Contemporary thought tends to oppose magic and Christianity. The term magic suggests superstition and illicit ritual, with roots in a misty, perhaps imagined, pagan past. It also implies material wish-fulfilment, by contrast to religious faith and prayer. Yet the origins of magic are interwoven with religion, and while some aspects of magic came to be connected with the illicit, pagan and heretical, magic was also endorsed by the powerful belief in a Christian supernatural that encompassed the divine, demonic and otherworldly, and by belief in natural, occult forces in the cosmos. A strong learned tradition of magic was sustained by interest in the occult sciences, while the power of ritual and tradition, and the compelling possibility of fulfilling basic human wishes and desires, whether beneficial or harmful, ensured the survival of magic within popular belief and practice. Magic and the supernatural more generally provide romance with its quality of the marvellous, but they are also treated with a profundity and realism that only become evident when romance is placed within its wider cultural contexts. This essay first traces these contexts, and then turns to the two faces of magic within romance, natural magic and black magic or ‘nigromancy’, taking as its focus non-Arthurian and more ‘popular’ romance. These interwoven motifs of white and black magic can illuminate the workings of providence within the world, both by showing the marvellous forces within nature that reflect God's beneficent powers, and by opposing to his divine plan malevolent, dangerous but ultimately unsuccessful human magic. Romance probes both the fascination and the anxiety surrounding magic in the Middle Ages.

The thought world of the later Middle Ages included a complex mix of ideas of magic and the supernatural, which stretched back through classical and Judaeo-Christian as well as Germanic and Celtic belief and ritual. Classical thought associated the magic arts with the East: Pliny traces magic to Zoroaster and his priests or magi, and tells how Xerxes brought this ‘monstrous art’ to Greece. The Greek term magos, a Persian or Median priest, came to imply a practitioner of alien or illicit rituals, and the idea of otherness plays a crucial role in the definition of magic.