Him biþ sona wel. Changes in the communicative pact between healer and patient in the Old English and Middle English 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. Due to the rise of university education and, more significantly, to the overarching influence of religion, in the course of Late Middle Ages some forms of magic began to be looked at with suspicion and increasing scepticism. In other words, although magic was still very popular, the general attitude towards magic slightly changed during the late Middle Ages, especially among certain social groups relating to learning, to which the scribe surely belonged. It is justifiable to suppose that such a change in attitude could be transferred in the linguistic choices made by the scribe while writing down what was to be performed. The present paper focusses on stance and engagement markings in a corpus of Old English and Middle English charms to individuate whether the social change in attitude expressed in texts is also visible in the linguistic choices of the writer.