Trafficking with Demons - by Martha Rampton (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Trafficking with Demons explores how magic was perceived, practiced, and prohibited in western Europe during the first millennium CE. Through the overlapping frameworks of religion, ritual, and gender, Martha Rampton connects early Christian reckonings with pagan magic to later doctrines and dogmas. Challenging established views on the role of women in ritual magic during this period, Rampton provides a new narrative of the ways in which magic was embedded within the foundational assumptions of western European society, informing how people understood the cosmos, divinity, and their own Christian faith.

As Rampton shows, throughout the first Christian millennium, magic was thought to play a natural role within the functioning of the universe and existed within a rational cosmos hierarchically arranged according to a "great chain of being." Trafficking with the "demons of the lower air" was the essense of magic. Interactions with those demons occurred both in highly formalistic, ritual settings and on a routine and casual basis. Rampton tracks the competition between pagan magic and Christian belief from the first century CE, when it was fiercest, through the early Middle Ages, as atavistic forms of magic mutated and found sanctuary in the daily habits of the converted peoples and new paganisms entered Europe with their own forms of magic. By the year 1000, she concludes, many forms of magic had been tamed and were, by the reckoning of the elite, essentially ineffective, as were the women who practiced it and the rituals that attended it.

Review Quotes

This book will serve as a stimulus to careful rethinking about a period in the history of magic that deserves more attention than it has sometimes been given.

A comprehensive study of the changes and continuities that magic--and its gendered and ritual associations--underwent from early Christianity through to the Carolingian period... This is an extremely valuable study, and will in particular appeal to scholars and students entering into and seeking a foothold within the study of early Christian and early medieval magic.

In Trafficking with Demons, Rampton has set out to challenge established scholarly views on the role of women in ritual magic during the first millennium... In refocusing our attention on the relationship between ritual and authority, and between authority and gender, Rampton's study offers an important new contribution to our understanding of elite Church views of magic during the first millennium.

Rampton's book is an ambitious project, attempting to cover a millennium of historical, social, and political contexts. While the book covers a broad span of time and geographical area, it helps the reader understand how views on magic changed drastically depending on where and when magic was discussed. It fills a gap in scholarship and does so in a way that engages the reader and highlights the depth of the research presented.

This is a monumental work. I found the book fascinating, enjoyable to read and full of interesting detail. It raises important questions about these relationships in subsequent European historym and it will be essential reading for gender studies courses and scholars of medieval religion and witchcraft.

About the Author

Martha Rampton is Professor Emerita of History at Pacific University. She is the editor of European Magic and Witchcraft.