About

Claire Fanger is a faculty member at Rice University with a primary research focus on the understandings and practices of Latin Christianity in the later Middle Ages, particularly texts and manuscripts of magic, with an emphasis on angel magic within a Christian context. She has authored two significant collections on this topic, 'Conjuring Spirits' (1998) and 'Invoking Angels' (2012), both published by Penn State University Press. Her scholarly work includes editing and analyzing the writings of John of Morigny, an early fourteenth-century French monk known for his magical and visionary texts, notably the 'Liber florum celestis doctrine,' which models angelic ascent and explores divine knowledge, visions, and mystical practices. Fanger's research extends to the study of medieval visions, prayer, and magic, as well as the epistemological and theological implications of these practices. She has also engaged with the occult revival of the 19th and 20th centuries, examining ideas such as the attempts to teach animals to talk and the epistemological challenges of human-animal sociality. Her work combines historical anthropology, theology, and book history, contributing to a deeper understanding of medieval mysticism, monasticism, and the intersection of religion and magic.

Research topics

• Sociology
• History
• Philosophy
• Art
• Religious studies
• Literature
• Linguistics
• Theology
• Art history
• Medicine
• Archaeology
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• The art and science of magic in premodern Europe

  Metascience · 2024-09-05

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England by Katherine Storm Hindley (review)

  Magic, ritual, and witchcraft · 2024-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity, By Wouter J. Hanegraaff

  Journal of the American Academy of Religion · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • History
  • Art history

  Journal Article Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity. By Wouter J. Hanegraaff Get access Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity. By Wouter J. Hanegraaff. Cambridge University Press, 2022. xvi + 400 pages. $135.00 (hardcover or e-book). Claire Fanger Claire Fanger Rice University clf5@rice.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, lfad046, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfad046 Published: 31 August 2023

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• Supernatural Encounters: Demons and the Restless Dead in Medieval England, c.1050–1450 by Stephen Gordon (review)

  Magic, ritual, and witchcraft · 2023-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Supernatural Encounters: Demons and the Restless Dead in Medieval England, c.1050–1450 by Stephen Gordon Claire Fanger Keywords medieval England, ghosts, undead, demonology, devil, witchcraft, sleep paralysis stephen gordon. Supernatural Encounters: Demons and the Restless Dead in Medieval England, c.1050–1450. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. Pp. x + 242. What is the difference between a demon and a revenant or embodied ghost? This is not a trivial question if you are trying to figure out how to eradicate one. This book, which began as Stephen Gordon’s Ph.D. dissertation, comprises a set of case studies of stories involving medieval English narratives of human encounters with the dead (or undead). Many of the stories fall roughly in the genre of what we might call ghost stories with a touch of urban legend (often they are claimed to recount actual events in real places; in some cases they are claimed to derive from a local witness, a friend of a friend). They are described by Gordon as a type of shared “porous and malleable” socio-cultural text, attributable not strictly to the “belief” in ghosts and revenants, but rather to “the acknowledgement of the belief in” them (3). They could arouse a wide array of reactions in medieval listeners, from skepticism to fear to intellectual interest in the manner of existence and the cause of the behavior of the monstrous beings they described. There are already excellent surveys of the restless dead in medieval culture. Gordon’s book is informed by prior scholarship, but his work differs from the well-known, larger scale studies (for example those of Jean-Claude Schmitt and Nancy Caciola) in that most chapters offer close reading of a particular narrative account in its context. There are six chapters, the first three focused on narratives from twelfth-century Latin sources, Chapters 4 and 5 drawing on the fourteenth-century vernacular stories, and Chapter 6 more generally treating episodes referred to by the modern term “sleep paralysis.” Chapter 1 concerns the tale of the Witch of Berkeley from William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum—a tale designed to exemplify the dangers of devoting one’s life to the Devil and engaging in illicit magic. Gordon reads the fate of the Witch in William’s account (dragged from her tomb to ride to hell on the back of a demonic horse, somewhat in the manner of later Faust narratives) as a social commentary on foreign elements of which the community needed to be purged. He also looks at the text’s reception history, for it was transmitted well into the period of witch-hunting; this last part of the chapter is interestingly illustrated by woodcuts from early modern sources. In Chapter 2, Gordon looks at a set of tales drawn from Book 5 of William of Newburgh’s Histora rerum Anglicarum—the tale of the “Buckingham Ghost,” the “Berwick Ghost,” the “Hounds’ Priest,” and the “Ghost of Anantis.” Gordon notes that the undead in these stories have some similarities to Scandinavian draugr and Slavic vampires. In a reading that builds on [End Page 310] Chapter 1, he discusses the tales in relation to rhetoric of contagion, tying the pestilential features of undead corpses to the dangers of social deviance and social unrest. Chaper 3 offers a close reading of the undead appearing in the De nugis curialium of Walter Map, with special attention given to the satirical features in these narratives. The chapter explores how the narrative conventions of the ghost encounter are undone by Map, who uses the figure of the undead corpse to satirize the conventions of tales of mirabilia. Chapters 4 and 5 jump from the twelfth-century Latin context to a late-fourteenth-century vernacular one. Chapter 4 looks at restless dead that appear in Middle English sermon literature, focusing in particular on the Liber festivalis by John Mirk. Chapter 5 concerns Chaucer’s “Friar’s Tale,” which relates thematically to the sermon literature discussed in Chapter 4 and involves an extended dialogue between the Devil and the summoner that reflects on the demonic animation of corpses. These two chapters, written more than a century after the Fourth Lateran Council, both manifest...

