Charms, Charmers and Charming: International Research on Verbal Magic

Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic

by Jonathan Roper (Editor)

Charms, Charmers, and Charming brings together the work of many of today's key scholars in the field of verbal charming. The essays it contains cover vernacular magical texts and practice from Malaysia to Madagascar, and from England to Estonia. As the most comprehensive collection of research on charms, charmers, and charming available in the English language, it forms an essential reader on the topic.

Genres: Nonfiction, Occult, Folklore, Magic, Witchcraft, Social, Language

321 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting stuff in here! More international than I needed, so I skimmed a few chapters more than I read, but it's so interesting to see similarities across the globe in the practice of charming!

[Tchipakkan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of papers on charms (verbal magick) from all over the world. I enjoyed the papers/chapters more when I had some familiarity with the culture- context is so important! For example, the charms from medieval England were similar to the ones I know well from my studies of Dark Ages England, Madagascar or Indonesia, not so much. But I liked comparing the diversity for common elements. This is solid study, not the kind of introductory stuff one gets from Llewellyn books (not that they don't have their place). I can recommend it to readers who are ready to look at magick from an anthropological point of view. I would also love to suggest to those who collected the information not to be quite so dismissive about the efficacy of the charms. By and large most didn't put a lot of energy into trying to come up with some justification why the people they were studying were doing it, and didn't come off as condescending as I've seen in other studies.