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A Witch On Every Corner: A Short Review of Cunning Folk [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-04-17

A book review! Been too long. Enjoy, before the world burns.

Should I Read This: Yeah. It’s a lot of fun for people who are interested in how everyday people lived their lives.

BookShop.org Link (non-affiliate): Cunning Folk a book by Tabitha Stanmore

Author’s Website: Dr Tabitha Stanmore

Cunning Folk by Dr. Tabitha Stanmore is a fun little book that highlights how Europeans in the Late Medieval and Early Modern period tried to force a world they didn’t entirely understand, and was often horrible to live in, to be just a little more kind. Anyone who is interested in how normal people lived would probably find this book enjoyable.

Dr. Stanmore walks us through the concepts of cunning folk, people who had a reputation for bending the world, even if just a little bit, in the direction of their clients. These people could find lost goods, help calm an abusive husband, try to get the center of your affections to fall in love, or at least lust, with you and, failing all other options, kill someone who needed killing. The book is organized into chapters by topic, such as love, detection, murder, etc. That organization does a very good job of highlighting the kinds of problems that people wanted solved, and even how the cunning folk, known by a lot of different titles, went about their “magic”.

The book also subtly points out just how miserable these lives could be. Someone who spends more than a day’s wages to retrieve a lost silver spoon shows how much poverty and the threat of poverty hung over normal people. The fact that the punishments for nobles who used these services were so much lighter than those of common people speaks to the capriciousness of life. The matter-of-fact descriptions of women trying to either escape their abusive husbands or tame them are a heartbreaking read. The fact that we lose most of the common people into the mists of history, as we see the cunning folk only in court records and then they fade to obscurity, speaks to the way society simply did not value their lives.

The book, despite the occasional odd nod to how we cannot really know if these practitioners used magic, walks through how people could continue to make money promising magic that did not actually exist. These men and woman (despite my flippant headline, the book gives the impression that this was largely a gender-neutral profession) used a combination of people’s own superstitions and their knowledge of the local people and geography, to essentially encourage people to con themselves into believing magic worked. A cunning person used the threat of a magical charm, coupled with an opportunity to anonymously return the lost good, for example, to get a precious item returned. Many people, when accused by a magician, folded, convinced that the magic and not the knowledge and investigative skills of the cunning person found them out. It is a fascinating look at how psychology convinces both the practitioner and the observers that magic did, in fact, work.

Cunning People is a fun read, written to be enjoyable and understandable by people with no background in the subject. It is a fun read about people trying to force a little bit of happiness and comfort out of a world seemingly designed to provide most people both. Recommended.

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