“Cunning folk” is originally an English term that refers to practitioners of mostly benevolent magic who work for clients. Despite the English origins of the term, equivalents are found in many cultures. The cunning folk are generally supporting characters in the narrative of early modern magical culture, which focuses either on learned magi like John Dee or witches and witch-hunters. Tabitha Stanmore has put the cunning folk at the center of the stage in a book aimed primarily at non-scholarly audiences. (It is not the first book on the subject, as Stanmore acknowledges; she was preceded by Owen Davies's Popular Magic: Cunning Folk in English History [2007].) Cunning Folk covers a broad range of popular magic employed to help people with the wide variety of problems and situations encountered in late medieval and early modern life—what Stanmore refers to as “practical” magic. The book is divided into chapters built on the functions practical magic served, from finding lost or stolen goods to healing, divination, and even winning cases at trial. The stories Stanmore tells are rich in detail and human interest, and she makes a strong case for the centrality of practical magic and the cunning folk in late medieval and early modern European society.

Of course, most consultations with cunning folk left no trace in the historical record, and Stanmore largely depends on court cases and other legal documents. This means that consultations with cunning folk in which something went wrong enough to end up in court are disproportionately represented. As anyone experienced in archival research knows, your stories are only as good as your sources, and Stanmore several times breaks out in understandable frustration when the evidence runs out before the end of the story, as when a court case ends with no mention of the verdict, let alone what happened after the verdict. Some of the stories she tells are widely known and the subject of previous scholarship, such as the story of Henry Neville and the wizard/con man Gregory Wisdom told at greater length by Alec Ryrie in The Sorcerer's Tale (2008), as Stanmore acknowledges. Others are fresh gleanings from the archives—not always properly sourced, as the book's scholarly apparatus is scanty. If Stanmore wished to avoid scholarly notes because she wanted the book to sell to a popular audience that might find them off-putting, why not put up a website with her sources?

Stanmore is keen to distinguish the kind of magic she is talking about from witchcraft, which is a distinction easy to make in general terms but fuzzier on the ground, where cunning folk could offer magical opportunities to harm others or even be publicly accused of witchcraft. (The debate over the relationship of cunning folk and witches goes back to the early modern period itself, as many witchcraft writers believed that any use of magic constituted witchcraft and was ultimately Satanic.) The Jacobean cunning woman Mary Woods, who combined palmistry, divination, and magical healing with a sideline in relieving women of unwanted husbands through poisoning (one of her clients was Frances Howard, which is why we know about her), certainly might have been considered a witch under other circumstances. Stanmore is also keen to distinguish the cunning folk from mere charlatans. She thinks they may well have believed in their magic, and some had a rate of success that established a local reputation and kept clients coming.

The book's geographical coverage is odd. The author, an English specialist, never states how her range of interest is defined geographically. In practice, this means short examples are drawn from all over Christian Europe (including Orthodox Russia), but nearly all the longer anecdotes are English. Regional variations receive little attention. Either a specifically English book or a book covering Europe broadly with better distribution would have been a superior choice.

As Cunning Folk is geographically undifferentiated, it is also largely temporally undifferentiated, stretching roughly from the late fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, but showing little variation over that time. Even the Reformation did not have a great impact, it seems. Stanmore does not show much interest in how this world of ubiquitous practical magic ended—or if it did. She includes an anecdote of her own visit to a palmist and remembers the long line of over a hundred people waiting to avail themselves of the services of this modern “cunning woman.” Stanmore also finds little variation in attitudes to popular magic by class or gender. Practical magic was not a question of “vulgar superstition” or “old wives tales.” The cunning folk were resorted to by men as well as women and by the rich and well-educated as well as the common people.

Few readers of Cunning Folk will come away without having their eyes opened to the ubiquity and variety of popular magic in this period. Although the lack of proper sourcing may make it frustrating for scholars, many will still learn from it, and it is an admirable introduction to everyday magic for the general reader.