fol. 9v. Courtesy of the Biblioteka Jagiellońska. 153
27 Alchemical retort. Kraków, BJ 837, fol. 10r. Courtesy of the
Biblioteka Jagiellońska. 154
28 Magical mirror from Rostock. Drawing by W. L. Braekman (Societas
Magica Newsletter, Winter 2001). Reproduced with the kind
permission of W. L. Braekman. 171
29 The prayer book of Wladislas: the king and the crystal. Oxford,
Bodleian Library, Rawl. liturg. d. 6, fol. 15r. Courtesy of
the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 176
30 The prayer book of Wladislas: the king and the angels. Oxford,
Bodleian Library, Rawl. liturg. d. 6, fol. 72r. Courtesy of
the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 177
 I:
I S  M S

There is a rather curious handwritten note in the first page of the British Library’s
copy of a printed reference book that was widely read in the sixteenth century, the
Locorum communium collectanea by Johannes Manlius, “In this interesting book
the first authentic notice of the Magician Dr Faustus is to be found at p. 43.”1 On
page 43, following a report on Abbot Trithemius (who, according to the author,
was a great magician), there are indeed a few paragraphs on the famous figure whose
legend soon became a popular literary topic. There it states that Faustus, “when
he was a student in Kraków, studied magic, as this art was at the time widely used
and publicly practiced there.”2 This statement appears in Manlius’s book as part of
common knowledge, and it soon became in fact generally accepted. Another, slightly
later source relying heavily on Manlius, the Dies caniculares by Simon Maiolus, re-
peats the claims that a Johannes Faustus studied magic in Kraków, where—accord-
ing to Maiolus—it was publicly taught.3
The general approval of a proposition, however, is not necessarily related to its
truth value. This sentence, for example, has a number of untrue implications. It
asserts, first of all, that the man who was to become the archetype of human deal-
ings with the devil did exist and was called Johannes. Now, philological investiga-
tions have established that the historical Faustus did indeed exist, but he was not
called Johannes at all, but rather Georgius. Second, Manlius says that he studied in
Kraków—at least for a time. Again, this seems to be false, for there is no historical

1. British Library, London, 12209.b.1.

2. “Hic cum esset scholasticus Cracoviensis, ibi magiam didicerat, sicut ibi olim fuit ejus mag-
nus usus, et ibidem fuerunt publicae ejusdem artis professiones.” Johannes Manlius, Locorum commu-
nium collectanea (Basel: Johannes Oporius, 1563), 43.
3. “Johannes Faustus qui Cracoviae magiam, ubi ea publice olim docebatur, didicerat.” Simon
Maiolus, Dies Caniculares (Moguntiae: Johannes Theobaldus Schönmetter, 1615), 601.
2 I

evidence that Faustus was ever in Poland.4 Finally, Manlius explicitly states that
Faustus went to Kraków to study magic because this art was publicly practiced—
in Maiolus’s words, even instructed—in the famous university town.
It is widely known that according to certain popular beliefs, magicians were
wandering students who learned magic from books by great intellectual effort in
special schools.5 Such schools were located, for example, in Salamanca and Toledo.
It is quite understandable why these Iberian towns had such a reputation: they
were located at the meeting point of three—the Arabic, the Christian, and the Jew-
ish—cultures, and it was through them that the Latin Middle Ages imported the
new learning. This was where the Western world had been confronted with—and
started to translate—the Arabic scientific corpus. This cultural import included at
least as much astrology, talismanic magic, and alchemy as mathematics, philoso-
phy, optics, and physics. It is not surprising, therefore, that a whole tradition of
topoi had presented Toledo as an international center of the black arts, divination,
and demonic magic, ever since the first scientific and magical texts were translated.6
This conviction was so strong that the “notory art,” described in a widespread text
of medieval ritual magic, the Ars notoria, was also called the “art of Toledo.”7 To
give another example: a source pertaining to the same genre of learned magic, the
Liber iuratus Honorii (Sworn Book of Honorius) purports to report a general synod
of magicians arriving from three cities: Naples, Athens, and Toledo. Even as late
as the sixteenth century, François Rabelais wrote of a “faculté diabologique” func-
tioning in Toledo.8
However, why Kraków had a reputation as a center of magic is far from being so

4. Frank Baron, Doctor Faustus: From History to Legend (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1978),
11–16 and 84.
5. See Ladislaus Toth, “Savoir et pouvoir par les livres de magie,” Aries 15 (1993): 13–25, on folk
beliefs. On the literary tradition concerning schools of magic, see P. Jacoby, “Hochschulen der Zau-
berei,” in Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, ed. Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, 10 vols. (Leipzig:
Walter de Gruyter, 1927–42). On the image of the magician (especially Virgil, Talesin, Merlin,
Michael Scot, and Roger Bacon) in medieval popular beliefs, see Juliette Wood, “Virgil and Talesin:
The Concept of the Magician in Medieval Folklore,” Folklore 94 (1983): 91–104.
6. The first Latin authors responsible for this tradition were William of Malmesbury and Cae-
sarius of Heisterbach; see Klaus Herbers, “Wissenskontakte und Wissensvermittung in Spanien,” in
Artes im Mittelalter, ed. Ursula Schaefer (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), esp. 244–47, and Jacoby,
“Hochschulen der Zauberei.”
7. Among other examples, it was thus called by the fourteenth-century Burgundian Laurens
Pignon; see Jan R. Veenstra, Magic and Divination in Burgundy and France: Text and Context of Lau-
rens Pignon’s “Contre les devineurs” (1411) (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 293–94. Since the Ars notoria de-
scribes exactly the kind of magic that provides better memory and competence in the liberal arts,
the association of Toledo with the notory art is a telling indication that proficiency in the new learn-
ing and magic were intermingled.
8. François Rabelais, Pantagruel: Le Tiers Livre, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Librairie Gallimard,
1951), 3:433.
 I S  M S 3

obvious. While it might have been a commonplace in Manlius’s times that Kraków
had once been a center for magical studies, it is far from evident today what the
source of this conviction was. Did Kraków really possess a particularly magical
milieu?
My book has succeeded if, by its end, its readers feel that they have received suf-
ficient information to answer this question. More precisely, I will focus on not
only Kraków but all of Central Europe, as seen through contemporary manu-
scripts. Even though I cannot promise to identify a public school for the black arts
functioning in the medieval territories of Poland, Hungary, or Bohemia—as magic
was never instructed officially and openly in any medieval school or university in
Europe—a large number of instructive cases will compensate the reader for the
frustration caused by the lack of a department of necromancy: among them, a king
summoning angels and peering into a crystal ball in order to learn the hidden
intentions of his people and the secrets of the material world; an engineer design-
ing terrifying siege-guns and powerful catapults, whose military manual contains
the first medieval depiction of the Archimedes’ screw, but also various magical
methods to occupy castles (one of which requires the fat of a hanged man); an exe-
cutioner and torturer who starts collecting handbooks on magic and reeducates
himself as a magician; an alchemist of a royal court who finds the text of the Chris-
tian Mass the most convenient model for describing the secret process of trans-
mutation; and a medical doctor educated in the best schools of Montpellier, on
whose advice princes and peasants collected snakes and frogs with their bare hands
and consumed them for medicinal purposes. Nevertheless, the main focus will be
the university masters whose libraries include—besides a large number of scientific
treatises—some surprising items pertaining to the field of learned magic: hand-
written notes scattered in the blank pages of the codices on how to learn about the
outcome of various enterprises or illnesses; human hands drawn with great care
indicating the main lines of fate for the purposes of palmistry; texts of natural
magic which include various recipes using animal substances used for magical pur-
poses; the earliest surviving version of the great handbook of talismans and ritual
magic, the Picatrix, which is in fact the only copy containing the illustrations of
the half-animal half-human creatures described in the text; and finally the Liber
runarum ( The Book of Runes) containing the names of angels transcribed in Scan-
dinavian runes, which bear special powers and are supposed to be engraved on talis-
mans in order to activate their benign or malign influence. Thus, although Faustus
probably never studied magic in Kraków, Prague, or Buda, it is possible to com-
pile a bibliography of the texts he would have used if he had.
For the sake of clarity, the texts under investigation will be classified into cer-
tain categories. The first comprises the relatively innocent practices of natural magic,
which operate through the secret correspondences of the world and the hidden
4 I

properties of objects. Then come the more manipulative methods of image (in
other words, talismanic or celestial) magic, which work with names and figures
engraved in specific stones and metals. The last is that of ritual (or ceremonial) magic,
which relies on the invocation of angels and demons, and which is somewhere on
the borderline between magic and religion. These categories, with which I will
operate throughout my study, will be carefully defined in the Chapter 1. For the
moment, it is enough to emphasize that although the threefold distinction of nat-
ural, image, and ritual magic is a helpful framework for the classification of medi-
eval magical texts,9 the borders between these subcategories will not always be clear.
It is much harder to account for the inclusion of two further categories, the div-
inatory material (including geomancy and palmistry) and the alchemical sources.
These arts share with magic the characteristic of being frequently condemned; nev-
ertheless, they were not necessarily seen as branches of magic, and—as it will be
argued in due course—were condemned for reasons different from those mar-
shaled against talismanic and ritual magic. But as the borderlines in the field of
magic are fuzzy, I tended to be inclusive rather than exclusive. Therefore, divina-
tion is also incorporated in this study, considering the fact that texts on divination
often traveled together with texts on natural and image magic. Evidence of alchemy,
as provided by a couple of Central European sources, will also be presented, first
because it seems to supplement the picture on the readership of magic in that era,
and second because I—like most modern readers—am somewhat imprisoned in
the modern categorization of magic, which undeniably includes alchemy. It is
important to always bear in mind that the modern and medieval categories of
magic, science, and religion do not necessarily coincide.
No similar admission is made in this book regarding purely astrological texts,
even though nowadays astrology might also seem to be a part of magic. It is of pri-
mary importance to remember that there is no necessary link between the two
fields. Astrology was taught in certain universities,10 magic never, or at least not as
part of the curriculum. Even though certain elements of astrology provoked serious

