The Munich Handbook of necromancy: manuscript Clm 849

The Bavarian State Library in Munich holds a fifteenth-century Latin codex with the shelfmark Clm 849. At first sight it is a modest manuscript, without precious illuminations; in reality it is one of the most important documents for the history of medieval magic, because it offers a collection of necromantic practices written by someone who knew them from the inside. Scholars call it the Munich Handbook.

The manuscript and its edition

The codex was studied and edited by the American historian Richard Kieckhefer in the volume Forbidden Rites, published in 1997, which provides a transcription and extensive commentary. Kieckhefer dates it to the fifteenth century and places it in the German-speaking area. The beginning of the manuscript has been lost, so the text opens in fragmentary fashion, like a notebook whose first pages have fallen away.

The collection consists of a series of «experiments», the term medieval magical texts used for individual operations with a specific purpose. They are written in Latin, with a few passages in German, and reveal an educated compiler, accustomed to the language of the liturgy and of exorcism, who reused ecclesiastical formulas in a context quite different from the one for which they had been created.

Three kinds of experiment

Kieckhefer distinguished three broad groups. Divinatory experiments aim to uncover hidden facts, such as the perpetrator of a theft or the future, often by means of reflective surfaces. Illusionist ones promise to conjure up banquets, castles or marvellous horses. Those the scholar calls psychological concern control over the will of others, from love to the favour of the powerful, and even attempts to arouse hatred or madness.

The picture that emerges is far removed from the image of a popular, peasant magic. These texts presuppose knowledge of Latin, familiarity with the rites of the Church and access to books and instruments. This is why Kieckhefer spoke of a «clerical underworld»: a milieu of clerics, often without a stable office, who possessed the learning needed to practise necromancy.

Necromancy in the Middle Ages

The term necromancy originally meant divination by means of the dead; in the Latin Middle Ages it came to designate the summoning of demons in general, partly under the influence of the form nigromantia, interpreted as «black art». Theologians condemned it as the gravest form of magic. Manuals like the Munich one show, however, that practitioners often understood it as an exercise of authority over demons in the name of God.

The codex is also valuable because it is neither a literary work nor a polemical text, but a working manual, with its repetitions, inconsistencies and additions. It allows us to see how texts circulated and were adapted, and it offers parallels with other European manuscripts that point to the existence of a shared tradition.

The Munich Handbook has changed the way historians look at medieval magic. It has shown that alongside the great texts attributed to Solomon there was a smaller-scale, practical production, born among clerics and handed down in working notebooks. Reading it means entering a precise social milieu, that of the late medieval clergy, with its ambitions and its transgressions.