[MUSIC] During the last medieval centuries a change occurred in the perception of magical practices. On the one hand, the new rationalistic approaches issued from the universities started to displace traditional magical practices, thus extending a shadow of suspicion over sorcerers, diviners and conjurers. On the other hand, the until then unsuccessful attempts made by the Church to uproot magical activities started to pay off thanks to the action of the mighty preachers of the Mendicant orders. Those preachers undertook a massive evangelization campaign among medieval society through a series of compelling sermons, in which they demonized magical activities. Both fronts, rationalistic science and Christian evangelization will definitely contribute to the disapproval and discredit of magic during the late medieval centuries and the early modern period. To give you an idea of this change in mentality, we are going to see some examples of those new conceptions of magic based on the new scientific paradigms of the Late Middle Ages. Let's take a look into a series of treatises written by the 15th-century Castilian Bishop Lope de Barrientos. Barrientos had studied at the University of Salamanca, and was part of the humanist entourage of the Castillian King John II, who appointed him as his own confessor and the preceptor of his first-born son. During the central years of the 15th century, Bishop Barrientos wrote a series of three books, dedicated to his king, in which he advised him on the subject of magic and superstition. Those three books were the so-called "Treatise on Sleeping and Waking; of dreaming and of divinations; of presages and prophecies", "Treatise on prophecies" and "Treatise on divination". In all of them, this learned man analyzed human affairs related to magic from a Thomistic perspective, relying on an empirical and materialistic approach, and with a great amount of confidence in human reason. As he himself stated at the beginning of this treatises, Barrientos's goal was to educate and correct the King's credulity regarding magical activities. When we read these treatises, we realize that the Bishop's concept of magic included a wide range of rituals and beliefs that went from astrology to divinatory arts, from the causes of the evil eye and other illnesses to the rituals of sorcery and incantation. While condemning this kind of practices and those who perform them, Barrientos also tried to disprove the reality of such things. For example, he criticized those who believed in the evil eye, which he considered a simple optical illness, susceptible of being cured by medical procedures. While addressing the subject of premonitions and divination, he attributed them to the operations of fantasy in people's minds, which tricked them into believing things that were not real. He also talked about the extended belief in the fact that some women were capable of getting out of their bodies at night and, in that manner, enter closed houses through the narrowest chinks with the purpose of harming little children. On that regard, Barrientos argued the impossibility of such magical things, since it was not possible for a three-dimensional body to pass through such little spaces. All those magical beliefs, according to Barrientos, were nothing but the effect of mental or natural disorders, or even worse, they were caused by the operations of bad spirits. Learned men such as Barrientos and others, contributed to the discredit of magical practices among the elites, while reinforcing the confidence on experimental science and medical procedures. Apart from these men of science, the members of the Mendicant Orders also contributed to the denigration of magical activities among the population. To exemplify that, we can take a look at the sermons given by Mendicant preachers during the last centuries of the Middle Ages, always bearing in mind that these sermons, preached in the vernacular language, had a compelling effect among the public that gathered by the hundreds, waiting for the arrival of one of those admired preachers to their cities and villages. Let's hear some parts of a sermon given by the Valencian preacher Vicent Ferrer at the beginning of the 15th century. "Because if your father, your wife or another person is sick, or you have lost something, or if you are in distress, don't ever go to the diviners but to God. And you, my daughters, if your children are suffering some disease, do not make any sorceries nor go to the sorceresses, because it would be better for your children to die. The women will go to their confession and they will say: 'the child was sick and there was no doctor around, and so I went to the conjurer'. And the confessor will answer: 'A sin you have committed!' And they will defend themselves arguing how could they let the child die. It would be better that he died. She went to male and female diviners, to the demons, because everything they do, they do it by the action of demons. Diabolical sorceries! That it is what male and female diviners are, sorcerers and sorceresses that make things with charms, bread, bottles and plates. Avoid their presence in your circumscription. If not, God's wrath will fall on the village and its circumscription." Such strong admonitions made by the influencing preachers had a great impact among the crowd. We often find local laws against magical activities promulgated by the city councils shortly after the passing of one of these preachers. The effect of this kind of preachings, together with the prominent role taken by the new scientific paradigms, contributed to the decline of magic during the Late Middle Ages. Not only did they entail the discredit and denigration of magical practices, but they also established a perilous link between those sorcerers and diviners and the misdeeds that haunted society; even relating those allegedly dangerous people to the action of demons and encouraging the population to expel them from their villages. As we will see in the following units, the situation was the prelude of terrible persecutions to come, in which hundreds of people were to be burned at the stake, accused of a dark crime with explicit magical connotations: the crime of <b>witchcraft</b>. [MUSIC]
