This, dear reader, is already decidedly my jam. However, the fact that fragments from all these sources have been brought together in one collection written mostly in the vernacular English marks The Dannel’s form as an early modern creation.'. Its content consists of ritualistic texts based in the medieval tradition of necromancy and is derived from medieval sources like Roger Bacon, The Greater Key of Solomon, and the 15th-century manuscript Livre des Esperitz.
' The Book of the Dannel seems to stand on the edge between medieval and early modern magic.
ST. CYPRIAN VIVA MAS SERIES
Contained within are a series of operations of openly and categorical demonic and necromantic magics. This text is known as The Book of the Dannel. The British Library's Detailed Record considers them a 'miscallany of tracts on magic', but a more accurate assessment of their collected-chapbook composition seems to come from László Sándor Chardonnens' description of them as 'an assembly of a series of booklets containing a great number of magical treatises'. The text to which I draw your attention is a collection, a legion of pamphlet-treatises bound together in the document known as MS Sloane 3853. In short, as an offering of devotion on this holy day, I intend to turn the pages on a collection of Cyprianic operations for calling to the powerful four kings of the cardinal directions, and summoning unclean devils and the shades of the dead to deliver and consecrate books of spirits and the understanding of the powerful transformative knowledge contained in such spirit-delivered tomes. It is a text concerning that nigromantic blend of demonology, conjuration and necromancy - those 'geotick' forms of magic, to use a term from our pre-modern forebears - with which readers of my chapter in Cypriana: Old World, '‘In the Manner of Saint Cyprian’: A Cyprianic Black Magic of Early Modern English Grimoires' will be familiar. I foreground my current geographical position quite deliberately, as I intend to set a lamp upon our reading-table and shed some light upon a specifically early modern English Cyprianic text on this Feast of St Cyprian and St Justina. Having crossed the Atlantic to present at the Living in a Magical World: Inner Lives, 1300-1900 conference hosted at St Anne's College, Oxford - at which I spoke on love divination in early modern England - it is from the chalk-lined shores of The Old Country that I wish you all a merry Cyprianmas for the year of 2018.
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