A good place to see how a fairly ordinary person employed these
charms (or at least collected them) is _The Commonplace Book of Robert
Reynes of Acle_ ed. by Cameron Louis (1980). Reynes collected a number
of charms, written or verbal, to cover spiritual and medical emergencies.
He includes a favorite charm of his day (1470s): the "nails of Christ"--a
drawing of a nail supposed to be of the same size as the nails of the
Passion to be carried as protection against, wounds, poison, death without
the sacraments, etc. But one was supposed to say some Our Fathers, Hail
Marys, and a Creed to "charge it up" every day. Forgive the plug, but
I've excerpted and modernized parts of his book in _Medieval Popular
Religion, 1000-1500: A Reader_, along with various other charms. One
particularly popular one was the Cross charm, in use from the 13th
century, promising very much the same as Jim's prayer to the BVM from
Josephat. The parchment it was written on was supposed to be wrapped
around a woman in labor as a "birth girdle." Curt F. Buehler edited it in
his article "Prayers and Charms in Certain Middle English Scrolls,"
_Speculum_ 39 (1964).
Perhaps the most famous charm of all of this sort is the tutelary
image of St. Christopher, widely painted on church walls and circulated
on woodcut devotional cards. Seeing it guarded someone for the rest of
the day from all manner of death and disaster. I suspect that part of why
the Christopher image was so popular is for a reason similar to Alison
Maloney's suggestion about the power of script for unlettered people.
Since it needed no "mysterious" writing, just an image, but guaranteed
protection from death, it could be fully appreciated and employed by
anyone, literate or not. (Still, the examples I know of all carry text
explaining the power of the image to ward off death.)
John
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John Shinners e-mail:[log in to unmask]
Chair and Professor Phone: (office): (219) 284-4494
Humanistic Studies Program Phone (dept.): (219) 284-4501
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Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
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