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This study focuses on the collection and interpretation of English material magic by English museums in the modern era. Based on a survey of English amulets in English museums, the thesis addresses the question 'how have museum collections of English popular magic materialised relations between people and things in practice?' Melding two academic perspectives - historical interpretations of English magic and analyses of ethnographic collections - it contributes to both fields of study. Theoretical approaches from material culture studies, museology, anthropology and history are used. Building on four areas of current academic concern - magic, modernity, materiality and museums - the thesis explores four themes: changing attitudes to magic, shifting attitudes to the material world, the growth and definition of academic disciplines, and relationships between amateurism and professionalism. The thesis' temporal scope extends from 1850 to the present, with a focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when most of the collections were amassed, and on their re-interpretation in the second half of the twentieth century. Taking English amulets as its starting point, the thesis examines why and how these have been juxtaposed with artefacts from the rest of Britain, Europe and the world. It investigates networks of institutions, people, objects and ideas which formed and were formed by the collections. The study pivots around a number of key case studies, both of people who collected and interpreted amulets and of institutions that assembled them. Institutions encompass the Pitt Rivers Museum, Folklore Society, Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Brighton Museum, and Museum of Witchcraft and Magic; individuals include General Pitt-Rivers, Edward Burnett Tylor, Frederick Elworthy, Edward Lovett, Henry Balfour, Alfred Cort Haddon, Herbert Toms, Beatrice Blackwood and Cecil Williamson. The thesis concludes that collections of English material magic have materialised relations between people and things in specific and significant ways.

This thesis focuses on the significance of blood and the perception of the body in both learned and popular culture in order to investigate problems of identity and social exclusion in early modern Europe. Starting from the view of blood as a liminal matter, manifesting fertile, positive aspects in conjunction with dangerous, negative ones, I show how it was believed to attract supernatural forces within the natural world. It could empower or pollute, restore health or waste corporeal and spiritual existence. While this theme has been studied in a medieval religious context and by anthropologists, its relevance during the early modern period has not been explored. I argue that, considering the impact of the Reformation on people’s mentalities, studying the way in which ideas regarding blood and the body changed from late medieval times to the eighteenth century can provide new insights about patterns of social and religious tensions, such as the witch-trials and persecutions. In this regard the thesis engages with anthropological theories, comparing the dialectic between blood and body with that between identity and society, demonstrating that they both spread from the conflict of life with death, leading to the social embodiment or to the rejection of an individual. A comparative approach is also employed to analyze blood symbolism in Protestant and Catholic countries, and to discuss how beliefs were influenced by both cultural similarities and religious differences. Combining historical sources, such as witches’ confessions, with appropriate examples from anthropology I also examine a corpus of popular ideas, which resisted to theological and learned notions or slowly merged with them. Blood had different meanings for different sections of society, embodying both the physical struggle for life and the spiritual value of the Christian soul. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 develop the dualism of the fluid in late medieval and early modern ritual murder accusations against Jews, European witchcraft and supernatural beliefs and in the medical and philosophical knowledge, while chapters 5 and 6 focus on blood themes in Protestant England and in Counter-Reformation Italy. Through the examination of blood in these contexts I hope to demonstrate that contrasting feelings, fears and beliefs related to dangerous or extraordinary individuals, such as Jews, witches, and Catholic saints, but also superhuman beings such as fairies, vampires and werewolves, were rooted in the perception of the body as an unstable substance, that was at the base of ethnic, religious and gender stereotypes.