Some observations on Middle English healing charms

In medieval medicine, magic played a significant role, in that it could interact with the divine and the supernatural, which was thought to be as responsible of the disease or the cure as the physical cause or remedy. Medical charms contained the rituals coercing their intervention in everyone’s life. However, unlike other instructive texts, such as recipes, their efficacy depended on the shared belief on their power. Due to the rise of university education and, more significantly, to the overarching influence of religion, some forms of magic began to be looked at with suspicion and increasing scepticism. The present paper focusses on stance markings, that is, linguistic choices that indicate an evaluation on the part of the writer (and possibly of the patient and the practitioner) in a corpus of Middle English charms ranging from the thirteenth century up to the end of the fifteenth century in order to establish whether such a change in the social attitude towards magic can also be detected by stance and engagement marking.