Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History.(Book Review)

Owen Davies. Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History. New York: Hambledon and London; dist. by Palgrave, New York. 2003. Pp. xv, 246. $29.95. ISBN 1-85285-297-6.

Owen Davies' Cunning-Folk is a much-needed study of the popular magicians of England from around 1500 to the twentieth century. Cunning-folk (literally, wise or knowing people) were those men and women who offered a wide range of magical services to the English public until social and economic changes in the first half of the twentieth century destroyed their markets and put an end to their practice. Cunning-folk professed to cure the bewitched, practiced various kinds of prophetic divination, and offered to find lost goods or hidden treasure, among other activities. They often made a good living doing so. They were not witches, and so they have received little attention from writers on the histories of witchcraft. In fact, they have been a generally ill-defined group: studies of class, gender, and mentality have backed away from their variety and ambiguity, and Owen Davies' book does much to rescue these colorful, elusive figures from undeserved obscurity.

Cunning-Folk is a continuation of Davies' interest in those people traditionally marginalized by historians of the prosecution of witchcraft proper. His Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 1736-1951 (1999) offered a history of those who practiced magical arts in the years after witchcraft itself was decriminalized in 1736. Thereafter, all kinds of magical activity was officially deemed to be fraudulent, and prosecuted as such; but it is clear that many English people continued to believe both in witchcraft and in the efficacy of cunning-folk for centuries after their laws had ceased to do so. Davies' A People Bewitched: Witchcraft and Magic in Nineteenth-Century Somerset (1999) was a case study of an English county, and Cunning-Folk builds on this work to offer wider conclusions about English society and the role of popular magic within it from the Reformation to a time within living memory.

This is an ambitious project and sometimes the reader would like even more detail of the cunning-folk, and the worlds in which they lived--worlds which they did much to shape by their forceful interventions in local affairs. Regional differences and local politics in particular might be further explored, as might some of the finer points of definition. Are we quite sure ...