Cunning Folk

'A brilliant book, written with wit and vigour' MALCOLM GASKILL
'Absolutely fascinating' IAN MORTIMER

Historian Tabitha Stanmore transports us to a time when magic was used day-to-day as a way to navigate life's challenges and to solve problems of both trivial and deadly importance.

It's 1600 and you've lost your precious silver spoons, or maybe they've been stolen. Perhaps your child has a fever. Or you're facing trial. Maybe you're looking for love or escaping a husband. What do you do?

In medieval and early modern Europe, your first port of call might have been cunning folk: practitioners of 'service magic'. Neither feared (like witches), nor venerated (like saints), they were essential to everyday life, a ubiquitous presence in a time when the supernatural was surprisingly mundane and a cherished everyday resource.

We meet lovelorn widows, dissolute nobles, selfless healers and renegade monks. We listen in on Queen Elizabeth I's astrology readings and track treasure hunters trying to unearth buried gold without upsetting the fairies that guard it. Much like us, premodern people lived in bewildering times, buffeted by forces beyond their control; and as Stanmore reveals, their faith in magic has much to teach us about how we accommodate ourselves to the irrational in our allegedly enlightened lives today.

Charming in every sense of the word, Cunning Folk is at once an immersive reconstruction of a bygone world and a thought-provoking commentary on the beauty and bafflement of being human.