This dissertation is located at the intersection of the study of religion and the history of learned magic. It analyzes a specific type of religious practice in which rituals are designed to invoke and interact with the presence of superhuman agents. The experience of superhuman presence has been studied in the psychology, phenomenology, cognitive science, and anthropology of religions. However, we lack an understanding of how arrangements of the ritual space relate to perceptions of superhuman presence. Through its wide array of rituals to summon spiritual beings to perceptual appearance, late-medieval learned magic offers unique material to approach such relationships and to investigate the notion of presence in the study of religion. As a form of procedural knowledge circulating in manuscripts, a central part of learned magic concerned the arrangement of suitable ritual spaces for such encounters. Nonetheless, space has remained an under-researched topic in the history of learned magic. We lack knowledge of why practitioners designed ritual spaces in specific ways, using certain objects and materials, but also of where these layouts originated, and why medieval practitioners believed these arrangements could be effective.

The study analyzes the relationship between superhuman presence and spatial design by a) exploring the different spatial arrangements available to practitioners for encountering spiritual beings, b) examining the relationship between the various spatial layouts and the cosmological frameworks that characterized the syncretic sources of learned magic, and c) analyzing the elements of material culture that might have conveyed a sense of efficacy. To do so, the study takes a comparative approach across three genres of learned magic explicitly concerned with the interaction between human and superhuman beings: demonic magic, angelic magic, and astral magic. The research covers a significant period, from the 13th to the 15th century, characterized by cultural encounters that shaped these diverse genres. The study approaches the relationship between textual and visual ritual instructions at three different levels of analysis: first, interpretation of the ritual event for the sacralization of space; second, structural analysis of the interactional space; and third, semiotic analysis of diagrams, images, and material culture.

The study argues that medieval practitioners expected to experience spiritual beings in different modalities, ranging from internal and imaginal vision to external and corporeal appearance. The study introduces the notion of rituals of perceptual presence (RoPPs), which refers to rituals that aim at interacting with the corporeal presence of superhuman agents. To make such interaction happen, practitioners had to construct ritual spaces that could plausibly allow spirits to take on corporeal form and be perceived and interacted with in the practitioner’s veridical space. The study develops a typology of five spatial paradigms for RoPPs found across different genres of learned magic, which correlate with different cultural matrices. Through the novel comparisons facilitated by this approach, the work seeks to expand the cultural horizons of the reception history of learned magic in the late Middle Ages and shed new light on its ritual dynamics.

The material and spatial dimensions documented in the manuscripts of ritual magic that circulated in the medieval and early modern periods have long eluded researchers. Studying where those rituals take place is important to understand the history of the practice of ritual magic. Few attempts have been done to interpret the reasons behind the construction of magic circles and the use of domestic locations. The author introduces a new interpretative category of such ritual spaces: imaginal architectural devices (IADs). IADs pick out a specific kind of portable, spatially unfixed ritual space, where “magical” ones are a key example. They are temporary architectural artefacts, attested across a swath of sources of ritual magic, that work as strategic tools for orienting cognition, behavior, and belief. Drawing on spatial theory and cognitive studies, the author constructs IADs as a typological category for comparative analysis. It describes architectural operations that work at the interplay between mental projections and material culture, and that modify the perception of space. In the second part of the article, IADs will be applied to study the circles described in the second section of the Liber Iuratus Honorii, a thirteenth-century handbook containing instructions on how to conjure different ranks of spirits. In the end, the author suggests future directions of research on the transmission of IADs into contemporary ritual magic.