How do words work? Do words you see work differently from those you hear? Does it matter if you understand them? Questions like these might preoccupy children just learning to read, though most people put them aside afterward as either settled or irrelevant; among our peculiarities as scholars is an inclination to return to such questions as questions. In Katherine Storm Hindley's Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England, charms serve as a limit case for language's interface with people and their world. Hindley's study of language's weird fringe allows her to convincingly demonstrate that the nature of words’ power, and the difference in force between writing and speech, was a live issue in the Middle Ages: it was possible to disagree about why words worked, and how, and for whom. In historicizing textual magic, she has produced a compelling account of one strand of the psychology...

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