Douce MS. 116: A Description of the Manuscript

Did this occur? Barring the discovery of new documents, it must be considered entirely speculative—but it could have. We do have the manuscript, at least, and what it reveals is fascinating.

Douce MS. 116: A Description of the Manuscript Whether or not Bodleian Library Douce Manuscript 116 was ever used in conjuration, its state of preservation is impressive. We know of at least four, possibly five, owners of the text over the centuries, with enough gaps between owners to suggest many more. Nonetheless, the manuscript, now in the possession of the Bodleian Library, is in excellent condition, save for the separation of the front cover from the book block.

Popular culture would have us believe that magical books are huge, thick tomes, clearly labelled and robustly illustrated. Some do meet that model, but most are small works intended to be portable and nondescript, written solely for the copyist’s needs. This work lies somewhere between the two ideals, measuring 9¼ by 6¾ inches, with 445 pages of paper, with additional papers glued in in at the beginning and end, and another bifold leaf bound in at pages 428 to 431. The book was bound in plain brown leather; based on the unornamented style of binding and the extension of our second author’s text to the endpapers, it happened before or during his ownership in the late eighteenth century. At a later date, an owner added gold rolls and the word “Magick” in gold to the spine.1

The Bodleian Library’s Summary Catalogue describes it as “magical incantations, formulae, experiments, and drawings, in almost haphazard order,” which is a fair assessment. The work is a magical miscellany, collecting material from other manuscript, printed, and possibly oral sources. The original copyist likely added materials as he found useful, in a sloppy and often careless hand. What sets Douce MS. 116 apart from other magical manuscripts is the amount of material its subsequent owners have added. Some of this amounts to side comments, glosses, decipherment of the original text, or notes to make it more useful to later owners. In addition, we also see entirely new sections appearing before or after the original material, supplementing the work with material reflecting their own philosophies of ritual magic and occult cosmology. Much of the text is in English, with passages in Latin and Welsh in the original author’s work.2

This treasury of magical lore is not an easy one with which to work. The original copyist of the manuscript made numerous mistakes when transcribing the text,

1. Pope, “Darcke and Clowdie Speeches,” 209. 2. Bodleian Library and Madan, A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, 4:527.

using the wrong word—changing “hour” to “hound,” or “Aves” to “Amen”—or adding or removing letters and words, likely due to haste of copying. The page numbering, most of which is likely Harrington’s work, changes repeatedly over the course of the manuscript, suggesting the author simply numbered pages without maintaining the principle that the right-hand leaf should always be odd. Errors in the text abound, with muddled words, passages scratched out, and others corrected to the extent that it is sometimes hard to tell what the authors intended.

What follows is the best version of the text I was able to create and edit, given these challenges. I hope that this edition will lead to further discussion and examination of the original manuscript, so that it may share its mysteries with a much broader audience.