9. When applying this distinction, I generally follow the structure of two recently defended doc-
toral dissertations: Frank Klaassen’s “Religion, Science, and the Transformations of Magic: Manu-
scripts of Magic, 1300–1600” (Ph.D. diss., Department of History, University of Toronto, 1999)—
its published version is forthcoming in the Magic in History series by the Pennsylvania State Uni-
versity Press, and Sophie Page’s “Magic at St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, in the Late Middle Ages”
(Ph.D. diss., Warburg Institute, University of London, 2000). It is worth adding, however, that Frances
Amelia Yates has already applied a somewhat similar threefold typology to her Renaissance material:
natural-celestial-ritual magic. See, for example, Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tra-
dition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).
10. On general overviews concerning the role of astrology (interrelated with astronomy and med-
icine) in university curricula and the medieval philosophy of nature, see Richard Lemay, “The Teaching
of Astronomy in Medieval Universities, Principally at Paris in the Fourteenth Century,” Manuscripta
19 (1975): 197–217, and Lemay, “The True Place of Astrology in Medieval Science and Philosophy:
 I S  M S 5

theological debates, such as the concept of the Great Year (which implied that
earthly history is fundamentally periodical, which contradicted the teaching of the
church)11 and the effect of the stars on particular events and on human free will,12
general astrological principles in a more innocent form were relatively well accepted
as a part of medical training, and as functional elements of natural philosophy.13
The idea that the incorruptible, perfect, and divine celestial regions exercise an
influence over the corruptible earthly bodies was supported not only by the argu-
ments of Aristotle and Ptolemy—the two main authorities of antiquity in the field
of celestial sciences—but also by empirical evidence. Celestial causal superiority is
evident in the influence of the sun on temperature, rain, and the cycle of seasons;
or the power of the moon on the ebb and flow of the tides; not to mention that a
sophisticated system had been worked out relating the sections of the zodiac, the
planets, and the various parts of the human body. In addition, experience—under-
stood in the medieval sense of the word—suggested that celestial virtues influ-
enced metals (think of the behavior of the magnet, which was a frequent subject
in the discussions of natural philosophy), and the association of planets with met-
als (the sun with gold, the moon with silver, and so on) was regarded as valid in
general, not just in alchemical considerations.
Second, astrology is excluded for regional reasons: although the readers and
scribes of magical texts in Central Europe were often concerned with the celestial
sciences, and are to be found among the circle of university professors, students of
astrology, and courtly astrologers, this correlation does not work in the other direc-
tion: the majority of these astrologers were not involved in magic. In brief, astrology
was a fully fledged discipline in its own right in the fifteenth century, but magic was
never officially studied or practiced, and if certain philosophers (who will be intro-
duced in the next chapter) proved tolerant of some of its forms, magical texts never
entered the university curriculum. Therefore, I will frequently touch upon the issue
of astrology while looking at the use and the codicological context of magical works,
but I will not, however, include astrological sources in the textual analysis.

Towards a Definition,” in Astrology, Science and Society: Historical Essays, ed. Patrick Curry (Wood-
bridge: Boydell, 1987), 57–73. On the requirements expected from a doctor to lecture in astrology
at Bologna, see Lynn Thorndike, ed., University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1944; repr., New York: Octagon Books, 1971), 282.
11. Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1994), 498.
12. Krzystof Pomian, “Astrology as a Naturalistic Theology of History,” in Astrologi Hallucinati,
ed. Paola Zambelli (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986), 29–43.
13. Edward Grant, “Medieval and Renaissance Scholastic Conceptions of the Influence of the
Celestial Region on the Terrestrial,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17 (1987): 1–23; John
D. North, “Medieval Concepts of Celestial Influence: A Survey,” in Curry, Astrology, Science and
Society, 5–18.
6 I

Further limitations to this study are linguistic. The focus of the research is pre-
dominantly on Latin texts. This is not due to the complete lack of vernacular
sources. Although no such examples have been found in Hungarian, the fifteenth
century no doubt witnessed the translation of divinatory and natural magic texts
into German and Czech. Again, these sources will not be ignored completely; how-
ever, proper research into the vernacular texts of learned magic (finding the Latin
original, identifying the additional elements coming from local sources, and so on)
would require a separate study.14
Nevertheless, the presentation and close reading of basic texts form only the first
objective of my investigations. Once the examples of magic have been collected,
and their codicological contexts examined (to determine which texts travel alone
in the manuscript tradition, and which ones occur together with other genres), the
main concern of the book is to explore and characterize the circle of people who
wrote, copied, collected, used, and read these manuscripts to the extent that the
evidence will permit. The historian’s work is then to identify which texts travel inde-
pendently in the codices, and—provided two or more magical texts find them-
selves bound together regularly—what characteristics of theirs made the collector
believe that they belong together.15
While only in some exceptional cases are the specific owners known, it is often
possible to identify the social stratum to which they belonged. Richard Kieckhe-
fer calls the owners and users of manuscripts of magic the “clerical underworld”;16
others attribute this practice generally to the lower clergy.17 William Eamon speaks
about the rise of an “intellectual proletariat, a group composed of university-
educated laymen who had failed to find useful or permanent employment.”18 An
“underworld of learning,” clerics, medical doctors, and members of universities

14. For research on German divinatory texts, see, for example, Elisabeth Wade, “A Fragmentary
German Divination Device: Medieval Analogues and Pseudo-Lullian Tradition,” in Conjuring Spir-
its: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic, ed. Claire Fanger (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1998), 87–109.
15. This is one of the main focuses of Frank Klaassen’s “English Manuscripts of Magic, 1300–
1500: A Preliminary Survey,” in Fanger, Conjuring Spirits, 3–31. As Klaassen stresses, even the man-
uscripts without any identified owner “give us access to the world view of their authors, scribes and
collectors, and frequently betray a great deal about these individuals their professions, names, educa-
tion, status, or relative wealth” (3).
16. Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
151–75.
17. See, for example, Stanisław Bylina, “La prédication, les croyances et les pratiques tradition-
nelles en Pologne au bas Moyen Âge,” in L’Église et le peuple chrétien dans les pays de l’Europe du Centre-
Est et du Nord (XIVe–XVe siècles) (Rome: École française de Rome, 1990), 301–13.
18. William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern
Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 69. Eamon refers to R. R. Bolgar, The Classical
Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 178. See also Alexan-
der Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), chap. 9.
 I S  M S 7

could have been the real necromancers and practitioners of magic, or at least the
readers of occult texts. Their curiosity in experimental and occult studies, their
education, profession, background, convictions, and wishes can be inferred from
the books they collected. And then, reconstructing the university careers, training,
interests, and libraries of the compilers and owners of the given texts helps us
understand the role of the magical books that lined their shelves and the place of
magical beliefs in their conceptual schemes.
Similar questions are to be raised in a Central European context. What is known
about the people who wrote, copied, and used magical texts? Did Central Europe
have its own magicians, or was the presence of sources on magic nothing more than
the result of simple incidental curiosity of well-known intellectuals at the univer-
sities and the courts? In other words, in what stratum of the social hierarchy should
one look for the readers: among the anonymous clerics and ordinary masters, or
in the group of highly respected scholars? Did the scribes add their own inven-
tions to the field of magic, or did they merely follow Western practices? Did they
belong to the local “clerical underworld”? (And on a more general level: what are
the boundaries of this underworld?) Furthermore, were the compilers and the col-
lectors educated at Polish, Bohemian, or Hungarian universities? Did they possess
such handbooks for personal use or out of pure curiosity?19
Throughout this study, “Central Europe” will designate the geographical and
political entity that lies beyond the limits of the first expansion of the Western bar-
barian peoples, the Carolingian Empire, but which did not belong under the direct
sphere of Byzantine influence, and could therefore join Western Europe around
.. 1000. ( This happened simultaneously with the process of the North’s inclu-
sion in the enlarged notion of the West, while Southeastern Europe found itself
under the aegis of Byzantium.) Central Europe comprises the countries of three
Christian states, whose political developments show genuine resemblances: Poland,
Bohemia, and Hungary. Strictly speaking, the territory covered here should be
referred to as “East-Central Europe,” since what is usually understood as “Central
Europe” is supposed to include Austria, Italy, and—partially at least—Germany as
well. In the following, however, for the sake of simplicity and brevity, I will refrain
from operating with such difficult expressions. I will apply the simpler term “Cen-
tral Europe” when referring to Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, not denying the
fact that this notion has been the subject of long theoretical debates.20 Since my

