‘How to make a ring jump in the manner of a locust’: recipes to animate small objects in late medieval European manuscripts

Abstract

In his late thirteenth-century collection of playful and amusing recipes, which this article calls magic tricks, Richard de Grimhill, a low-ranking Worcester noble, collected a trick ‘to make a ring jump in the manner of a locust’, alongside other instructions to animate domestic objects such as eggs, loaves of bread and spit-roasting chickens. Using a source base of 100 late medieval manuscripts, this article demonstrates that rings and other domestic objects were animated in various ways: through sleight of hand, by exploiting the chemical properties of mercury, or with a mixture of mercury, sulphur, and saltpetre. Placing these three methods in their manuscript and cultural contexts, I underscore that late medieval European people experienced magic tricks as a form of both cognitive play and playful experimentation with chemical knowledge. They thus have broader implications for late medieval European approaches to the possibilities and limitations of the human mind and physical matter.