Anexo B: menú HART ® para AMS

One of the more salient questions this dissertation has addresses is how it can be determined whether a particular text is a Heavenly Letter charm. This question is pertinent because typologies and indexes of charms have the interest of modern charm scholarship. Charms are studied not as individual texts, but in light of their form, function or mode of

transmission. The Heavenly Letter, however, is conspicuously absent from recent studies.8 _{This absence could be due to the typological difficulties}

that come with the Heavenly Letter’s status as a charm type. They are briefly summarized here.

5 _{William R. Halliday, “A Note upon the Sunday Epistle and the Letter of Pope Leo,”}

Speculum 2.1 (1927): 74, n. 2. See also Martyn Lyons, “Celestial Letters: Morals and Magic in

Nineteenth-Century France,” French History 27.4 (2013): 498, 506-07; Harlinda Lox, “Kaiser Karl V. in der flämischen Erzählkultur,” in Erzählkultur: Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaftlichen

Erzählforschung. Hans-Jörg Uther zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Rolf W. Brednich (Berlin: de

Gruyter, 2009): 263-76.

6 _{Lyons, “Celestial Letters,” 507, 512-13.}

7 _{In de Geest van Gebed, “Gebed tot het Heilig Kruis en Lijden van Onze Heer Jezus}

Christus,” accessed June 11, 2015,

www.geestvangebed.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=370&Itemid=41.

8 _{E.g., Jonathan Roper, English Verbal Charms, FF Communications 288 (Helsinki:}

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The corpora introduced in chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate that, in spite of the presence of a number of shared features, there is

considerable variation between the texts. The first discriminating factor between Heavenly Letter charms and other charms is their status: the Heavenly Letter charm is a verbal charm, which implies that it has a certain form and function. Verbal charms are here defined as

(combinations of) characters, words and sentences, often formulaic and sometimes associated with certain objects or actions, that aim to

influence reality for the better by means of supernatural intervention. They allow the charmer to prevent or fix a situation that is not to their liking, which usually constitutes healing an injury, curing an illness, or protecting oneself or others against medical, social, or supra-individual problems. Those texts known as Sunday Letters, for example, also derive from heaven but should be distinguished from Heavenly Letter charms, as their function is admonitory rather than protective or healing.

A Heavenly Letter’s function, and therefore its nature as a charm, is usually easy enough to recognize: as mentioned above, the majority of Heavenly Letter charms consists of a letter proper – the effective part of the charm – as well as an introduction stating how and why the charm should be used. This is especially true for Prières de Charlemagne, which typically feature extensive explanations of the charm’s function and use, and in fact get their name not from the contents of the letter, but from the mention of Charlemagne in their introduction. Epistolae Salvatoris are slightly more problematic in this regard. They, too, are sometimes

bipartite, with a clear distinction between introduction and letter proper. This is the case for the Epistola in the fifteenth-century prayer book Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 850, which starts with the following rubricated line: Who so bereth on him þis write or euery day onys or twies

sey it or her it agayn all perelles he shall be safe if he beleue in god. The

letter itself is rendered in Latin, as is the letter proper of every other

Epistola in the medieval English corpus. However, in some Epistolae the

distinction is not quite so clear. The Epistola in the Royal prayer book, for instance, does not make explicit that it is a charm until the very last line:

Si quis hanc epistolam secum habuerit secures ambulet in pace. Another

fifteenth-century prayer book – Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawl. liturg. e3 – presents an even more ambiguous case. The rubricated introduction

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preceding the letter proper is in Latin and gives no indication that the text could or should be used as a charm; it simply announces that the following text is the letter written by the hands of Christ himself to King Abgar. However, if one considers the texts surrounding the letter, it becomes less evident that the letter would have no protective function whatsoever. It is preceded by a number of petitionary prayers and followed by a ‘prayer to the crucifix’ that prevents the person saying it devoutly from being accosted by evil and from going to hell after death. How, then, will the letter from Christ to Abgar – its contents focussing on protection by default – have been interpreted by a fifteenth-century reader of the book?

