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ideas about the cosmos.40 Natural magic was regarded as a consequence
of God’s creation of the universe and was therefore not seen as illicit,
demonic or against nature (to use Thomas Aquinas’s tripartite division of
causation of the miraculous: “above nature,” “beyond nature” and “against
nature”).41 This understanding of the occult nature of stones’ powers is
evinced in AM 194 8vo’s lapidary, which describes the stone Geretisses as
having “þegianda afl eda megin.”42
Surviving copies of lapidaries, both in the continental tradition43 and
in medieval Iceland (e.g., AM 194 8vo and RIA 23 D 43), are often bound
with other medical treatises. This proximity to other texts concerned with
human health and vulnerability is suggestive of, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
asserts, “the work’s intimacy to medieval thinking about embodiment
and disability.”44 Lapidaries are therefore a relevant part of discussions
of medieval medical beliefs and practices, just as much as they are a useful
resource for considering the more metaphysical questions of agency and
matter. I return to this point later, providing a comparison of the applica-
tion and operation of treatments in the AM 194 8vo’s lapidary text and its
medical treatise (referred to in modern scholarship as Læknisfræði).
Finally, lapidaries prompt responses among their audiences. This is
true on the micro-level of scribes and redactors, since, as John Riddle
notes, hardly any two lapidaries among the many hundreds are alike.45 And
it is true on the macro-level of literary communities, since lapidary learning
is implemented in saga literature (and particularly in riddarasögur, where
the marvellous properties of stones offer narrators new opportunities for
plot development).
40 Roberta Gilchrist, “The Medieval Materiality of Magic: The Ritual Lives of People and
Things,” Brewminate (12 July 2020), https://brewminate.com/the-medieval-materiality-
of-magic-the-ritual-lives-of-people-and-things/ .
41 Robert Bartlett, Natural and Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), 8.
42 AÍ, 81: “a silent/concealed strength or power.” Unless otherwise noted, all translations are
my own.
43 Riddle, “Lithotherapy in the Middle Ages… Lapidaries Considered as Medical Texts,”
Pharmaceutical History 12 (1970): 42.
44 Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 231.
45 De Lapidibus, 50.
LAPIDARIES AND L Y F S T E I N A R