Modern Magic

From the creation of the first encyclopedia to Wikipedia, from ancient museums to modern kindergarten classes―here is award-winning writer Simon Winchester’s brilliant and all-encompassing look at how humans acquire, retain, and pass on information and data, and how technology continues to change our lives and our minds.

Artificial intelligence has long been a mainstay of science fiction and increasingly it feels as if AI is entering our everyday lives, with technology like Apple's Siri now prominent, and self-driving cars almost upon us.

This volume presents editions of two fascinating anonymous and untitled manuscripts of magic produced in Elizabethan England: the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. Frank Klaassen uses these texts, which he argues are representative of the overwhelming majority of magical practitioners, to explain how magic changed during this period and why these developments were crucial to the formation of modern magic.