  PublisherDOI

• Mattering the Invisible: Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral ed. by Diana Espírito Santo and Jack Hunter

  Magic, ritual, and witchcraft · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Philosophy

  Reviewed by: Mattering the Invisible: Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral ed. by Diana Espírito Santo and Jack Hunter Claire Fanger diana espírito santo and jack hunter, eds. Mattering the Invisible: Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral. New York: Berghahn Books, 2021. Pp. 329. This book focuses on the way matter and material technologies are involved in making paranormal experiences possible. The word "paranormal" is not used in the title but appears in the first sentence and recurs frequently thereafter. The book shares a basic theoretical framework with other work that has been done on material religion, the introduction citing sources starting with Alfred Gell leading to Karen Barad with nods at Bruno Latour in the middle—a familiar theoretical pantheon. The editors argue that in these accounts, we need to think not about "the meanings of messages" (11)—that is, not about what the dead or other discarnate entities may communicate within such experiences, but rather about how these experiences convey presence—they are all at least in part about a sense of contact with a numinous reality. For this reader it was something of a problem that the word "paranormal" was not defined anywhere, not in the introduction, the conclusion, nor in the essays. A large array of very different sorts of materials seems to be subsumed under the heading in this book, which nevertheless offers some very interesting reading. Many if not most of the chapters concern things that might elsewhere be categorized as "anthropology of religion." But how does "religion" intersect with the "paranormal?" What is the advantage of using the word "paranormal" here? I will return to these questions later. One reason I wanted to review this book is that I know Diana Espírito Santo is good at writing about the paranormal. In her work, the idea of what constitutes the "paranormal" is somehow transparent in a way that seems connected with the kinds of stories she tells: she can stun readers with marvels and lure them into the human dimension of stories that challenge credibility and yet escape disproof. Her chapter in this book is no exception. The rest of the book is a bit of a mixed bag inasmuch as not all the chapters constitute stories of clearly paranormal experiences as far as I can see—neither in its ordinary colloquial sense of something that is "above or beyond normal," nor in the storyteller's way that Espírito Santo does (if those are in fact distinct). The book comprises ten chapters, with an introduction and conclusion. I will summarize the chapters before returning to the issues of definition. In Chapter 1, "Organicism and Psychical Research: Where Mediums and Mushrooms Meet," Jack Hunter begins by describing how, in his work with mediums of the Bristol Spirit Lodge, instruments are used to coax the [End Page 459] reluctant spirits into speech—a slow halting process which "does not seem to be so much a case of turning the medium on like a radio receiver and then tuning in with a dial but rather is more like a process of nurturing—a participatory process of encouragement and growth, gradually enabling the spirit to manifest" and "is perhaps better understood using an organic rather than technological metaphor" (38). This is interesting and feels useful, though most of chapter is theoretical, in fact concerned with the superiority of organic to machine metaphors for a general idea of what the world is about, which I found dry and in spots implausible. Chapter 2, by Miguel M. Algranti, "Semantics of the Suffering: Torture Technologies and Mediumship in Buenos Aires," gives a brief history of Esoteric and Spiritist groups in Argentina ending with a group among whom the author conducted fieldwork: the Basilio Scientific School Association (BSSA). He discusses how Martha, his informant in this context, channels a young man who says that his spirit was broken when he was tortured with a cattle prod; he gave away information that he should have kept to himself. The point of Martha's channeling is to offer healing to the spirit of this dead youth through Martha's replication of the physical condition of his...

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• Foreword

  Magic, ritual, and witchcraft · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This Foreword positions De radiis in its historical context to highlight the importance of the withdrawal of attribution to al-Kindī. The text attempts to create a philosophical justification for the effectiveness of ritual action.

