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The first and most obvious question that Shakespeare scholars will ask is why, if the play suggests even equivocally that Prospero has a magic book for the control of spirits, is there so little scholarly curiosity about this book today?

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Page 11 +13+16 – photos of the ritual grimoire pages. I added a transcription done by AI

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Page 11 +13+16 – photos of the ritual grimoire pages. I added a transcription done by AI

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There is no trace of Manichaeism in these books: God is supreme, ruling the fallen angels just as he rules everything else.30 (Marlowe’s depiction of conjuring in Doctor Faustus makes this feature of the grimoires surprising, since Faustus can be seen as defying God in conjuring Mephistopheles.31) Second, the grimoires are almost com pletely devoted to the materials, instructions, and language needed for conjuring. They are filled with pentagrams, magic circles, tables, and charts; with instructions for elaborate ritual preparations (fasting, consecration of tools, baths, suffumigations); and, most importantly, with prayers, invocations, conjurations, and formulas for binding and dismissing spirits. Very little space is given over to such mundane matters as the purpose for which the spirit is being summoned.32 Pages of conjurations, threats, and pleas may conclude with a single sentence:“And when he is come, you may ask of him what you will.”33 Third, the books display unquestioning faith in the power of words and images to call forth and control spirits. Holy names are the most powerful of the conjuror’s tools, and the master again and again copies into his book the reassuring message to himself that the repetition of a particular conjuration thick with divine names will call forth the spirit even if the spirit is bound in chains—and if the spirit is so tightly bound that he absolutely cannot come, at the sound of these names he will at least send a messenger.34

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suggests, in the spirit’s vaguely Eastern turban/crown, features of the early Oberon, whose kingdom lay in the Orient (see Figure 5 and cover). But the Oberion of MS Vb26, though in part Oberon, is also a spirit of another sort with a quite different history. Oberion appears, for example, in 1444 in the court record of a man pilloried in England for summoning a “wycked spyryte the whyche was callyd Oberycom”;47 and the Archiepiscopal Register of York tells us that, in 1510, a “certain demon, Oberion” (along with “four others, ‘whereof Storax was one’”) was conjured by a group in search of a demon-guarded treasure, the group including the former lord mayor of Halifax and the Church canon who owned the magic book used for the conjuration.48

(depiction)

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While the belief that a human being can call up demons and have them answer questions about buried treasure was far from orthodox, the grimoires’ foundational premise that demons exist and that they have power was, in fact, accepted theology: in sixteenth-century England to express doubts about the existence of demons was to invite the accusation of atheism

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My point is that, in terms of their underlying theology, grimoires such as MS Vb26 or Scot's "T. R." were not in their own time completely eccentric or irrational or necessarily evil—though they might well have been described as such by disapproving preachers and theologians.52 While the belief that a human being can call

up demons and have them answer questions about buried treasure was far from orthodox, the grimoires' foundational premise that demons exist and that they have power was, in fact, accepted theology: in sixteenth-century England to express

doubts about the existence of demons was to invite the accusation of atheism.

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"[T]he line between the miracles sought by the master in MS Vb26 and those described in the Judeo-Christian Bible is more blurred than not. In fact, the master—in MS Vb26 and other grimoires—uses biblical miracles as models to encourage God to repeat His past interventions. On page 15 of MS Vb26 (Figure 6), for instance, the master, urging God to behave as in the past, reminds God of His driving evil spirits into swine, of Moses' calling of the plagues onto Egypt, of

God's dividing the Red Sea..." (P.20).

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"Prospero is, of course, both voyager and sorcerer, and The Tempest, through its bookish allusions, conjures the long sweep of human exploration, colonizing, and empire-building that predates the early modern period. I have argued elsewhere that the play’s intertextual citations serve to make the play an episode, as it were, in a great and continuous sequence of voyage stories and that behind this sequence of epics, romances, and dramas stretching from Homer’s Odyssey through The Tempest lies the ancient and ongoing saga of exploration, colonization, and suffering that is human history.90"

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The Duret anecdote, by turning the book of the explorer into a kind of “magic book,” points obliquely to an unexpected connection between the explorer/conqueror and the sorcerer. The connection is buttressed by Greenblatt’s discussion of “the discourse of travel in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.”86 He finds the “strength” of this discourse in its expression of “the shock of the unfamiliar, the provo- cation of an intense curiosity,...the encounter with difference that is at once initiated and epitomized by Columbus’s marvelous landfall in an unimagined hemisphere.”87 I suggest that these phrases describing geographical discovery from the point of view of the lettered—“the shock of the unfamiliar,” “the provocation of an intense curiosity,” “the encounter with difference”—could just as well be describing the conjuror’s attempted forays into the dark world of the spirits. The resemblance between the explorer and the conjuror appears as well in the language of subjugation used by the conqueror against his victim and by the conjuror against a summoned spirit: