Oral Tradition, 7/1 (1992):116-142 Latin Charms of Medieval England: Verbal Healing in a Christian Oral Tradition

This is an essay to open a discussion of medieval Latin charms as a genre rooted in oral tradition. It will concern itself solely with materials drawn from manuscripts made in England from about A.D. 1000 to near 1500. One reason for setting such limitations on the materials is that restricting the study chronologically and geographically will facilitate identification of features peculiar to the insular English tradition of Latin charms.1 For though Latin charms can be found throughout medieval Europe, to make cross-cultural comparisons prematurely might obscure distinctive regional features. To begin, it seems best to state what is meant by the word “charm ” in this paper. Carmen is the word that in classical Latin meant, among other things, “a solemn ritual utterance, usually sung or chanted in a metrical form” (OLD). The word denoted, on the one hand, a religious hymn, or on the other, a magical chant, spell, or incantation. Related words in late Latin are incantamentum and incantatio.2 These words carry associations with magic due to the implications of chanting or incanting in pagan contexts. In the medieval manuscripts under consideration here, carmen is the word repeatedly used as a tag, a heading, or a marginal gloss to call attention to some kind of verbal cure. Its meaning is not confined solely to spoken remedies, since the directions often indicate that the efficacious words are to be written, nor is the term attached especially to poetic texts. The word 1 A methodology for the study and comparison of oral literature that takes into account “tradition-dependence ” as well as “genre-dependence ” is described by Fole