  PublisherDOI

• Complications of Eros: The Song of Songs in John of Morigny’s Liber fl orum celestis Doctrine

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Philosophy
  • Theology
  PublisherDOI

• The Ethics of the Miraculous: Magical Technologies and Religious Pedagogies

  Magic, ritual, and witchcraft · 2022-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Ethics of the Miraculous:Magical Technologies and Religious Pedagogies Claire Fanger Keywords magic, technology, miracles, religious pedagogy, John of Morigny What is a "technology"? In the three preceding pieces the term is treated as effectively self-evident. The contributors do not pause to define it, but in essence treat it, when understood as a process, as meaning "advanced technology," or as engineering or applied science; when understood as an object, the contributors treat "technology" as equivalent to a piece of machinery. Magic remains largely undefined as well, but the sense is equally clear: magic, understood as a process, is a kind of experience of an alternate reality, more vivid than everyday reality and perhaps escaping normative assumptions about perception. Insofar as "magic" coupled with "technology" in this colloquial sense raises any vexed issues, as Michael Ostling has pointed out, it may seem to do so only to the degree that these terms are understood in opposition to each other: a "technology" in this colloquial sense is conceived as something that manipulates physical or material forces (even where they may be hidden) while a "magic" is conceived to manipulate evidently non-physical forces (spirits of the dead, demons, orishas and so forth). In some cases, one might be inclined to think of as "magical" any widely used technology that seems to work for some people, but nobody can explain how (dowsing to find current, homeopathic remedies to cure colds). As Ostling puts it, "In such everyday perspectives … technology works via natural or practical means…; in contrast magic … doesn't (really) work at all …" (Forum Introduction, 170). What happens, then, when you set about creating convincing technological illusions of the purported effects of magic or religious miracles? Technologies of entertainment magic have long been used by pickpockets for stealing [End Page 201] wallets, by religious leaders to attract a following, by spiritualists to make money off the grieving relatives of the recently deceased, and so on. Depending on context, then, there could be ethical issues surrounding the use of any technology—understanding this term very broadly—that effectively mimics religious experience, or that deploys magic (real or apparent) in an unfair way, or alternatively that covers up the use of magic where people would feel uncomfortable with it. What is the line between piety and fraud? Between therapy and cold reading? The vexed issues I see as latent in all the pieces in this forum are ethical ones. I want to use my own space here first to delimit and expand the understanding of what constitutes a "technology," in the process reviewing a medieval magico-religious technology for knowledge acquisition and showing how it worked. In the last section I explore the ethical issues that seem to me to hover under the surface of each piece in this forum. EXPANDING THE SENSES OF THE WORD "TECHNOLOGY": PREMODERN USAGES For a long time, at least since the seventeenth century, and again more lately, "technology" has been a word capable of indicating a variety of methods for doing many kinds of things—things by no means relegated exclusively to materials science. The Oxford English Dictionary offers seventeenth-century usages showing that "technology" might reference parts of a systematized understanding of a human skill set for treating entirely non-material objects (e.g., the word is used with reference to a "learned and artificial discourse," or a "Cabalistical" technology).1 The word "technology" was born in an era that still studied classics. It is a portmanteau of two Greek words, "techne" meaning a skill set (an exact equivalent of the word "ars" in Latin), and the suffix "-logy", from "logos" meaning speech or reason, also the root of "logic." In the classical and medieval periods, all the "artes" are "technai," or skill sets: this is true not only for the mechanical arts but the liberal arts too. Our contemporary colloquial idea of technology correlates most closely with the skill sets of the medieval "mechanical arts" (applied arts such as building, metalwork, navigation, and medicine). But the liberal arts, too, are technai—ars grammatica, ars rhetorica, ars logica, and so on; that is, they were skill sets as [End Page 202] well. In the later...

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Comparing Foucault: Cultivations of Gnosis and Technologies of the Self

  Gnosis Journal of Gnostic Studies · 2021-07-07

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Medieval Anti-Faust

  2021-09-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter considers how medieval fictions about practitioners of nigromancy (black magic) illuminate the more personal story of magic and redemption found in the memoir of an actual practicing medieval magic user. The magician in question is John of Morigny, the fourteenth-century Benedictine author of a mixed text of prayers, rituals, and visionary autobiography called The Flowers of Heavenly Teaching,. What can narratives of nigromancers broadly available in late medieval culture tell us about how the medieval magic user—especially the one who actually summoned demons on purpose—grasped his role in his family and monastic community, or his relation to God in the dispensation? By juxtaposing narrative patterns, the chapters shows how available narratives are integrated into John’s self representation. Any individual, like John, who moves either to reject or to adopt or take ownership of any form of esoteric knowledge, such as nigromantia, actively negotiates its values and categories in ways that are not predetermined by other institutional judgements, but intersects with them in unpredictable ways very much informed by available stories.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Wouter J. Hanegraaff

  University of Amsterdam

  5 shared

• Jean-Pierre Brach

  École Pratique des Hautes Études

  3 shared

• Allison P. Coudert

  2 shared

• Marco Pasi

  University of Amsterdam

  2 shared

• Ingrid Tieken‐Boon van Ostade

  Leiden University

  2 shared

• A.A. MacDonald

  Children’s Institute

  2 shared

• Peter J. Forshaw

  2 shared

• Siân Echard

  University of Manchester

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (1…
• The American Philosophical Society (2003 Franklin Grant)
• The American Council of Learned Societies (2017 Fellowship)