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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Book Review|
July 01 2024
Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England
Katherine Storm Hindley,
Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England
, Chicago
: University of Chicago Press
, 2023
.
Emily V. Thornbury
Emily V. Thornbury is associate professor of English at Yale University and the author of Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England (2014). She works on poetry and poetic form in Old English and Anglo-Latin, and on aesthetic thought in the earlier Middle Ages.
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Genre (2024) 57 (2): 177–181.
Citation
Emily V. Thornbury; Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England. Genre 1 July 2024; 57 (2): 177–181. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-11175884
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