Chaining your books to the shelf to protect them from light-fingered readers has fallen out of fashion, but maybe it’s time to fall back on another popular medieval solution to thievery: the book curse.
Book Curses is a forthcoming publication from Bodleian Publishing by Eleanor Baker, who is the English subject lead for the University of Oxford’s Astrophoria Foundation Year. Ranging in time from thousands of years ago until the modern day, it offers plenty to choose from, although there are several common themes.
“The threat of hanging appears many times,” explained Baker, who specializes in the late medieval period, “that of burning is not infrequent, and shame is often invoked. What is lasting over time is people’s desire to imagine harm upon one another in creative ways that are both amusing and unnerving. Many of the curses are representative of the time in which they were penned and make reference to contemporary forms of capital punishment or kinds of illness that were particularly prevalent. For some people, these were threats that promised real harm, but for others, they were more playful.”
Many book curses from the early medieval period were written in a standard Latin formula along the lines of this example in an Italian manuscript now held in Yale’s Beinecke Library, casually threatening excommunication from the Catholic faith:
The book of St Mary of the Dove.
Whoever steals or removes [this book]:
let him be anathema. Amen.
“In the late medieval period, the structure of these curses becomes a little freer, and we begin to see some more idiosyncratic constructions,” Baker said, sharing this example translated from Middle English from a fifteenth-century manuscript held by Durham University Library:
This is John Hancok’s book and whoever says nay,
The devil of hell bare Thomas Carter away!
Know before you knit, and then you may loosen it,
If you knit before you know, then it is too late.
“The riddle-like quality of the last two lines appears to advise that people should know, perhaps in the biblical sense, the person they will marry before they wed them,” Baker added.