19. This approach is in many ways similar to that of the scholars dealing with the “history of
reading.” See Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, eds., Histoire de la lecture dans le monde occi-
dentale (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1997), and Roger Chartier, L’Ordre des livres (Paris: Alinea, 1992).
20. The classic study on the internal borders of Europe and on the medieval notion of Central
Europe is Jenő Szűcs, “The Three Historical Regions of Europe: An Outline,” Acta Historica Acade-
miae Scientiarum Hungaricae 29 (1983): 131–84. Further considerations on this issue, with special
8 I

research is related to the medieval emergence of courts, institutions, and libraries,

by and large I will concentrate on Kraków, Prague, and Buda, not neglecting of
course towns of lower political significance, insofar as ecclesiastical formations and
book collections can be associated with them.
As far as manuscripts are concerned, the eastern boundary of Central Europe
is very clear: beyond this region sources are written in a different language; they
belong to a different manuscript tradition, even though occasionally this border is
permeable.21 The southern borders are more cultural than political: while the history
of medieval Croatia is closely associated with that of Hungary, and consequently
falls under the scope of the present inquiry, Istria and Dalmatia had a separate
history in the Middle Ages, dominated by Italian influence. Therefore, the famous
alchemical text Pretiosa margarita novella, composed in Pula by Petrus Bonus, a
native of Ferrara, will not be treated together with Bohemian, Polish, and Hun-
garian sources on alchemy.22

attention to the patterns of university foundations in the region, are Gábor Klaniczay, “Late Medieval
Central European Universities: Problems of their Comparative History,” in Universitas Budensis,
1395–1995, ed. László Szögi and Júlia Varga (Budapest: Bak-Fisch, 1997), 171–82, and “Medieval
Central Europe: An Invention or a Discovery?” in The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences, ed.
Lord Dahrendorf, Yehuda Elkana, et al. (Budapest: CEU Press, 2000), 251–64. On the birth of
medieval Central Europe, see also Aleksander Gieysztor, L’Europe nouvelle autour de l’An Mil. La
Papauté, l’Empire et les “nouveaux venus” (Rome: Unione Internazionale degli Istituti di Archeologia,
1997). For a helpful historiographic survey on the formation of the idea of Central Europe in the
secondary literature, see Gábor Klaniczay, “The Birth of a New Europe about .. 1000: Conver-
sion, Transfer of Institution Models, New Dynamics,” in Eurasian Transformations, Tenth to Thirteenth
Centuries: Crystallizations, Divergences, Renaissance, ed. Johann P. Arnason and Björn Wittrock (Lei-
den: Brill, 2004).
21. William Francis Ryan has researched Eastern Slavic (especially Russian) magical sources; see
especially The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (Stroud:
Sutton, 1999), and “Magic and Divination: Old Russian Sources,” in The Occult in Russian and Soviet
Culture, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 35–58. See also the
following: Ihor Ševčenko, “Remarks on the Diffusion of Byzantine Scientific and Pseudo-Scientific
Literature Among the Orthodox Slavs,” Slavonic and East European Review 59 (1981): 321–45;
Mirko Dražen Grmek, Les sciences dans les manuscripts slaves orientaux du Moyen Âge (Paris: Univer-
sité de Paris, 1959); and Grmek, “Les Sciences chez les Slaves au Moyen Âge,” in Histoire générale
des sciences, vol. 1, La science antique et médiévale, ed. René Taton (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1966), 557–67.
22. Still, if someone is interested in science and magic in Dalmatia, the following will be help-
ful: Žarko Dadić, Egzaktne Znanosti Hrvatskoga Srednjovjekovlja (Zagreb: Globus, 1991), and Mirko
Dražen Grmek, “The Life and Astrological-Medical Ideas of Federik Grisogono of Zadar,” Medical
Journal (Zagreb) 92 (1970): 34–42. For a helpful bibliography of Grmek’s further works related
to this field, see Danielle Gourevitch, ed., Maladie et Maladies: histoire et conceptualization: Mélanges
en l’Honneur de Mirko Grmek (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1992), xvi–xlv. A potential reader interested
in Petrus Bonus of Ferrara might want to consult Chiara Crisciani’s study, “The Conception of
Alchemy as Expressed in the Pretiosa Margarita Novella of Petrus Bonus of Ferrara,” Ambix 20
(1973): 165–81.
 I S  M S 9

The western boundaries of my region are somewhat less clear, and defined accord-
ing to different, rather practical considerations. Eastern Germany, Austria, and Italy
are historically and politically closely related to Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland.
Culturally, these countries formed an organic unity; Polish, Bohemian, and Hun-
garian students frequently studied in German and Italian universities, while German
and Italian humanists and professors often came to Central European institutions.
Apparently, political boundaries did not present any obstacle. However, the source
materials provided by Italy, Austria, and Germany are substantially different both
in quantity and quality. In the present study, I intend to rely on a well-defined and
delimited Polish, Bohemian, and Hungarian sample. It follows that I will not pre-
sent a systematic survey of the magical manuscripts of Vienna23 or Erfurt,24 for ex-
ample, because such an attempt would go beyond the scope of a single book, but
whenever the traces lead to the West, I intend to follow them naturally, and I will
include occasionally material from beyond the western limits of my area. The reason
for this is that Central European universities were founded at much the same time
and in much the same way as the universities of the German-language area (Heidel-
berg, Cologne, Leipzig, and Erfurt), and that political boundaries did not stop the
wandering students of the fifteenth century. Their “homeland”—the university—
was an international formation,25 and they traveled freely, without paying much
attention to national divisions, carrying their books, that is, my sources, with them.
Having thus acquainted ourselves with the idea of Central Europe, it is still not
quite clear why this region should be treated separately as far as the texts of learned
magic are concerned. In other words: what is so distinctive in this region with
respect to the field of magic?
Two answers can be given to this question. The first is related to a tendency
already pointed out by the scholarship dealing with the diffusion of Arabic magi-
cal texts in Western Europe: copies of magical texts “found an attentive audience
only after about . . . 1400 in Central Europe.”26 Put differently, the answers to the
questions posed in this book can be found in fifteenth-century manuscripts. The
second characteristic feature of this area is a relative tolerance shown toward texts

23. The exclusion of Vienna may seem particularly arbitrary, since the University of Vienna was
founded roughly the same time as the universities of Prague, Kraków, and Pécs, and Vienna itself
lies almost two hundred kilometers east of Prague, and thus must be considered Central European.
My reasons, I repeat, are merely functional; Vienna alone possesses more extensive manuscript hold-
ings than all the libraries where I carried out systematic searches.
24. A fruitful field of research might be based on the twenty treatises on magic in the fifteenth-
century library of Erfurt. See David Pingree, “The Diffusion of Arabic Magical Texts in Western
Europe,” in La diffusione delle scienze Islamiche nel Medio Evo Europeo, ed. B. Scarcia Amoretti (Rome:
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1987), 58 n. 1.
25. On the metaphor, see Klaniczay, “Late Medieval Central European Universities.”
26. Pingree, “Diffusion,” esp. 79 and 59.
10 I

on learned magic. This tolerance—which I definitely do not want to overstate—

is to be understood by Western European standards. While in Paris, statutes and
theological declarations condemning various forms and practices of magic were
issued one after the other in the later Middle Ages, in Central Europe it was appar-
ently without the slightest sign of fear of prosecution that university students and
professors kept magical items in their libraries.
Because the two phenomena are closely related, they can be investigated in par-
allel. In order to understand why magical texts arrived in Central Europe with
such a considerable delay, it is necessary to observe the particular traits of the intel-
lectual history of the area. Roughly speaking, the use and copying of magical texts
presupposes the presence of a certain learned culture, and the emergence of a suffi-
cient number of learned scribes, compilers, and book collectors to sustain such a
culture requires an intellectual milieu that only universities, monasteries, and royal
or episcopal courts can provide.
The date suggested as the arrival of the magical texts in Central Europe coin-
cides with the time of the reorganization of the University of Kraków (originally
founded in 1364). After the death of its founder, King Casimir the Great, the uni-
versity fell into a state of decline that ended only thanks to a new stimulus received
from Queen Jadwiga, in the last years of the fourteenth century. This renewal opened
up a golden age in the life of the university, in which, in the first half of the fif-
teenth century, two private chairs were founded especially for the studies of astron-
omy and astrology. These chairs yielded many new astronomical and astrological
works, and provided the history of science with several generations of astronomers,
while supplying various clerical and secular courts of Central Europe with thor-
oughly trained astrologers. Because of this flourishing, the University of Kraków
became an international center of astronomy as well as of astrology, and it had an
extensive relationship with other centers in Bologna, Paris, Vienna, and the royal
court of Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary. Probably without exaggeration, the
contemporaries merely noted that “Kraków is stuffed with astrologers.”27
The Prague milieu, in contrast, was somewhat less astrologically oriented. On
the one hand, interest in alchemy was already present in Bohemia two hundred
years before its late sixteenth-century apogee at the time of Emperor Rudolf II.
This interest or even practice of the science of alchemy was probably stronger than
a pure curiosity on the part of a confined intellectual circle, because we have an
alchemical work dating from the middle of the fifteenth century written in the
vernacular, that is, in Czech.28 On the other hand, natural and image magic, as

