Sophie Page has published several noteworthy works on medieval magic and astrology. Her first monograph, Magic in the Cloister: Pious Motives, Illicit Interests, and Occult Approaches to the Medieval Universe, is a revision of her dissertation written under the direction of Charles Burnett at the Warburg Institute. It appears in Penn State's Magic in History Series, whose titles should be familiar to any scholar working on medieval magic's literate traditions. Magic in the Cloister studies the collection of more than thirty magic texts donated in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century to St. Augustine's monastery in Canterbury, the largest and most prestigious Benedictine house in late medieval England. St Augustine's library of occult titles was the biggest of any medieval English religious order's, with the exception of the Austin friars' at York. While the monks at St. Augustine's collected and used both licit and illicit magic texts, surprisingly they were never investigated or censured. Page contends that the monks' piety and experience with written texts protected them from criticism. Additionally, from the late twelfth century, magical texts were important to the medieval learned tradition, evident in multilingual translations of them. Yet, while Page notes how these and other circumstances safeguarded the monks at St. Augustine's from suspicion, she is careful to remind her readers how unique their situation was in light of how medieval conceptions of learned magic would eventually contribute to the early modern witchcraft hysteria.

In her book's first chapter, “Monks and Their Magic Texts at St. Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury,” Page offers thorough background on the owners, collectors, donors, and users of St. Augustine's magic books. Her study benefits from a late fourteenth-century chronicle kept by one of its monks, William Thorne, who affirms that the monks were not just occult collectors but also practitioners of magic. In discussing St. Augustine's library, Page outlines the bibliographic history of the magical texts on which her next five chapters will focus. These texts come from volume 1277 of St. Augustine's library, now known as Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 125, a famous collection of alchemical, magical, and medical texts and rituals. Taken together, chapters 2–5 track the monks' interest in increasingly more illicit types of magic. Chapter 2, “Natural Magic: The Basilisk and the Lodestone,” explains that despite and because natural magic dealt with divinely-ordained phenomena, it could be a muddled category. While it was putatively the most licit type of magic best known for its medical applications, natural magic could subvert the divine order and thus attract suspicion of being demonically engineered. A more provocative use of natural magic is the subject of chapter 3, “The Liber vaccae: Magical Uses of Monstrous Creations,” which discusses the Liber vaccae's eighty-five experiments designed to change humans partially or entirely into beasts. In this chapter, particularly interesting is Page's explanation about how most medieval copies of the Liber vaccae, including the one in Corpus Christi MS 125, were preceded by Bartholomaeus Anglicus's De proprietatibus rerum. Whether physical or conceptual, a magic text's affiliation with a “safer” text allowed several of the St. Augustine's titles to evade detection.

For the Liber vaccae's provocative use of natural magic, Page's study of it makes for a facile transition between chapter 2 and chapter 4, “Image Magic: Harnessing Power in the Harmonious Universe.” While image magic drew primarily on occult powers in nature, its ceremonial use of words, characters, images, and spirits was more controversial for its potential idolatry. Image magic's affiliation with astrology, culturally associated with purely natural phenomena, rendered it more orthodox. This chapter centers on Glossulae super Librum imaginum lunae, which exists in a unique copy in Corpus Christi MS 125. Page includes her translation of it in Appendix 1. Appendix 2 is Page's translation of the text on which she focuses in chapter 5, “The Liber de essentia spirituum: Magic, Revelation, and Fellowship with the Spirits.” In its relation of an angelic vision that its author claims to have received, the Liber de essentia spirituum represents a provocative departure from other medieval learned magic texts, which allegedly originated in revelations of biblical and legendary authorities.

A more traditional example is found in the Ars notoria, comprised of Solomonic revelations, which is the focus of Page's sixth and final chapter. In “The Ars notoria and Its Monastic Audience,” Page discusses this text's relationship to mainstream Christian theology and monastic practices by way of evaluating the monastery's hospitability for occult studies. In her epilogue, “John Dee, St. Augustine's Manuscripts, and Renaissance Magic,” Page considers this unique monastery's broader importance to the history of the occult by examining how St. Augustine's texts contributed to the Renaissance magician John Dee's interests and practices.

Magic in the Cloister is a rigorous and fascinating work that complements two other titles in the Penn State series particularly well: Benedek Láng's Unlocked Books: Manuscripts of Learned Magic in the Medieval Libraries of Central Europe (2010), which examines medieval magic studied outside of the metropolitan “magician schools” of Toledo, Naples, and Athens; and Frank Klaassen's The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance (2013), which explores the circulation of magic texts in England in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Compared with these associated works, Page's focus on St. Augustine's library, particularly on one volume in it comprised of various occult materials, makes for a much narrower scope. Yet, Page brilliantly locates these magical texts in a wider multicultural tradition known to the monks at St. Augustine's, and thus she illuminates her particular example very well. Given how occult texts are often miscellanies difficult to categorize, Page's organization of her study according to their practical use by the monks enhances her book's legibility. As she develops individual discussions, however, Page is especially adroit at problematizing these neat labels thus to testify to the complexity of late medieval magic.