Bodley Head wins six-way auction for historian Stanmore's debut on practical magic

The Bodley Head has landed historian Tabitha Stanmore's debut, Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic, after a six-way auction.

Will Hammond, deputy publishing director, and Jorg Hensgen, editorial director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Matt Turner at RCW. The deal concluded after six opening offers for the book. The Bodley Head will publish in hardback, e-book and audio formats in spring 2024.

The book will explore a time when magic was used day-to-day as a way to navigate life’s challenges and to solve problems of both trivial and deadly importance.

The synopsis reads: "Imagine it’s the year 1500 and you’ve lost your precious silver spoons—or perhaps your neighbour has stolen them. Or maybe your child has a fever. Or you’re facing trial. Or you’re looking for a lover. Or you’re hoping to escape a husband.

"At a time when nature’s inner workings were largely a mystery, people from every walk of life—kings, clergy and commonfolk—who faced problems or circumstances they were powerless to control sought the help of ‘cunning folk’. These wise women and men were often renowned for their skill at healing the sick or predicting the future, fortune-telling and divination, and for their knowledge of spells and potions. Occasionally and tragically, some were condemned as witches for using their powers for ill. But this has tended to obscure the fact that the magic they practised was a normal and accepted part of daily life.

"In Stanmore’s richly peopled and highly entertaining history, we see how this practical or ‘service’ magic was used and why people put their faith in it. Each of the stories in the book acts as a micro-drama of medieval and early modern life, with its pre-scientific worldview, animating vividly people’s intimate fears, hopes and desires, many movingly familiar, some thrillingly strange."

Stanmore is a teaching associate at the University of Bristol, where she researches practical or "service" magic in medieval and early modern European society. She has written for the Conversation and has appeared on BBC4 talking about plague, on Radio 3’s "Free Thinking" discussing witchcraft, and on BBC Radio London. This is her first book.

Commenting on her book, she said: "I’m hugely excited that Cunning Folk has found a home with The Bodley Head. We tend to make a lot of assumptions about magic and life in the pre-modern period, and I hope that this book will encourage readers to think more deeply about the subject. While using magic might seem strange to many people today, it’s born of a desire to control our lives: and in that sense it’s a fundamentally human thing to do."

Hammond said of the title: "Our editorial director Jorg Hensgen first identified Cunning Folk as one of the most accomplished debut history proposals we have ever seen, and it has completely captured the imagination of everyone here at Vintage. It promises to be a properly excellent, entirely original and hugely engaging history, full of conversation-starters and memorable characters, which does that very special thing of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar."