The Petit Albert: secrets of natural magic in early modern France

In the French countryside of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, owning an «Albert» could be enough to earn a reputation as a sorcerer, as many tales collected by folklorists attest. The reference was to the Petit Albert, short title of the Secrets merveilleux de la magie naturelle et cabalistique du Petit Albert, one of the best-selling popular books of the age. Together with the Grand Albert it formed a small canon of domestic magic, spread by pedlars from village to village.

Editions and false imprints

The earliest known editions date from the beginning of the eighteenth century and bear the imprint of Cologne and of a phantom publisher, the «heirs of Beringos fratres». This was a cover: the booklets were printed in France, probably in Lyon, and the foreign place served both to evade controls and to suggest a mysterious origin. Reprints multiplied throughout the following century, with variants and additions.

The declared author is one Albertus Parvus Lucius, «Albert the Little», a name playing on confusion with Albertus Magnus, the great thirteenth-century Dominican theologian and naturalist. The allusion served to link the booklet to Albert's reputation as an expert in the hidden virtues of nature, a fame already exploited for centuries by other apocryphal texts.

An encyclopedia of secrets

The content is a heterogeneous anthology. It contains planetary talismans, perfumes, love secrets, methods for discovering treasure, folk medicine remedies, and advice on farming, fishing and cooking. Much of the material derives from the Renaissance literature of «secrets», the books of natural magic and household technique that had enjoyed great success in Italy and across Europe in the sixteenth century.

Natural magic, as defined by Renaissance authors such as Giovan Battista Della Porta, who published the first edition of his Magia naturalis in 1558, was the study of sympathies and antipathies between things, distinct from demonic magic. The Petit Albert appeals to this tradition but mixes it with cabalistic and talismanic elements and with popular beliefs, in a whole where naturalistic curiosity and superstition coexist without distinction.

Suspicion, censorship, spread

The clergy considered the Petit Albert a dangerous book, and preachers pointed to it as an instrument of the devil. In the nineteenth century the French commission charged with examining pedlar literature, established in 1852, counted it among the works to be excluded from itinerant sale. The ban did not halt its circulation, which continued through clandestine channels and cheap reprints.

The booklet also travelled beyond the borders of France, to the colonies and French-speaking regions, from the Antilles to the Indian Ocean, where it was read and adapted in very different cultural contexts. In some of these areas the very name Petit Albert became a generic synonym for a book of witchcraft, feared and sought after in equal measure.

The Petit Albert allows us to observe from the inside the popular culture of the ancien régime: its fears, its desires, its curiosity about the secrets of nature. It is a book born of Renaissance popularisation and turned by cheap print into an almost legendary object, the mere possession of which was enough to conjure up the world of the marvellous.