Out Of The Shadows

In an extract from a new book celebrating the history of Boscastle’s Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, Professor Ronald Hutton introduces the photographs of Sara Hannant, which aim to bring a range of enigmatic objects from the museum’s unique collection to life.

- Sara Hannant and Simon Costin

Until recently, historians generally neglected material objects as evidence for what we could know about the past, leaving them to archeologists, while archeologists preferred to concentrate on more remote periods, and above all the ancient world and prehistory, where they were either dominant or wholly in charge. Neither had a lot of time for writing about magic, which was viewed as both an obscure and a trivial branch of human activity, and especially so if continued into modern times, when most scholars thought that people should really have got over it. All this consigned the material remains of modern magic to the ultimate periphery of interest for serious scholars. This situation has, however, altered almost beyond recognition in recent years, so that in 2015 alone no fewer than four different collections of scholarly essays were in press, all intended to impress academic as well as general readers and all dedicated to the material evidence for magical activity. Some had a global scope, and some covered the period from ancient times to the present, but all included modern European evidence and all made the point that to study the materiality of magic is now considered to be a thoroughly good thing.