27. “Cracovia astrologis referta est.” Aleksander Birkenmajer, Études d’histoire des sciences en Pologne,
Studia Copernicana 4 (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1972), 491.
28. See Chapter 5, note 41, and the accompanying text.
 I S  M S 11

well as divination, are well represented in the manuscript collections of the first
university of Central Europe in Prague. Apart from the university, the monastic
context must have also provided fertile ground for an interest in magic: a number of
magical texts have come to us from the Augustinian libraries of Třeboň and Brno.
Finally, the southernmost intellectual center of the time (no less interested in
the celestial sciences) was the court of King Matthias of Hungary. King Matthias’s
enthusiasm for Renaissance Neoplatonic philosophy, his fascination with Hermet-
ism, reflected also by the books of his famous Corvinian Library, his enthusiastic
correspondence with Marsilio Ficino, the other Italian humanists staying and work-
ing in his court, are described by contemporary sources and researched by modern
studies. According to Antonio Bonfini, one of the learned Italians staying in the
royal household, members of the court were deeply concerned with Neoplaton-
ism, and the names of Plato, Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, Hermes Trismegistos,
Zoroaster, Orpheus, Plotinus, and Pythagoras were mentioned in philosophical
discussions on a day-to-day basis.29 It is also often emphasized that King Matthias
invited great experts of astronomy and astrology, such as the Pole Martin Bylica
of Olkusz, the Königsberg-born Johannes Regiomontanus, and perhaps even the
Italian Galeotto Marzio to the newly founded university in Pozsony (present-day
Bratislava), the so-called Academia Istropolitana.30 Astrology was taken so seri-
ously that Matthias consulted his court astrologer before campaigns and had the
horoscope of his new university prepared.
This was the institutional milieu that served as fruitful soil, not only for the
development of the celestial sciences, but also for a deep interest in magic. The
intellectual centers listed so far copied and produced a considerable number of texts
belonging to each branch of magic. In various courts of kings, archbishops, bishops,
dukes, and princes, as well as in the newly founded Central European universities,
a new type of intellectual found himself in a peculiar and convenient place for sat-
isfying his interest and getting involved in research.
Yet is it possible to claim that Central Europe was the birthplace of a “center of
magical studies”?31
Anticipating one of the negative conclusions of my research (partly in order to
avoid hasty misinterpretations), let me emphasize here that there is no reason to
suppose that magic played any genuine role in late medieval Kraków, Prague, or
29. Antonius Bonfini, Symposium de virginitate et pudicitia coniugali, ed. Stephanus Apró (Buda-
pest: K. M. Egyetemi Nyomda, 1943), 119–20.
30. Ibid.
31. The expression “center of magical studies” is used by David Pingree for the late medieval St.
Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury after he had identified a number of manuscripts of learned magic
as having belonged to certain identifiable monks of the monastery (Pingree, “Diffusion,” 94). Con-
cerning these texts and their owners, as well as the extent to which “center of magical studies” can
applied to St. Augustine’s Abbey, see Page, “Magic at St. Augustine’s,” chap. 1.
12 I

Buda. Interest in various forms of magic did not constitute a unified or coherent
movement either inside or outside the courtly and university life. If we take the
extant manuscripts as starting points, and plot their locations on a map of Europe,
we will see that Central Europe—especially Kraków—deserves special attention.
By pursuing these lines further, we can then address the general issues of who pro-
duced and preserved these sources. On the other hand, however, if we proceed in
the opposite direction, and wish to provide a general picture of the intellectual activ-
ity of the region, we can talk about a strong, consistent concern in astrology, but
this claim cannot be extended to the question of magic, examples of which will
remain relatively scattered and isolated.
The succeeding chapters follow the former of the two procedures. I start with
a careful study of the sources themselves, presenting the main genres of magical
literature one by one, then describe the extent to which the categories are repre-
sented in the surviving Central European source material, and examine whether
the texts are mere imports from the Western manuscript tradition, or whether one
can find local products, examples of “original” texts. The codicological context of
the particular magical texts will also be questioned as veritable sources: the position
of certain kinds of magic in the framework of learning can be better understood
on the basis of the tracts that occur or travel together with them. In addition, an
excursus departing from the main body of the argumentation of the book will focus
on the visual material contained in the sources.
Part Two concentrates more on the human and institutional elements. Two
chapters will be devoted to the role that magic played in monastic milieus and
royal courts, while a third will survey the patterns of the founding of universities
and go deeper into the secrets of the personal libraries of university professors and
students. Special attention will be paid in two excursus, first to the question of the
criminalization of practice of magic, and the dangers awaiting those who did not
make a secret of their interest in the occult, and second to the transformation of
the figure of the magician, as demonstrated by a historical example closely related
to the Kraków material. Here is where we return to the person of Faustus.
The present work can expect basically two kinds of readers: the first has a good
knowledge of the sources and genres of magic, but is supposedly less acquainted
with the history of local universities and royal courts. The second is more familiar
with these latter questions but does not necessarily recognize every magical text by
its incipit. I have tried to find a way between the Scylla of leaving my audience un-
informed and basic subjects unexplained and the Charybdis of boring some read-
ers by too much popularization. I have had to repeat facts that are widely known
in the Western scholarship of learned magic in order to introduce and characterize
the categories I operate with. In a bibliographical essay, for example, situated at
the end of the book, I have provided short overviews surveying the findings and
 I S  M S 13

the main tendencies of the secondary literature of the given branches of magic.
These fairly conventional summaries are not meant to be significant contributions
to scholarship, their purpose is to provide background knowledge for the readers
who may need it. Similarly, my description of the foundation and early history of
Central European universities will not contribute anything new to what has been
said about the intellectual history of the area; however, I still needed to give some
information on the milieu before getting to the subject of the private libraries of
university people.
Remaining with the question of the readership of this book, I must also take into
consideration the linguistic barrier that separates the three Central European coun-
tries from their German-speaking neighbors. The secondary literature and the pri-
mary sources of Austria, Germany, and Italy are accessible for the well-prepared
modern scholar, but the same is not necessarily true for the Polish, Bohemian, and
Hungarian material used in my work. One of my intentions and a raison d’être of
this book is to provide this hypothetical scholar with further research tools.
 C: S Q

My inquiries have had a twofold objective. First, I intended to provide a catalog and
an analysis of the texts of learned magic that have survived in Central Europe, and
second, I wished to characterize the circle of those persons who can be related to
these magical texts. These two objectives can be divided into two sets of questions.
To provide a catalog and an analysis of the texts of learned magic that have sur-
vived in Central Europe, it was necessary to ask:
1. What texts of magical content (belonging to the fields of natural, image, and
ritual magic, as well as to those of alchemy and divination) can be found and iden-
tified in the manuscript collections of Central Europe?
2. What texts that have not survived, but which surely existed, since we have
evidence of their fifteenth-century existence from the extant source material, can
be identified?
3. And to what extent does this group of magical texts represent an “original”
intellectual production of this region? In other words, were these texts written in this
region by local authors, or were they simply imported from the West by local scribes?
To characterize the circle of those persons who can be related to these magical
texts, it was necessary to ask:
4. Who are those persons who were in one way or another responsible for the
emergence of the magical sources, that is, who were their authors, scribes, owners,
readers, and users? How can we describe the circle of these persons? Were they
magicians, outsiders, marginal figures living on the periphery of society, or ordi-
nary monks, average courtiers, and everyday university people?
5. What was the place of learned magic in their interest: primary or accidental?
Why were these sources copied or written: to put them into practice or just for
contemplation? Did any reader wish to apply the divinatory methods, talismanic
instructions, and ritual invocations? Or did magic simply belong to a pure “aca-
demic interest” of the collectors?
266 C

6. Remaining still with the issue of the collectors’ fascination for magic, one
can ask a question that might be considered both anachronistic and naive, and yet
everyone dealing with medieval texts of magic will sooner or later ponder on it.
Why didn’t these collectors see that it was impossible to learn the seven liberal arts
through the prayers of the Ars notoria, that it was impossible to expel scorpions
from Bath or destroy cities with the help of Thebit’s De imaginibus, and that the
magnet does not say anything about the chastity of their wives? Or should we rather
suppose that the methods did actually work in their time?
7. And finally, did the scribes, collectors, and authors of magic texts form a co-
herent group of practitioners, or a company of interested friends? Did they copy
the texts from each other’s codices, did they discuss the content, did they put this
content into practice together, or were they isolated intellectuals with no visible
connections?
Let us see systematically what the answers to these questions are, as offered by
my research.
1. I believe that my study has convincingly shown that Central European man-
uscript collections offer fewer, but an equally rich variety of, magical texts as West-
ern European libraries. Polish, Bohemian, and Hungarian scribes and collectors
included natural and image magic, alchemy and divination, as well as various types
of ritual magic in their codices not just by mere chance. This is the region which
preserved, inter alia, the first long version of the famous handbook of magic, the
Picatrix, which is also the only illustrated copy we have, and two of the four extant
copies of the Liber runarum, a short tract combining Hermetic talismans with Scan-
dinavian runes. In addition, this part of Europe gave birth to the following: a
unique version of ritual magic, the prayer book of King Wladislas, which incor-
porates crystallomancy, and long paragraphs of the Liber visionum of John of
Morigny; the Bellifortis of Conrad Kyeser, a source of technology and military engi-
neering that is rich in magical elements; the Antipocras of Nicholas of Poland, a the-
oretical work on the borderline of medicine and natural magic, which recommends
its reader to consume snake flesh for medicinal purposes; and Nicolaus Melchior’s
Processus, which combines the text of the Christian Mass with the alchemical pro-
cess. These four texts of “local authorship” inspired wide interest among Western
scholars, too.
The only category of texts missing from these manuscripts was necromancy per
se, the genre which contains long invocations to benign and malign spiritual agents,
offers explicitly demonic procedures, and operates with an inventory of magic cir-
cles, animal sacrifices, suffumigations, summoned and bound demons, and so on.
( To be sure, texts of image magic may also contain such elements, although in dif-
ferent contexts and in different concentrations.) However, demonic magic was fairly
rare even in the West; texts such as the Munich manuscript published by Richard
 S Q 267

