Thinking About Magic in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
In April 2010, a group of scholars convened at the University of Auckland to discuss 'Miracles, Medicine, and Magic in Medieval and Early Modern Europe'. Among the speakers, many focused on magic. As they engaged with and challenged existing scholarship, one theme recurred with special frequency: the systems of thought that made the different notions of magic thinkable. This Special Issue of Parergon is the result of those exchanges, bringing together articles that explore how magic was imagined in England, France, the Netherlands, and Scotland between the late fourteenth and late seventeenth centuries. This Introduction, with its brief survey of recent scholarship, is intended to offer context, scholarly and historical, for the articles, each of which seeks in some way to reconstruct the overlapping mental structures within which magic seemed plausible to contemporary observers.