Timbers, Frances. Magic and Masculinity: Ritual Magic and Gender in the Early Modern Era. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.
Magic has had a long history of being used as a tool to both convey and define cultural ideas in society, and the ways that magic was regarded and used by people in early modern England is the focus of Magic and Masculinity: Ritual Magic and Gender in the Early Modern Era by Frances Timbers, who is currently an adjunct professor at Trent University and who focuses her research on ritual magic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Magic and Masculinity was her first monograph, published in 2014, and it grew out of Timbers’ doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto. The work’s primary concern is examining the ways in which ritual magic intersected with ideas of gender in early modern England, and Timbers shows how magic was opportunistically used by some in ways that reinforced traditional gender hierarchies, but also by others to undermine those established gender roles. Timbers relies heavily on manuscripts written by people directly involved in magic during the era; people such as Elias Ashmole, a well-educated and well-connected alchemist, and Goodwin Wharton, who left behind an extensive diary of his life with Mary Parish and their experiences with the spiritual world. While these manuscripts may contain any amount of fabrication, they remain historically useful sources because they open a window onto the culture in which they were produced and shine a light on contemporary gender issues. Timbers also uses Quarter session records from Essex to illuminate a legal episode that involved accusations of magic use.
Timbers opens her work with a quite useful primer on the subject of magic and the differences between ceremonial or ritual magic and witchcraft. While witchcraft was viewed as a means of supernatural harm, ritual magic was widely accepted as a positive and useful natural philosophy. It was largely employed by respected and educated men who sought to manipulate the natural world or engage with the spirit world in a synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy. In the early modern era, the boundary between the tangible and the intangible worlds was highly permeable or even non-existent, with widespread belief in magical ideas and spiritual beings like demons and fairies. This general belief in magic allowed those who practiced it to be influential drivers of culture.
A foundational argument of Timbers’ book is the way that magic was used as a pathway to manhood and its attendant power, control, and honor. Men used ritual magic to achieve their masculine desires and to strengthen the patriarchal structure of society. Male magicians were considered to be experimental scientists who used science, which was personified as male, to subdue nature, which was personified as female. This behavior by educated and influential men supported traditional patriarchal ideas of the dominance of men. The men who performed ritual magic sought to demonstrate control over both the natural and spiritual worlds. In the religious and cultural landscape of the early modern era, patriarchy was firmly entrenched in society and it was generally accepted that women were naturally subordinate to men; in fact, this was believed to be the divinely ordained order of things. Men extended these beliefs to the spiritual world and used ritual magic to subordinate and command spirits as well. Timbers explains that the demonstration of control over the spiritual world could add greatly to a magician’s sense of masculinity.
In this same vein, there was an upper-class fraternity of men involved in ritual magic who formed groups that allowed for elite occult status that had the effect of enhancing the social status and masculinity of these men. Groups like the Royal Society and the Freemasons provided men who were interested in magical arts with a measure of exclusivity, secrecy, and occult knowledge. Timbers cites Elias Ashmole as an example of a rich and educated man, interested in astrology and alchemy, who was very drawn to these kinds of groups that had a mystique of ancient and secret knowledge available only to the male elite. Of course, these groups excluded women and lower-status men, thereby upholding patriarchal hierarchies and notions of masculine elitism.
Timbers also includes a case study of a local legal suit in the 1640s between John Alston and Robert Aylett. Alston, who was a prominent man in his community, accused Aylett and some fellow conspirators of breaking into his home in the night and sexually assaulting male and female members of his family. Alston explained the men of the family’s lack of resistance by claiming that Aylett had caused them to be charmed asleep during the assaults. This is a prime example of Timbers’ notion that magic was a tool that people wielded in various ways. By leveling an accusation of magic use at Aylett, Alston was able to frame himself and his family as victims of the supernatural, thereby retaining his honor in a situation that otherwise would have cast him as a weak patriarch who was unable to protect his family and home. Alston was able to retain his manhood by accusing his enemy of the nefarious use of magic.
Timbers’ examination of women’s use of magic also shows variations and inconsistencies in the ways it intersected with gender ideas. Goodwin Wharton wrote about his partner, Mary Parish, a female magician who sometimes undermined patriarchal ideas with her magic, and at other times seemed to support the notion of traditional patriarchy. In the accounts of Parish’s magic, she was submissive to the spirit world rather than in command of it, as male magicians would have been. This puts her below men in terms of magical prowess and feeds into ideas of women as naturally weaker and more subservient than men. But in another instance, she had to defend Wharton’s male virtue when he was being sexually abused by female spirits. This event reversed the usual patriarchal hierarchy of powerful males protecting the virtue of weaker women.
Magic and Masculinity examines how cultural opinions about gender were impacted by ritual magic, and by the way magic was used by various individuals, both male and female. The work should appeal to scholars interested in cultural or gender history, but could also hold wider scholarly appeal as the issue of magic in the early modern period overlaps with numerous other subjects, such as religion, science, and medicine. Timbers admirably covers a surprising amount of ground in a brief book, but Magic would have profited from a bit more analysis in the conclusion. She does well to write about the theme of boundaries, with male magicians seeking to build and control boundaries between the worlds while female magicians tended to blur those boundaries. But there seemed to be some additional themes in the book that she could have expounded upon as well, such as power or belief. That said, the book is well-written and full of fascinating ideas, so perhaps the criticism about the brief conclusion is just another way of saying that readers will be left with a curiosity to know more about this intriguing subject matter.
Reviewed by Matthew Inman – George Mason University
