Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

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You might think from the title of Religion and the Decline of Magic that there is going to be some causal relationship between the two noun phrases: that this is a story of how religion grew as magic diminished. A destitute old woman comes to your door to ask for some butter; you turn her away; you happen to break your ankle later on; and your own feelings of guilt connect the dots. Witches were rarely accused of responsibility for plagues or big fires – it was always personal disasters, individual calamities. People believed one’s future could be determined by the size of their skull. That the monarch possessed healing powers. That the position of the moon influenced fluid in the brain. That amulets could reveal lost treasure.

The difference between churchmen and magicians lay less in the effects they claimed to achieve than in their social position, and in the authority on which their respective claims rested. Few historical enterprises have been as intensively historiographical and reflexive in character as the study of witchcraft in early modern Europe. Doubts about the very existence, let alone the character, of the object of study, together with the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, have ensured that the explosion of studies in this field since the 1960s has been accompanied by a regular rethinking of its intellectual parameters and conceptual tools. One of the most important moments in this process was the publication in 1971 of Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas. The essays in this book, arising from a conference held in 1991, examine the developments in witchcraft scholarship in the last two decades or so in the light of Thomas' contribution. In part a review of his influence, it also offers both prescriptions and examples for alternative approaches. This introduction begins this process by re-examining the arguments of Religion and the Decline of Magic in the light of subsequent studies (particularly, but not exclusively, in the Englishspeaking world), as a way of exploring the changing nature of witchcraft research.Magic, prophecy, witchcraft and astrology – the outmoded, discredited, untenable intellectual debris of a former era; so one would think, but during the past half century in particular, there has been a recrudescence of interest in each of these, and as for religion, it hardly needs me to draw the reader’s attention to the revival of its poisonous fanaticism across the globe.

There are tons of other interesting ideas explored, and it really gave me a much better idea of how much religious, magic, and science beliefs changed and were influenced by each other. Keith Thomas’s magisterial volume detailing the transformation in educated and popular beliefs relating to matters natural and supernatural in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, is a work that anyone interested in this period should read. No other single book issued since this was published in 1971 can be said to have dealt with this theme more comprehensively, and although the fruit of extensive scholarly labours, copiously referenced and footnoted, it makes for an engaging read. Although my first reading of this was as an undergraduate many years ago, I have lately re-read it for the first time since, and enjoyed it even more than the first time around. What does all this mean for intellectual history? Has the field arrived at an impasse? Is there a future for intellectual history in scholarship on the history of magic and if so what might it look like? As someone grappling with the marginalisation of astrology, I’ve come to think that intellectual history—armed as it is today with new sets of tools and (thankfully) a far broader remit­­—is well-equipped to contribute answers to many of the questions that remain unanswered in the knotty history of magic, religion, and science. In what follows I outline three possible ways forward.The final point goes to the supposed stagnation of arguments against magic across multiple centuries. While it’s indeed the case that most basic arguments against, say, astrology, were by the 1700s many centuries old, to dismiss the effectiveness of argumentation on this account is to abstract ideas from their context. The power of particular arguments lies not only in their cogency, but also in a host of social, cultural, and material factors including the character of their author or mediator (see Steven Shapin’s A Social History of Truth (1994) and Anne Goldgar’s Impolite Learning (1995)), and the wiles of their publisher (on magic, see Andrew Fix on Balthasar Bekker ). Intellectual historians are well placed to investigate how the re-presentation of arguments could make them more or less compelling in different contexts. The author apologises for being fairly superficial with his publication, intending it to be a popular exposition. But one historian’s superficiality can be a lay reader’s in-depth history, it seems! The author usually supports, often with several referenced examples, any statements he’s trying to make. So, at least for me, it came across as a more academic work than I wanted. I just dipped in and out of various well labelled chapters in the end, skipping what seemed to me an over emphasis of the points being made. Michael Hunter situates the decline of magic between 1650 and 1750, within the areas of research in which he has built his career: the history of the early Royal Society, in particular that ‘Christian Virtuoso’ Robert Boyle, and the widespread fear of atheism in elite circles. Given Hunter’s decades of rumination on these adjacent subjects, this book unsurprisingly has deep roots—the opening chapter first appeared in 1995 and appears here ‘in close to its original form’; other parts were published more recently (p. 25). Still the overarching argument, previewed bullet-point style in the preface, is extremely well-articulated, as punchy as that of the coffee-house wits that partly occupy Hunter in this volume (pp. vi–vii). In fact, the book could be shorter still. One could quite easily omit two of the book’s six chapters (chapters 4 and 6). These case studies provide useful scaffolding, but without them Hunter’s tree would still stand. Laura Sangha, ‘The Social, Personal, and Spiritual Dynamics of Ghost Stories in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal 63/2 (2020): 339–59. No advance in technique, however, replaces genius. Filing and sorting is a creative activity when a lively mind is directing the operation. Thomas’s devoted and labor-intensive methods, allied to what must be an almost superhuman memory and power of organization, have allowed him to create a dense network of cross-referenced and linked information, in a way that would be beyond the “moderately diligent” or the narrowly schematic researcher. “When I read, I am looking out for material relating to several hundred different topics…. In G.M. Young’s famous words, my aim is to go on reading till I can hear the people talking.”