“It’s a Kind of Magic”: Juggling Privacy and Prosecution for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Magical Practitioners

Abstract

Practitioners of ritual magic in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain faced both legal and social dangers, yet continued to engage in their activities with the assistance and support of other members of society. Doing so necessitated the acquisition and maintenance of privacy, even if it must often be breached to ensure success. After a discussion of ritual magicians’ privacy in both indoor and outdoor settings, this chapter examines scrying, a subtype of ritual magic in which the magician gains knowledge by means of looking into a reflective surface. Both manuals of magic and popular and legal accounts of such rituals display how magicians aspired to privacy under challenging social and spatial conditions, with varying degrees of success.