Conjuring Spirits contains both general surveys and analyses of magical texts and manuscripts by distinguished scholars in a variety of disciplines. Included are chapters by Richard Kieckhefer and Robert Mathiesen on the Sworn Book of Honorius, Michael Camille on the Ars Notoria, John B. Friedman on the Secretum Philosophorum, Nicholas Watson on the McMaster text, and Elizabeth Wade on Lullian divination. The work also includes Juris Lidaka's edition of the Liber de Angelis, and an overview of late medieval English ritual manuscripts by Frank Klaassen....

Invoking Angels brings together a tightly themed collection of essays on late medieval and early modern texts concerned with the role of angels in the cosmos, focusing on angelic rituals and spiritual cosmologies. Collectively, these essays tie medieval angel magic texts more clearly to medieval religion and to the better-known author-magicians of the early modern period. In the process of rearticulating the understanding of Christian angel magic, contributors examine the places where an intersection of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic ideas can be identified.

Aside from the...

In Rewriting Magic, Claire Fanger explores a fourteenth-century text called The Flowers of Heavenly Teaching. Written by a Benedictine monk named John of Morigny, the work all but disappeared from the historical record, and it is only now coming to light again in multiple versions and copies. While John's book largely comprises an extended set of prayers for gaining knowledge, The Flowers of Heavenly Teaching is unusual among prayer books of its time because it includes a visionary autobiography with intimate information about the book's inspiration and...