Assuming that the distinction between charm and non-charm can be made, one may wonder what exactly makes a particular charm a Heavenly Letter charm. Chapter 3 expounds the path that can be taken towards a classification of charms. It is proposed that the presence of certain building blocks and their nature – for instance, which formulas are used, how the charm should be applied, and what its expected results are – could allow for identification of individual charm types. Any variation in the presence or nature of the building blocks of a certain charm type could point to the existence of multiple subtypes. What Heavenly Letter charms have in common, aside from their holy provenance, is their multifunctionality. They are not geared towards preventing or solving a single medical, natural or social issue. Moreover, unlike other charm types that do have a more specific function,

Heavenly Letters do not demonstrate a semantically meaningful link between their content – the motif of a letter coming from heaven or having a divine sender – and their function. As charms are often categorised according to their function,9 _{the Heavenly Letter’s}

multifunctional character might hamper its identification.

Another, perhaps even more important, shared feature among Heavenly Letters is that they explicitly present themselves as letters, i.e.,

9 _{E.g., Tatiana Agapkina and Andrei Toporkov, “Charm Indexes: Problems and}

Perspectives,” in The Power of Words: Studies on Charms and Charming in Europe, ed. James Kapaló, Éva Pócs and William Ryan (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2013), 76; Jonathan Roper, “Typologising English and European Charms,” in Charms and

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as contents on a material carrier, sent from one place or person to another. This is witnessed in both Epistolae Salvatoris and Prières de

Charlemagne. The emphasis on their materiality classifies Heavenly Letter

charms in a sense as charm objects, an assumption that is supported by the fact that the majority is amuletic.10 _{The Saint Suzanne or Saint William}

charms against gout are otherwise similar to the Heavenly Letter – they were relatively well-known in the later Middle Ages and also claim a heavenly provenance – but they do not emphasize their status as written texts; they are less frequently amuletic, and often function as oral

incantations. This sets them apart from the charms that are considered Heavenly Letters in this dissertation. The materiality of Heavenly Letter charms is further discussed in section 7.4. Ultimately, whether or not all charms containing a reference to a heavenly entity or perhaps all multifunctional, letter-like charms can be considered a category depends on which feature of the charm’s form, contents, or function is regarded as most important by the person making the classification.

All in all, the question of typology remains a difficult one to answer. Even if there are some strong patterns to be witnessed in the corpora that might allow for the allocation of a charm to a particular type or subtype, there are also charms claiming heavenly provenance that do not fall into the categories of Epistolae, Prières or Saint William or Suzanne charms, for that matter. The Caligula charm, for instance, only states that it was brought to Rome by an angel. There is no mention of the Christ-Abgar correspondence or of the Emperor Charlemagne. Then there is the Lacnunga charm which is not multipurpose, but only

functions as a cure for diarrhoea. Do these charms make up their own subtypes of the Heavenly Letter charm? Even more variation arose in the later Middle Ages, most notably in the form of a set of Heavenly Letter charms referring to Joseph of Arimathea as the one who found a letter written by Christ – a multipurpose amuletic charm – on Christ’s body when he was taken down from the cross. It becomes increasingly clear that the corpus of Heavenly Letter charms is at odds with a rigid typology of charms according to function or purpose. On the one hand, the two

10 _{For a discussion of the object-like properties of (amuletic) charms, see Borsje, “Medieval}

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distinguished subtypes of Epistolae and Prières become more well-known over time and therefore more fixed in terms of form and function. On the other, the third group of heterogeneous Heavenly Letters also increases in size. One may wonder whether sheer number plays a role here: would a modern scholar consider the Joseph of Arimathea letters, for instance, a subtype of Heavenly Letter charms, if more of them had been

identified? It appears that some measure of subjectivity cannot be avoided in this matter.