The first comprehensive account of magic tricks in medieval Europe, revealing their place in recipe literature, manuscript culture, illusionist magic, material knowledge and late medieval cultures of experimentation and play.


The Tollemache Book of Secrets, a manuscript compiled around 1500, records a recipe for making a loaf of bread jump by filling it with mercury. Far from an isolated curiosity, versions of this trick appear in several late medieval manuscripts alongside recipes for inks, paints, remedies, alchemical preparations and other practices. Such playful instructions open a window into the history of science, magic, manuscript culture and everyday experimentation in late medieval Europe.

Drawing on more than 550 Latin and vernacular recipes from 100 mostly fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts, Vanessa da Silva Baptista reveals magic tricks as a significant but neglected genre of medieval recipe literature. She shows how tricks for making bread jump, making water appear as wine, rendering bodies seemingly impervious to fire, and causing substances to behave in surprising ways circulated in technical, medical and miscellaneous collections. These recipes were read, collected and perhaps performed by monks, students, physicians, alchemists and literate laypeople.

As the first comprehensive study of magic tricks in medieval Europe, this book brings manuscript and recipe studies into conversation with the history of science and technology, magic, literary studies and premodern performance, demonstrating that deceptive effects were integral to late medieval cultures of play, craft, performance and experimentation.