The Sources
And Recommended Reading
Foundational Sources
The serious study of cunning folk is a relatively young field, but there are a handful of books that are foundational to the study. Specific sources for each group of cards can be found on their pages, but content on the site draws heavily from the sources below.
Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History
Owen Davies, 2003
The most comprehensive survey of cunning folk practice across England. Davies covers who they were, how they worked, what they charged, and how they were perceived by their communities and by the authorities. Thorough, readable, and essential. The first book I read on the subject many years ago and the main source for many stories used for the cards, the project would not exist without it.
Grimoires: A History of Magic Books
Owen Davies, 2009
A companion to Popular Magic, tracing the written tradition cunning folk drew on rather than the practitioners themselves: the spell-books, charm-collections, and conjuring manuals that circulated from the medieval period through to the nineteenth century. Useful for any card built around a written or copied charm rather than a practitioner’s own method, this deck’s spell-books and word-squares lean on it directly.
Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era
Tabitha Stanmore, 2023
Stanmore’s foundational study of “service magic,” the paid, practical magic that ordinary people commissioned for finding lost goods, securing love, locating treasure, and winning at law. The book establishes service magicians as a distinct category, separate from both witches and learned magi: tradespeople whose magic was a transaction, not a transgression. The deck’s treatment of love magic, treasure hunting, and the practical, fee-for-service character of cunning-folk work draws directly on this research.
Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic
Tabitha Stanmore, 2024
The most recent and accessible introduction to the subject. Stanmore writes for a general audience without sacrificing historical rigour, drawing on case records and contemporary sources to bring individual cunning folk and their clients vividly to life. The ideal starting point. Also available as an audio book and a delight to listen to.
Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits
Emma Wilby, 2005
The foundational modern study of the relationship between cunning folk, witches, and their animal familiars, drawn from trial records and folk belief. Dense but essential: Wilby takes the practitioners’ own worldview seriously rather than explaining it away, which makes this unlike most academic treatments of the subject. Sometimes makes it difficult to identify the line between cunning folk and witches, but breath-taking in scope and concept.
The Cunning Man’s Handbook
Jim Baker, 2014
A reconstruction of cunning folk practice drawn from surviving manuscripts and case records. More practical in orientation than Wilby or Davies: it shows what a cunning person actually did, what they said, and what they wrote down. Invaluable for understanding the mechanics of the practice.
Religion and the Decline of Magic
Keith Thomas, 1971
The great landmark study of belief in early modern England. Vast in scope, covering astrology, prophecy, witchcraft, and folk magic in their social and religious context, and still essential reading more than fifty years after publication. Cunning folk are one thread in a much larger tapestry, but Thomas situates them with exceptional clarity. The book that started it all.
Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft
Ronald Hutton, 1999 (cited from the 2019 revised edition)
Hutton’s chapter on cunning-folk (“Finding a Low Magic”) arrives at its conclusions independently of Davies and Baker, and the three converge almost exactly, useful corroboration rather than a fourth opinion. His most valuable contribution to this project is the case against any continuity between cunning craft and modern paganism: the historical record shows no shamanism, no pre-Christian survival, nothing but committed, ordinary Christians at work. Also rich in court-level texture: costume, consulting rooms, surviving notebooks, the sort of detail that doesn’t appear anywhere else.
Sources by Card
The following sections each have detailed sources listed on their corresponding page: