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

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Instead, I would argue, such beliefs had become unfashionable (an ‘act of inurbanity’ in Lord Byron’s memorable phrase).

Technological advances, such as improvements in agriculture, firefighting, and complex mechanisms of banking and insurance, also improved life expectancy and reduced misfortunes. Religion and the Decline of Magic is a large and complex work, in which witchcraft is only one theme. When Religion and the Decline of Magic appeared, its subject matter was a “neglected area of the past” (p. I cannot judge whether Thoresby was the sensitive type, but if these views were indeed that common the antiquary should not have been surprised by them.

Moreover, and here Thomas took his cue from the anthropologists, they also served deeply useful functions in insecure societies that were under constant threat of famine, fire, and disease. I would also note Anthony Wood’s claim, overlooked by Hunter, that ‘[f]or writing of [the witchcraft] book he was also laughed at by wags of this university, because, as they said, he himself look’d like a little wizard. Technological and socioeconomic improvements were also rendering some forms of magic less crucial to everyday life. Hunter also links the growth of scepticism in the phenomenon to a change in scientific ‘fashion’, namely the displacement of ‘the Boylian tradition of Baconian science’ with ‘an essentially mathematical mode’ based on a ‘new, Newtonian ethos’ and general laws of nature (pp. The devil was shockingly proximate, not metaphorical but as real as your neighbor, as your spouse or child.

Evidence that this Jesuit had adduced to prove the universality of witchcraft was repurposed to demonstrate its ‘heathenish’ origins. This year marks the 50 th anniversary of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), a book that set the agenda for decades of scholarship on the history of popular belief. 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. I am grateful to Jan Machielsen for his alert and careful reading of my book, with the thrust of which he seems largely to concur—despite various critical asides, often reflecting his absorption in the earlier literature of demonology.What gives way when credulous Catholicism meets the demystifying tendencies of radical Protestantism? Book reviewers sometimes applaud a book as a masterpiece; occasionally they herald one as a seminal work which will have an enormous influence on the way we will perceive a subject in the future. There is one last point in my book to which Machielsen does not refer at all, but which is worth mentioning because it explains why I am not fazed by the evidence for the survival and renaissance of magical belief surveyed by Waters.

I am also sorry that I relegated to an endnote the comparable historical argument concerning the royal touch used by William Becket in his Free and Impartial Enquiry into the Antiquity and Efficacy of Touching for the Cure of the King’s Evil (1722). Evidence may be partial, contradictory, or baffling, but the author’s capacious technique scoops it all in. He sees that they were not quaint deviations from mainstream thought; they were not marginal to the early modern world, but intrinsic to it. Every childbirth brought a woman to a liminal state, poised between this world and the next; the midwives who attended her were (alas for feminist sentimentality) often dirty, cruel, and useless. The subject warrants only a single, grudging sentence in the conclusion: ‘It may be true that a more rigid polarisation between popular and educated belief than hitherto was coming into place .It seems to me perfectly to summarise the attitude to magical ideas of British thinkers since the 18th century, in that, while the dominant culture rejects them, minorities vociferously espouse them.