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St. Gall MS 1395, a collection of fragments from various periods, includes a page of Irish origin and apparently ninth-century date, containing four healing charms known as the St. Gall Incantations, each followed by instructions concerning its ritual performance. A close study of this single vellum folio examining the characteristics of the text, scribal practices and the cultural setting in which the document was compiled, provides a basis for theorizing about Old Irish magical practices and their multidimensional performative context. By highlighting the investigation of the liaison between the words of the charm and the associated ritual, an attempt will be made to elucidate how the textual register of the manuscript translated into physical performance. Accordingly, questions of mise-en-page performance and the manuscript as a material amulet are addressed in order to understand the written environment of magical language as well as the practices of charming in early medieval Ireland.

Irish-language scribal culture demonstrated a significant interest in charms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in part because of the more localized and intimate audience for such texts. Yet when folklorists later made note of the provenance of charms they collected from these scribal sources, they often failed to convey information about how charms came to be copied down and how charms fit into the larger intellectual context of their users. In fact, collectors preferred to highlight the oral aspects of folk practices, as in the example of Douglas Hyde’s massive collection of popular religious material, Abhráin Diadha Chúige Connacht (1906). It is argued here that the scribal context surrounding eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish charm exemplars deserves closer investigation so that the textual practices that surrounded the propagation of charms can be restored to their place alongside the words of the charms themselves.

Dr John Clague (1842–1908) was a medical practitioner in the Isle of Man as well as a folklore and folk song collector. His mother was a herbal healer as was Clague before commencing his medical studies. Clague’s posthumously published reminiscences in 1911 contain the largest collection of charms (13) published to date as well as details of his encounters with charmers and healers during his rounds. Published with facing pages of Manx Gaelic and English (the two languages of the Island in this period) the question arises as to which language the charms were originally collected in. Surviving is a manuscript notebook containing texts of six of the charms; two others are known in Manx from earlier church court records. Clague’s collecting does not exhaust the material for the Island. There is one other contemporary collector, namely Sophia Morrison, whose manuscript material remains inedited and unpublished. Other material that remains to be examined are the printed and manuscript collections of the Manx National Heritage Library, especially the Manx Museum Folk-Life Survey. It is hoped that all this material can be gathered together at some date in a charm catalogue allowing its use by the wider community of charm scholars.

The charm for wounds beginning “Three good brothers were going/walking” has been documented in written and spoken sources in various languages across the European continent from the medieval period. Ferdinand Ohrt's article in the Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens contained many examples of the formula from Northern European manuscript sources. There remain many more examples to be assembled from English manuscripts and from other cultural traditions This paper (including the Appendices) does not attempt to offer a comprehensive collection of Three Good Brothers charms. Rather, it seeks to understand and interpret selected instances of the charm's appearance from the evidence of selected manuscript contexts. The phrase ‘Historical Points’ in the title of this paper signals my attempt to elucidate the cultural contexts for the use of this wound charm at specific moments during, before and after its popularity in the manuscript culture of the medieval period.