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Chapter 13 - Magic and Priestcraft: Reformers and Reformation

from Part IV - Old Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2015

David J. Collins, S. J.
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
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Summary

The banishment of Mistress Missa was established as a necessary priority of religious reform in England. The link between magic and the Mass reached to the heart of the liturgy, and of late medieval devotion, in the assertion that transubstantiation was itself no miracle, but rather a magical or quasi-magical manipulation by the priest. The image of the priest not as celebrant but as conjuror cast the central rite of the church as a diabolic act. Reformation critics accused Gregory of 'monstrouse wytchcraftes' and the ability to deceive the eyes of the observer with false wonders and feigned miracles. The magical and the folkloric were interwoven with threads of orthodox piety in the fabric of medieval religious life, as traditional non-Christian practices were adapted to the Christian world-view, sustaining a contested amorphous middle ground between religion and magic. Yet the separation of miracle from magic, at least in theoretical terms, still owed much to the legacy of the Catholic past.
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The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West
From Antiquity to the Present
, pp. 393 - 426
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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