Kieckhefer and the MS Rawlinson 252 are considered singular survivors, and it is
by no means surprising that no such examples have been found so far in Central
European manuscript collections.
2. Some of the extant source materials contain clear indications that certain
other magical works were in use and had been read in late medieval Central Europe.
Precise textual borrowings in the Bellifortis attest that Conrad Kyeser, when writ-
ing and compiling his work, had in front of him a copy of the Liber vaccae, and
two texts attributed to Albertus Magnus, the Experimenta, and the De mirabilibus
mundi. We have every right to suppose that the latter two texts were consulted with
great attention also by Nicholas of Poland, the doctor from Montpellier. The Liber
visionum of John of Morigny, a (perhaps incomplete) copy of the Ars notoria, and
some further magical and crystallomantic texts were without doubt on the table of
the author of the prayer book of Wladislas, who incorporated long paragraphs from
these sources in his handbook. Nicholas the Hangman and Henry the Bohemian
were both accused in Kraków of possessing magical books (one of these was written
by a certain Matthias, a necromancer); and even though these books cannot be
identified today, we may suppose that they belonged to the field of ritual magic.
Finally, the author of the short book list of the Dresden manuscript—whom I believe
to have been the scribe of the codex, Egidius of Corintia—was well acquainted
with the eleventh chapter of the Speculum astronomiae, where the author of the
Speculum establishes the classifications of Hermetic, Solomonic, and natural liter-
ature; he must have also read the Picatrix; and he seems to have had firsthand in-
formation about at least some of the magical and necromantic books he lists, such
as the Clavicula Salomonis, the Liber Semphoras, the Liber quattuor annulorum Salo-
monis, the De arte eutonica, the Liber ad demoniacos, the Liber machometi de septem
nominibus, the Liber institutionis Raziel, the Liber lunae, and the Liber Almandel.
Even though these texts have no trace in the extant book collections, we can plau-
sibly suppose that they were accessible for a Kraków student at the end of the fif-
teenth century.
3. It is perhaps naive but certainly reasonable to inquire about the originality
of this wide range of magical texts. Bearing in mind that discerning between orig-
inal authorship and mere compilation has little relevance in a medieval context in
general, and therefore any answer to such a question is necessarily misleading, we
can say that in the fields of medicine and astronomy, Central European scholars
proved to be most fruitful and “original,” and their scientific outcome constitutes
an important chapter of the history of science, but their texts on natural and image
magic as well as on divination were, as a rule, mere reproductions of the well-known
Western material. We have only a few, albeit striking, examples when a text is not
a simple copy of an Italian, French, or German codex. Such examples are the Bel-
lifortis of Kyeser and the royal prayer book of Wladislas—even though this book
268 C

is at least ninety-five percent compiled from other texts, the act and the aspects of
the compilation can be regarded as “original,” which is the usual type of original-
ity in the genre of ritual magic. Interestingly, alchemy proved the most inspiring
topic for the authors of this region: besides reproducing Western texts, such as the
works of Johannes of Rupescissa, Central European scribes had the opportunity
to copy local products, too, whether they were the Latin works by Johannes Tici-
nensis, the Czech Rightful Way of John of Laz, or the alchemical process in the form
of a Christian Mass by Nicolaus Melchior. While we have less reason to speak about
Central Europe’s own group of magician-authors, the region certainly had a con-
siderable number of practicing alchemist-authors.
4. Having identified the individuals who can be related to magic, we can observe
that virtually none of them can be seen as a real outsider, that is, a marginal fig-
ure of the society. In Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, we find mainly insiders related
to manuscripts of magic: university professors, monastic figures, ecclesiastical and
courtly officers, medical doctors, and engineers—that is, intellectuals whose activ-
ity was not monopolized by the topic of magic. Even Nicholas of Poland, whose
medical methods and obsession with snake flesh shocked and terrified many, and
caused no little scandal around Kraków, was a doctor trained in the best schools
of his time, and nobody considered him an obscure magician.
Among the three places where readers of magic gathered—the monastery, the
university, and the court—the monastic milieu yielded the least evidence for a re-
construction of some magical interest. Alchemy was certainly a recurrent concern
for the monks of Central Europe (as it was for monks in the West), and so was
natural magic (probably as a form of medical knowledge), but no monastery of the
region can rival the richness of magic sources in St. Augustine’s in Canterbury. As
far as one can judge from the extant list of titles, monastic libraries in Central Europe
rarely included explicitly magical items. The courtly context was a much more fer-
tile soil for a curiosity about learned magic, and this curiosity was not limited to
telling the future. Courtly intellectuals were in the position of being able to read
a wide range of magical materials, as it is attested by Wladislas’s prayer book, Kyeser’s
military handbook, and the court case of Henry the Bohemian, who was accused
of invoking spirits in order to find treasure.
The greatest number of tracts, however, appears in the codices of the masters of
the newly founded Central European universities, especially in the milieu of the
chair of astrology in Kraków. The Picatrix, the Liber runarum, the Experimenta
Alberti, and a variety of other magical works may be found in the late medieval
professorial libraries of the region. To be sure, the predominance of university mas-
ters in the role of the collectors and scribes of magical texts might have several other
reasons than their greater interest in magic. First, professors usually owned more
books than other readers in the Midle Ages. Second, compared to other medieval
 S Q 269

book collections, their libraries enjoyed the best chances of survival, and are con-
sequently the easiest to reconstruct. Modern national libraries, such as the Biblio-
teka Jagiellońska in Kraków and the National Library of Prague, which were the
main “suppliers” of this study, were originally based on private and institutional
medieval book collections related to the university.
5. The fact that most texts of magic survived from the libraries of university peo-
ple explains their codicological context, too. Generally speaking, works on natural
magic and talismans became integral constituents of medical and astronomical
manuscripts without being considered particularly magical or problematic, and
this reflects the fact that they had an equally organic place in the scientific interest
of the collectors. Analysis of the library of a Kraków student, Johannes Virdung
of Hassfurt, has proven that a clear awareness of the magical character of talismans
did not discourage some masters from including image magic in their books. Vir-
dung’s collection of Hermetic and talismanic texts is especially rich even by West-
ern standards. While we do not know whether he practiced the methods that he
studiously copied on the blank folios between the scientific tracts, the great num-
ber of these texts, along with his later interest in the magicians of Europe, indicates
that he was an attentive reader of image magic, and that he thus turned to the tal-
ismans with deep intellectual interest.
The scientific context of magical works is almost universal: texts of philosophy
and theology rarely occur together with magic. Perhaps related to this fact, the theo-
retical reflections on magic, such as Al-Kindi’s De radiis stellarum and the Speculum
astronomiae, also occur separately, never in the company of texts of practical magic.
An exciting exception from this rule is the book list of magical works in the Dres-
den manuscript, which is copied in the company of astronomical, astrological, tal-
ismanic, and divinatory texts. This difference of codicological context is one of the
reasons why I think that the book list was the scribe’s own intellectual production,
with the purpose of orienting the reader in the mass of magical texts partly con-
tained by the same manuscript.
In most cases, we are simply not in the position to decide whether the occur-
rence of a magical text in a codex indicates actual practices or simple curiosity. The
Picatrix or Thabit’s De imaginibus contain no indication whether their readers con-
structed talismans. Some sources are, fortunately, more talkative. The long list of
successive manuscript pages representing geomantic charts in BJ 793 among other
examples, the sophistication with which these charts are elaborated, the indications
and cross-references in the margins, and the omission of theoretical introductions
to the methods of divination not only point to a general, theoretical interest in
divinatory methods, but indicate expertise in their concrete application. In a word,
I am convinced that at least some sections of BJ 793 were copied with the definite
purpose of fortune telling. More interesting perhaps, actual use of ritual magic,
270 C

crystallomancy, and the invocation of angels may also be revealed. External evi-
dence—legal documents and confessions—is not the only way to prove that some-
one attempted to apply the methods of crystallomancy and demon invocation;
but internal evidence left in the magical texts may also show such application. As
we have seen, in the case of the royal prayer book of Wladislas, the consequent
substitution of the name of the operator implies that the text was prepared with
the intention of making it suitable and ready for real use, and it was in all proba-
bility even consecrated.
6. Once we identified the collectors of natural magic, talismanic, divinatory,
alchemical, and ritual magic texts as learned monks, court intellectuals, and uni-
versity masters, that is, as intelligent individuals capable of reflection, it is rather
obvious to inquire: how can we account for the fact that these persons were never
faced with the problem that the methods they copied did not work in practice?
Did they not see that the mechanism of magic is obviously false, and that its fal-
sity can be easily shown with the help of simple experiments? Or did the methods
perhaps actually work?
While such questions about the past might seem somewhat present-minded and
thus illegitimate, the real danger is not to ask questions inspired by the concerns of
the present (such important research fields as the history of women, childhood, or
everyday life are typically inspired by the concerns of the present), but to give answers
distorted by these concerns. We can therefore freely raise our naive questions, even
though there is something anachronistic in such inquiries, we only have to be care-
ful when answering them.
In fact, we are not looking for one single answer to explain why the methods
of magic could have been seen as effective, but rather a group of interconnected
answers. What we can claim in general, however, is that those magic practices sur-
veyed in this book fitted quite well into the scientific-religious conceptual frame-
work of the Middle Ages.
We have already touched upon the issue of efficacy in the case of talismanic magic
in Chapter 3. There is no point in doubting that belief in the general protective
power of talismans was prevalent in the Middle Ages, and, in addition, a number
of stories support the idea that the same talismans were believed to have sufficient
virtue for concrete—for instance military—purposes, too. It happened that women
started feeling affection for someone, that castles were occupied, and that scorpion
populations decreased. Success in such cases might have been attributed to magic.
In other words: magic in some cases actually seemed to work. And this was closely
related to the fact that processes of natural and talismanic magic were not as alien
from the contemporary natural philosophy as they are from our modern natural
science. The underlying assumptions behind the mechanism of talismans and magic
stones, the occult virtue of herbs, and the healing power of animal substances formed
 S Q 271

