Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts, Sorcery and Witchcraft in Christian Britain Ed. Ronald Hutton

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This is a fascinating collection in a number of ways.

Firstly, particularly in the essays by Champion and by Easton, looking at ritual markings made in Churches and in domestic and other settings is the way that you see what you are looking for. Most people have avoided giving “meaning” to graffiti within Churches as it did not fit with their narrative of Christian belief, but look again with a different lens and there is so much meaning being inscribed on the walls (even if the exact meaning is not available to us).

The second point would be the continuity that a lot of the evidence points to, there are region variations and there are evolutions through time, but the picture is generally one characterised more by continuity than diversity. One of the questions this prompts is what caused these practices to endure – and a key part of the answer must be that at some level the practices “worked”. There must have been enough cases where people saw the desired outcome followed the action (even if scientists would point to coincidence rather than causation) to keep the practice alive. Also, as those of us who pray would be able to share, even in the absence of the desired outcome the fact that you have done something, be that making a charm or saying a prayer etc., brings a comfort.

Moving on from this, there is a wider point that there is a whole range of ritual and belief that is generally dismissed as “folk religion” which we should be much more attentive to. One of my questions would be the way these studies, despite seeing long histories in the practices described, set themselves as “historical” studies. There seems to be few connections made to contemporary practice. That the search “charms” returns over 2 million results in ebay would suggest there is a living tradition out there. The way that so many people engage with the act of lighting a candle in a church or cathedral quite separate from any structure of Christian belief that “the Church” would recognise is another token of this. It seems quiet clear to me that the beliefs of ordinary people are no more shaped by the “secular” orthodoxies of the likes of Dawkins and co than they were by Medieval priests and prelates.