Amulet Atlas

peopleFrederick Thomas Elworthy

also: F. T. Elworthy

peopleBritain and IrelandRome and ItalyIberiaWestern EuropeUnited KingdomItalySpain

English philologist and antiquary, 1830–1907, of Wellington in Somerset. He wrote the two books that pulled the evil eye and its answering objects together as one subject in English — "The Evil Eye" in 1895 and "Horns of Honour" in 1900 — and he bought the objects while he was writing, in Spain, Italy and elsewhere. His collection went to the Somersetshire Archaeological Society's museum at Taunton after his widow's death.

cited

When

10 January 1830 – 13 December 1907 cited

PeriodVictorian
How the date is knowntextual — a dated text describes it

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The story

Elworthy came to writing late. A woollen manufacturer's eldest son, schooled privately at Denmark Hill, he made his first name as a dialect scholar: "The Dialect of West Somerset", published for the English Dialect Society by Trübner between 1875 and 1886, in two volumes with a grammar and a word-book.

Then he turned to the eye. "The Evil Eye: an account of this ancient and widespread superstition", John Murray, 1895, gathered what he had seen on the road — the coral horn in Naples, the hand, the crescent, the amulets sold at street barrows — and set them beside Roman and Greek material. "Horns of Honour", the same publisher, 1900, took the horn on its own. He drew, and he drew well; the plates are his.

His obituarist in the Dictionary of National Biography wrote that in the course of those travels he made "perhaps the finest collection of charms, amulets, and such-like trinkets in existence". That sentence is the record of a whole period's vocabulary, and this atlas prints it as a quotation rather than borrowing it. Elworthy's own subtitle does the same work. The word he put on his title page is the verdict the book starts from, and everything inside is described by somebody who had already decided what the practice was.

Inference — what survived the framing is the evidence. Elworthy recorded which object was sold on which street, what a seller said it did, and what shape it took in one town against the next; those observations are still checkable and are still cited, including in this atlas, wherever a Mediterranean charm needs a dated nineteenth-century sighting.

cited

Now

His 1895 and 1900 books are out of copyright and circulate freely as scans, which keeps both the observations and the vocabulary in wide reach. The Pitt Rivers Museum's 'The Other Within' project, by Alison Petch, carries a biographical page on him as one of the collectors behind English ethnographic holdings.

cited

What this is near

motifThe eyethe sign he catalogued across Europe in 1895, and the reason many of these objects are grouped together at allkinCornicellothe Neapolitan horn he bought, drew and gave a book of its own in 1900motifThe hornthe sign he argued was doing the eye's work by another shapekinCimarutaone of the Italian charms his fieldwork put into English printtraditionEuropean folk apotropaic craftthe tradition his two books first assembled as a single subject in EnglishparallelEdward Lovetthis English contemporary, working the same decades on London streets rather than Mediterranean onesstoryThe eye everywherethe long read his 1895 survey is the first English attempt at

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

personCimarutathe Victorian who travelled Italy and Spain collecting charms against the eye and published on them in 1895personCornicellothe Victorian who collected charms of this kind in Italy and published The Evil Eye in 1895personFascinumthe Victorian who assembled the European evidence for the eye and its substitutes, and put this object in the same drawer as the horn and the handpersonEuropean folk apotropaic craftthe man who made this a single subject in English, in 1895, by buying the objects while he wrote about thempersonGreek and Roman protective magicthe Victorian who assembled the European evidence for the eye and its substitutes in 1895, and whose groupings museums still usepersonThe eyethe Victorian who catalogued the sign across Europe in 1895 and is still the reason many of these objects are grouped togethercontrastAlan Dundesthe Victorian whose eye material his casebook inherited, read through a century of argumentparallelEdward Lovetthis contemporary on the same subject, working Mediterranean markets where Lovett worked London barrowsparallelSiegfried Seligmannhis English counterpart, fifteen years earlier and far shorter; Seligmann read himpersonperiaptthe Victorian cataloguer whose generation kept the word in printpersonThe Lovett collectionhis older contemporary, who built the comparable collection and left it to TauntonpersonThe eye everywherethe Victorian who put this family together in one book in 1895, and whose grouping we still use

Where this came from

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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