part of the same correspondential worldview that was typical of many fields of medi-
eval science. Our first answer to the initial questions is therefore that in many cases
users certainly regarded magic as effective.
But what happened when such a technique manifestly did not work? Here, we
have to differentiate according to the type of magic we are discussing. Taking
ritual magic first: to ask why its practitioner did not get disappointed when his
prayers to the angels did not lead to success is quite the same as to ask religious
persons whether they become atheists if God does not accomplish what is asked
in the prayers. Faith needs obviously different kinds of proof—if it needs any. To
construct scientific experiments with the intention of testing what percentage of
prayers turns out to be successful—even though such an experimental approach
was subject of fairly heated debate in late nineteenth-century England1—sounds
bizarre both in the fifteenth century and today.
To continue with the experimenta literature and the talismans, we see a more basic
disagreement between the medieval and the present attitudes. The self-criticism
and the readiness to exclude those methods which repeatedly failed to produce the
expected results was not a particularly central idea in the natural philosophy of
those times. As we have seen in Chapter 2, what counted as an experiment was not
what was tested in a number of controlled experimental situations, but what the
old philosophers and authorities described, and what was generally accepted about
nature. Even for those philosophers who taught that demons—having exclusively
spiritual and not corporal existence—are not perceivable, it was the experience, that
is, the general conviction, that proved their existence.2
Against such a background, it is not surprising that relatively fantastic convic-
tions could be considered through the centuries as sufficiently confirmed scientific
facts.3 An instructive example is the conviction that magnets will loose their power
of attraction if they are rubbed with garlic. This “fact” was repeated many times as
a self-evident “proof ” for the theory of antipathies by authors over fifteen centuries,
from Plutarch to the sixteenth century. A convenient worldview (in this case the
theory of sympathies and antipathies) and a sufficiently strong textual tradition
became more efficient means for this conviction to gain epistemological status
than practical tests. And—to complicate the problem—those who believed in the

1. Frank M. Turner, “Rainfall, Plagues, and the Prince of Wales: A Chapter in the Conflict of
Religion and Science,” Journal of British Studies 13 (1974): esp. 64; quoted in Thomas F. Gieryn,
“Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Pro-
fessional Ideologies of Scientists,” American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 781–95.
2. On the modern history of the word experience, see Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The
Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp.
11–25.
3. I would, however, definitely not wish to imply that this was true only in the Middle Ages and
that modern science is free of theories that will someday seem fantastic and ridiculous.
272 C

magnet-garlic antipathy claimed to have tried it in practice. The same empirical

argument that seems to us to disprove the theory became its actual proof. This
changed only when the generally accepted ontology of the world was transformed
and magnets and garlic were no longer seen as having antipathies and sympathies,
but one of them as having magnetic force, and the other as being completely irrel-
evant as far as magnetism is concerned. Things are proved to be nonexistent and
theories are proved to be false when they change their status in the classification
of a new worldview.4
Finally, we hasten to add that in a number of cases experiments must have pro-
duced results that were seen as negative by the contemporaries, too. Even in such
cases, however, it would be anachronistic to expect them to abandon the given the-
ory; various strategies less drastic than rejecting the core hypotheses of magic were
available to explain the failure. One could always argue that the operator had not
sufficiently or correctly prepared to perform the given magical task: he had not fasted
enough or attained a satisfactory level of bodily and spiritual purity. It was also
possible to argue that the constellation at the moment of the experiment was not
favorable. Or perhaps everything happened as it was described in the handbooks,
only the person was not right one. Such experiments were not conceived in the
democratic way of the modernity (according to which an experiment carried out
under the same specified conditions can be repeated by anyone, anywhere, regard-
less of gender, race, and origin): only the initiated, the adepts, could perform them,
and the pupils were not necessarily in the possession of such abilities. If the given
result was expected from a helping angel or demon, the argument could have been
made that the spirits were able, just not willing, to do what had been required from
them. Finally, one could always say that the instructions—originating usually
from texts written several hundred years earlier—were not understood properly (just
as we have serious problems in understanding Galileo’s descriptions of experiments),
or that the text was simply not transmitted—copied or translated—correctly (as
the talismans of the magic squares were copied indeed with many errors).
All in all, there are many reasons why the methods of magic described in the
handbooks could not be falsified, and even though I do not exclude that there may
have been some skepticism about some methods, in general, there is no reason to
doubt that most of these texts were copied with a fairly strong conviction that the
methods written in them would work.
7. The last issue to be addressed here concerns the relations and links of the per-
sons who can be associated in one way or another with learned magic. To put it
differently, the question is whether any cooperation, correspondence, or intellectual
contact of magicians is detectable. If so, it remains for us to speculate whether we

4. Daryn Lehoux, “Tropes, Facts, and Empiricism,” Perspectives on Science 11 (2003): 326–44.
 S Q 273

can claim that any of the intellectual centers—courts, cloisters, or universities—

of the region were particularly magical in nature, and with this we have returned
to the initial question of the book: could Faustus have studied magic in Kraków,
if he had turned up there?
The historical Faustus probably never went to Kraków not only because magic
was not studied publicly there in the late fifteenth century, but also because that
city did not yet have the same magical fame it was to have one hundred years later.
The pieces of evidence collected during my research do not support the assertion
that Kraków offered an intense magical milieu to its visitors at that time—while it
undeniably offered a particularly strong astrological environment. My conclusion
is that however ample the evidence we have concerning an intellectual interest in
learned magic in Central Europe, and especially in Kraków, there is no sufficient
reason to call any of the intellectual foci and institutions a “center for magical stud-
ies,” and no coherent and institutional study of magic is detectable in the region.
Still, although there was no public chair of learned magic in the heart of the Uni-
versity of Kraków, we can point to the presence of some important cooperation
related to magic. It can be reconstructed in detail that in the early fifteenth century
Henry the Bohemian worked together with other university people, a certain Stan-
islas, the Italian professor Monaldus of Luca, and the Polish Nicolaus Hinczonis of
Casimiria, on his crystallomantic treasure-finding projects in the royal gardens.
Sixty years later, Johannes Virdung of Hassfurt copied talismanic texts in the
same year and from the same sample book as another student of the university,
Egidius of Corintia. Whether they were acquainted cannot be proven, but the sim-
ilarities of their interests and the resemblance of their manuscripts suggest at least
some intellectual contact, and one can easily imagine how they got involved in the
discussion of the content of the Liber runarum or of the Hermetic Liber de stellis
beibeniis. Virdung’s manuscripts and Egidius’s Dresden codex both contain repre-
sentative selections of texts on image magic and Hermetism and surprisingly simi-
lar collections of astrological texts. In addition, Egidius’s list of magical titles testifies
to a certain theoretical interest in the issue of classifying magical texts, which may
have also easily been a topic discussed among the students of the University of
Kraków. We cannot reconstruct the rest of Egidius’s life, but we know that Virdung,
upon returning to Germany, took steps to become acquainted with all of his con-
temporaries who were interested in magic on a technical or on a spiritual level.
Thus, he was in contact with Abbot Trithemius, the English necromancer Nicolaus
de Pulchro Monte Schonberg, and the humanist Konrad Celtis (who had also been
a student at Kraków). He probably also met Johannes Mercurius and Georgius
Faustus.
If we remain with the question of the cooperation among “magicians” and the
transmission of magical ideas and texts, we cannot discount the effects of Italy and
274 C

Germany. The Bohemian alchemist John of Laz claimed to be a pupil of a certain

Antonio of Florence, killed in Bohemia because of his alchemical practices. In Kra-
ków, the Italian Monaldus of Luca took part in the treasure-hunting practices of
a circle of university masters around Henry the Bohemian. In Hungary King Mat-
thias was in correspondence with Marsilio Ficino, whose pupil and fellow in the
Florentine Academia Platonica, Francesco Bandini, even visited the royal court of
Buda; another Italian Platonist, Callimachus spent several years at the University
of Kraków. Last but not least, the mysterious BJ 793, containing many texts on
image magic and divination, as well as the Picatrix, is probably a copy of an Ital-
ian codex. Italian masters and manuscripts seem to have played a crucial role as
external factors promoting the Central European reception of learned magic, which
reception was also facilitated by the fact that students of the region often visited
Italian universities. The role of Germans was somewhat different, rather modeled
by the Faust legend. Konrad Celtis and Johannes Virdung of Hassfurt as young
students went to Kraków, and although they did not study magical arts at the uni-
versity, they clearly got involved in learned magic, and the manuscripts they found
in Kraków became a source of their fascination with certain genres of magic.
One of the reasons why Central Europe could have seemed an adequate place for
a student to satisfy his interest in magic, and why especially the University of Kraków
could have been an institution where magical texts were frequently copied, could be
the relative tolerance of magical activity in the region. I am still not arguing that Cen-
tral Europe provided the students and courtiers with a particularly magical milieu as
compared to Western Europe; however, it is undeniable that it was a relatively calmer
place with regard to criminalization. The practice of magic did lead to court cases
in several occasions—as we have seen in the cases of Nicholas the Hangman and
Henry the Bohemian—but there were no such severe condemnations on the part
of the university or other authorities as we can observe in contemporary Paris.
A second—rather global—reason for the emergence of magical texts in the fif-
teenth century might be a general European tendency, namely that from the twelfth
century on certain forms of magic had more and more opportunity to cross the
borderlines of legitimate science. It seems that the notions of both science and magic
were (and are) historically changing, dynamic constructions, and it was not ahis-
torically given what counted as scientific knowledge teachable at universities and
what was excluded as dangerous and harmful, and what was seen as rational enter-
prise and what was considered irrational. While arguments against certain practices
and ideas related to magic reflect a growing severity, more and more frequently
other forms of magic in other sources were labeled as scientific. This tendency—
called the “positivization of magic”5—can be well exemplified by such classifications

5. I am quoting again Claire Fanger’s terminology, as I did in Chapter 1. See also Chapter 7.
 S Q 275

as that of Conrad Kyeser or the author of the Dresden book list, where alchemy,
theurgy, and certain forms of natural and image magic appeared as respectable ele-
ments of science.
It was due to this process that leading intellectuals were provided with ample
opportunity to find a legitimate and scholarly approach to dealing with magical
methods. As a result, the readers of magic in Central Europe are not to be looked
for primarily within the circles of the Faustus or Mercurius-type of full-time, semi-
literate, and self-made magicians, nor in that of anonymous university members
whose number “outran the demand” and who remained without jobs. Partly be-
cause local higher education started functioning in the Central European area rela-
tively late, there was no time in the fifteenth century for the emergence of a surplus
of university masters and an “underemployed and largely unsupervised clerical
underworld,” as had happened in the West.6 As nearly as we can reconstruct the
picture, the late medieval collectors and readers of magical manuscripts of the region
belonged to a high and respected intellectual stratum, benefited from the tolerant
milieu of the Central European universities and courts, and apparently did not
feel obliged to lock the door of the room in which they kept their books of secrets.

6. Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 12.

 G I

Adelard of Bath, 31, 94, 285–86 Augustine, St., 20, 25–26, 35, 39, 124, 225
Albertus Magnus, 24, 36, 55–57, 61, 94, 128, 145, St. Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, 11 n. 31,
147, 151, 186, 206, 225, 252, 267, 281–82, 184, 201, 268, 284, 287
284 Augustine Sigismund, king of Poland, 224
Ps-Albertus Magnus, Experimenta Alberti, Liber
aggregationis, De virtutibus herbarum, lapidum Bacon, Roger, 70, 145, 147, 149, 281, 284
et animalium, 36, 55–65, 67, 72, 85, Barbara of Cilly, wife of emperor Sigismund,
252–55, 267–68, 271 156–57, 211
Ps-Albertus Magnus, Speculum astronomiae. See Batthyány, Boldizsár, 276–77
Speculum astronomiae Beatrix, queen of Hungary, 224, 236
Albertuse of Brudzewo, 108, 249, 256–57 Benedictus, former necromancer, monk in Schotten-
Albicus of Uniczow, 115 n. 91, 212–14, 224 kloster, 194–98
alchemical laboratory in Oberstockstall, 151–52, Boldizsár Batthyány. See Batthyány
277–78 Bonfini, Antonio, 11, 236
alchemy, 4, 8, 10, 38, 41.–42, 59, 70, 144–61,
187, 198, 202, 206–8, 211–14, 226, 228, Cardano, Girolamo, 91–92
234, 268 Casimir the Great, king of Poland, 10, 244–45
in the 16th century, 276–79 Caspar, assistant priest on Poznań, 226
and clerics, 147–55 Central Europe, the definition of, 7–10
and the Holy Trinity, 152–55 Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, 200, 244
Alfonso the Wise (king of Castile), 81, 96, 230, 232, chiromancy, 123, 127–31, 148, 186–87, 226–27,
237 254, 256, 278
Al-Kindi, 23–24, 80, 83, 108 n. 70, 126, 231, 269 Christian of Prachatitz, 213, 233
amulets, 110, 120, 200, 212, 226–28 Conrad of Vechta, 151, 159, 161, 198, 212–13, 224
Andrzej Grzymala of Posnania, 62, 85, 192, 252–55 Conrad Kyeser, author of Bellifortis, 36, 49, 71–78,
Anna Cilly, 209–10 136, 149, 182, 211, 220, 233, 266–67, 275
Aristotle, 5, 31, 56, 58–60, 69, 105, 119, 128, 206, Correggio, Giovanni da. See Johannes Mercurius
225, 252, 281, 285 Corrigiensis
Arnald of Villanova, 62, 151, 198–99, 252 cryptography, 110, 130–32, 137
Arnaldus Saxo, 67–68 crystallomancy, 3, 124, 162–64, 168, 170–83,
Ars notoria, 2, 33–34, 40–41, 48–49, 81, 118, 125, 209–10, 215–25, 250, 266–67, 270, 273
140, 148, 183–97, 204, 205–6, 208, 222,
227, 230, 251, 266–67 decanic figures, 79–80, 97–98, 101–2, 104, 251
and the prayer book of king Wladislas, 165–87 Dee, John, 181, 276–79, 290
research on, 287–92 De imaginibus septem planetarum (Belenus), 82,
Asclepius, 26, 68, 105, 119 116–18, 256, 327
astrology, 2, 4–5, 10–12, 20, 25–27, 36, 59, 70, 78, De imaginibus, sive annulis septem planetarum
80, 105–6, 121, 142, 147, 149, 187, 219, (Hermes), 27, 82, 115–16, 118, 256, 327
226, 241, 245–46, 284–89 demons, 20–25, 26, 29–31, 34, 38–40, 48, 60, 65,
in Kraków, 10–12, 33, 115, 192, 214, 227, 68, 71, 75–76, 79–80, 95, 125, 140, 167,
248–55, 257–58, 268 181, 194–97, 199, 211, 214, 216, 220,
in Buda, 230, 234–39 22–26, 228, 266, 272. See also magic,
in Prague, 232–34 demonic
330 I

De septem quadraturis planetarum, 83–84, 91–94, Jan Milíč (Johannes Milicius) 199–200, 229
207, 321, 326 Janus Pannonius, 235–38
De virtutibus herbarum, lapidum et animalium. See Jean de Bar, 173, 222–23, 226, 229
Albertus Magnus, Ps-Albertus Magnus Jean Gerson, 22, 60 n. 27, 95, 223, 226
diagrams, 135–43 Johannes Bianchini, 108, 252, 256
divination, 2, 4, 11, 20, 26, 33–34, 38, 64, 76, Johannes Faustus. See Faustus
86–89, 123–35, 137–38, 172, 175, 210, Johannes Hartlieb. See Hartlieb
226, 228, 232–33, 241, 252, 255, 266–67, Johannes Hunyadi, 234
274. See also geomancy, chiromancy, sphere Johannes Lasnioro (John of Laz), 155–57, 211, 268,
of life and death 274
Divine names. See God, names of Johannes Manlius. See Manlius
Dürer, Albrecht, 91–92 Johannes Mercurius Corrigiensis, 261–64, 273
Johannes Nider, 194–97
Egidius of Corintia, 33–35, 103, 107, 109, 251, Johannes of Dobra, 68–69, 152, 218
258, 267, 273 Johannes of Francofordia, 21, 226
Etienne Tempier, 125, 191, 207, 226 Johannes of Glogovia, 107, 227, 249, 256–58
Experimenta Alberti. See Albertus Magnus, Johannes of Ragusio, 69
Ps-Albertus Magnus Johannes of Rupescissa, 95, 147, 149, 268
Johannes of Sacrobosco, 108, 219, 248
Faustus, Gregorius, 1–3, 12, 212, 220, 241, 260–63, Johannes of Transylvania, 150
273–75, 276, 279 Johannes Regiomontanus, 11, 108, 206, 235, 237,
Ficino, Marsilio, 11, 82, 103–6, 119, 207, 234, 246–47, 256, 258
237–39, 259, 274 Johannes Ticinensis, 149, 151, 268
Johannes Trithemius. See Trithemius
Galen, 53, 60, 62, 252
Johannes Virdung of Hassfurt, 107, 109, 115, 118,
Galeotto Marzio, 11, 234–39
128, 130, 241–42, 251, 255–64, 269, 273,
geomancy, 4, 38, 76, 85–90, 109, 124–27, 130–35,
274
137, 206, 226, 228, 233, 251–56, 269, 278
Johannes Vitéz, 235–36, 245, 247
Georgius Peuerbach, 237, 246, 256
Johannes Volmar of Villingen, 258
Gerbert d’Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II), 70
John of Laz. See Johannes Lasnioro
Gerson, Jean, 22, 60 n. 27, 95, 223, 226
John of Morigny, author of the Liber visionum,
God, names of, 165, 169–73, 175, 181, 186–87,
40–41, 167–69, 180–84, 197, 267, 287,
203, 222, 233, 288
290–92
Harpocration of Alexandria, 57 John of Salisbury, 173, 210
Hartlieb, Johannes, 38, 124, 172–73
Heinrich von Langenstein (Henry of Hesse), 246 Konrad Celtis, 259, 273–74
Henry the Bohemian, 47, 182, 214–23, 225, 229, Kyranides, 55, 57, 59, 61–63, 68, 106
250–51, 267–68, 273–74
Hermes Trismegistus, 11, 26, 30, 33, 35, 38, 57, 63, Łaski, Albert, 278–79
79, 82–83, 85, 94, 104–9, 114–16, 118–20, Laz, John of. See Johannes Lasnioro
127, 145, 155, 192, 207, 236, 239, 252, Lazzarelli, Lodovico, 263–64
256, 262, 281–82 Liber aggregationis. See Albertus Magnus, Ps-Albertus
hermetic talismans, 104–19 Magnus
hermetism, the two kinds of, 104–6, 239 Liber de spiritibus inclusis, 80, 116–18, 256, 327
Hippocrates, 52–54, 60, 62, 231, 252 Liber de stellis beibeniis, 108–9, 114, 251, 256, 273
Hugh of Santalla, 126, 128 Liber de xv stellis, xv lapidibus, xv herbis, et xv imag-
Hugh of St. Victor, 38, 124 inibus, 82, 207
Liber iuratus Honorii, 2, 39–40, 48, 290
Inquisition, 200, 219 Liber lunae, 26, 30, 33, 34, 82, 114, 267, 286
Liber runarum, 3, 33, 83, 109–15, 118, 137–38,
Jacobus of Piacenza, 198 251, 256, 259–60, 266, 268, 273, 293
Jadwiga, queen of Poland, 10, 244 Liber vaccae, 28, 62 n. 37, 72, 267
 I 331

Louis the Great, king of Hungary and Poland, 58, Oberstockstall. See alchemical laboratory in
244 Oberstockstall
Lullus, Raimundus, 136, 145, 149, 151 Ottokar II, king of Bohemia, 231–32

magic palmistry. See chiromancy

classifications of, 24–43 Paul of Prague, 48, 220–24
criminalization of, 219–30 Peer Codex, 67 n. 54, 148 n. 1, 202–4
definitions of, 17–20 Petrus Gaszowiec, 98, 103, 107, 108, 152, 252–54,
demonic, 2, 20–22, 30, 37, 39–40, 104, 199, 258
266 Picatrix, 3, 23, 34, 35, 41, 43, 80–81, 83, 94,
image, 26–27, 29–33, 35–38, 79–122, 138, 193, 96–106, 115, 117, 120, 136, 138, 230, 251,
207–10, 251, 256–58, 266–67, 283–86 255, 266–69, 274, 285
natural, 25–27, 35–38, 51–78, 170–71, 251–52, Plato, 11, 28, 62, 119, 161, 236, 237, 238
261, 266 Ptolemy, 5, 37, 82–83, 85, 95, 106, 231, 233, 237,
“positivization” of, 22, 35, 274 281, 284
ritual, 2–4, 20, 37–41, 48, 116, 140–43, Ps-Ptolemy, Centiloquium, 32, 63, 80, 83, 121,
162–88, 208, 222, 230, 265–70, 286–92 248
magic squares. See De septem quadraturis planetarum Ps-Ptolemy, Opus imaginum, 31, 34, 36, 82, 94,
Maiolus, Simon, 1–2 251
Manlius, Johannes, 1, 229, 277
Marcus Graecus, Liber ignium, 72, 149 Regiomontanus. See Johannes Regiomontanus
Martin Bylica of Olkusz, 11, 217, 235, 247 Richard of Fournival, 19, 28–29, 35, 191, 281–83
Martin Król of Żurawica, 247–49 Rota Pythagorae. See sphere of life and death
Martin, Túrócszentmárton, town in Slovakia, 96–97 Rožmberk family, 204, 207, 278
Mattheus Beran, 185–86, 192, 204–8, 250–51 Rudolf II (Holy Roman Emperor), 10, 145, 278–79
Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, 10–11, 77–78, runes. See Liber runarum
119, 180, 217, 224, 234–40, 243–49
Matthias, necromancer, 216, 267 Secretum de sigillo leonis, 94
Mercurius. See Johannes Mercurius Corrigiensis Secretum secretorum, 55–60, 61–64
Michael Harsch of Geppingen, 148 self-fashioning, 262–64
military engineering, 70–76, 233, 266 Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor, king of Hungary,
mirror, magical, 138–39, 170–73, 175, 181, 209, 49, 71, 77, 97, 151, 156, 212–13, 224, 231,
222–23, 225 234, 244–45
Monaldus of Luca, 157, 216–17, 250, 273–74 Solomon, 29, 34–35, 39, 163, 165, 167, 175, 281,
288–89
necromancy, 3, 7, 24–27, 29–30, 33–37, 41–42, 48, Rings of, 141, 185
69, 71, 97, 114, 118, 138, 167, 172–75, Solomonic magic, 29, 120, 169, 175, 267,
182, 194–98, 209–10, 214–17, 219–26, 289–90
241, 260, 266–67, 273 Sortes regis Amalrici, 64, 132 n. 27, 134 n. 28
Nicholas of Marienwerder, 128, 253–55 Speculum astronomiae, 19, 24–38, 80–83, 93–94,
Nicholas of Poland (Nicholas of Montpellier), author 103–4, 115–16, 125, 191, 251, 267,
of Antipocras and Experimenta, 36, 51–55, 281–84, 289
60–61, 266–68 Sphera Pythagorae. See sphere of life and death
Nicholas, the Kraków hangman, 47, 209–10, 220, sphere of life and death, 90, 109, 130–31, 133–35,
225, 229, 267, 274 137, 140, 197, 206, 256, 293
Nicolaus Cusanus, 231, 233 Stanislas of Skalbimierz, 215–18, 221, 225, 229
Nicolaus de Pulchro Monte, 258, 261, 273 Stevin of Bruges, Simon, 79–80, 98
Nicolaus Magni of Jawor, 124, 173, 226
Nicolaus Melchior Cibinensis, author of the Processus talismans. See magic, image
sub forma missae, 144–46, 158–61, 211, 268 Thebit ben Corat, Thābit ibn Qurra, 35, 37
Nicolaus Olah, 158–60, 198 De imaginibus, 23, 30–31, 34, 36, 63–64, 70,
notory art. See Ars notoria 81–82, 93–94, 251, 255–56, 284
332 I

Thomas Aquinas, 24, 38, 128, 225, 284, 289, 292 William Byg, 173, 220–23
Thomas, author of a work on talismans, 118, 256, 260 William of Auvergne, 19, 24–27, 29, 30, 32, 35–36,
Thomas Murner, 227 54, 124, 171, 173, 207, 225
Thomas of Pisan, 121–22 Witelo, 21–22
Thorndike, Lynn, 2, 39, 232 Wladislas I, of Varna, 178–80, 182, 218
Trithemius, Johannes, 1, 32, 114, 118, 159, 198, Wladislas II, 144, 159–61, 179–80, 224
259–64, 273 Wladislas Jagiello, 209, 214, 244
Wladislas, king, owner of the prayer book, 41,
Ulricus Crux of Telcz, 206–7 48–49, 162–83, 185, 211, 218, 222,
266–68, 270
Wenceslas II, king of Bohemia, 69, 231–32 Wladislas Posthumous, 246
Wenceslas IV, Holy Roman Emperor, 71, 77,
212–14, 232–33, 237
 I  M

Alba Iulia, Bibliotheca Batthyányana 2014 214–17

R I 36 61 n. 34 2252 106 n. 62, 108 n. 70, 109 n.
R I 64 61 n. 34 74
2496 32 n. 61, 323
Brno, Moravská zemská knihovna 2513 214–17
From the Library of the Augustinians in Staré 5465 149
Brno: 48, 27 n. 12, 202 n. 20 Dipl. BJ 610 209–10

Budapest, Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Könyvtára London, British Library

K 465 77 nn. 84 and 86, 319 Sloane 3457 151, 213 n. 8

Jena, Universitätsbibliothek Martin, Literárny archív

El. f. 74 258 n. 86 J 2042 97 n. 43
El. f. 77 258 n. 86
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
El. phil. q. 3 258 n. 86
CLM 125 108 n. 70, 131 n. 23, 213 n.
13
Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek
CLM 826 233
N. 100 33, 94 nn. 31 and 33, 106,
107 n. 66, 108–11, 115, 127 Munich, Universitätsbibliothek
n. 12, 131 n. 23, 213 n. 13, 2° Cod. ms. 738 134–35, 324
255, 293, 319
Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum
Kraków, Biblioteka Jagiellońska Hs 168 148 n. 13, 324
257 48 n. 4, 220 n. 43, 320
551 108 n. 70, 125, 127, 148, Oxford, Bodleian Library
166, 186–87, 227, 320 Rawl. Liturg. d. 6. 162–83, 324
610 94 n. 31, 96 n. 42, 106 n. 62, Hertford College
138 n. 47 2 (E.N. 2.) 58 n. 24, 231 n. 84, 324
778 68, 69 nn. 66 and 68, 218 n.
39, 232 n. 89 Prague, Národní knihovna ČR
792 217 n. 32 267 I F 35 131 n. 23, 133, 140 n. 53,
793 31, 64, 80, 84–104, 106, 141, 185–86, 192 n. 5, 205
108, 119–20, 131–32, 134, n. 32, 325
147, 251–52, 255, 258, 264, 1144 VI F 7 192 n. 4
269, 274, 320 1609 VIII G 27 32 nn. 63 and 65, 33 n. 67,
805 62, 63 n. 39, 85, 106 n. 62, 114
127 n. 11, 252–53, 322 1832 X B 3 94 n. 31
813 62, 63 n. 39, 252, 322 1998 X H 20 62 n. 37
817 63, 323 2027 XI C 2 64–68, 127 n. 12, 131 n. 23,
837 152–55 134 n. 28, 135 n. 36, 137 n.
839 127 n. 12, 253, 323 41, 325
1839 249 n. 34 2764 adlig.
1970 31 n. 61 14 H 208 83 n. 12, 91 n. 21, 207, 326
334 I  M

Prague, Knihovna metropolitní kapituly Cod. lat. 11133 160 nn. 58 and 59
1323 L LXXVII 23 n. 26 Cod. lat. 11347 160 n. 58
1367 M XI 53 n. 8, 55 n. 16
1370 M XVII 149 n. 21 Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
1374 M XXI 63 n. 42 Pal. lat. 1375 83, 106–9, 115–20, 130–32,
1577 N LIII 206 n. 35 138, 256–58, 260, 326
Pal. lat. 1385 255 n. 66
Prague, Knihovna národního muzea Pal. lat. 1391 130 n. 21, 255 n. 66, 257 n.
III H 11 155 n. 43 78
V H 21 155 n. 42 Pal. lat. 1396 128 n. 18, 129, 199 n. 15,
200 n. 16, 255 n. 66, 256 n.
Třeboň, Státní oblastní archiv 75
6 (A 4) 206–7 Pal. lat. 1439 106–15, 128, 137 n. 44, 255
9 (A 7) 206–7 n. 66, 256–57, 293, 327

Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Zagreb, Knjižnica Metropolitana

Cod. lat. 4007 128 nn. 14 and 16, 254, 328 MR lat. 154 198 n. 11
Cod. lat. 2352 233