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

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Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a growing, educated class united around mockery of supernatural belief­­—increasingly represented as the preserve of the credulous masses­­—to cement their developing identity. The author also notes the importance of scientific and philosophical revolutions resulting in a widespread belief in natural rather than supernatural laws, which Christian theology successfully integrated with the rise, for example, of natural theology. Still, it's hard to overstate the amount of pleasure on offer here, or the number of fascinating sidelights this book throws on the history of human society and ideas.

The English population was exceedingly liable to pain, sickness, and premature death; many were illiterate; epidemics such as the bubonic plague plowed through English towns, at times cutting the number of London's inhabitants by a sixth; fire was a constant threat; the food supply was precarious; and for most diseases there was no effective medical remedy.reviewers will be able to assess the Hobbesian roots of this link between priestcraft and witchcraft, but the through line sketched out by Hunter with subsequent Deists and their ‘application of a cynical psychology to the history of religion’ is certainly convincing. Witches were rarely accused of responsibility for plagues or big fires – it was always personal disasters, individual calamities. The legal system in England was, happily, less willing to accept witch-hunts against defenceless old women than were courts on the continent: indeed one judge in 1712 is said to have responded to some of the more outlandish testimony against one ‘witch’ by remarking cheerfully that there was no law against flying, and promptly dismissing the case. As the preserve of the common people, witchcraft and ‘superstition’ enabled the construction of an alterity against which enlightened male identities could be defined—not just those of orthodox clergymen, but those of coffee house wits, deists, free-thinkers, and scientists as well. Magic clung to religion, he tells us, as a “corpus of parasitic beliefs,” and there was a pronounced magical cast to many of the rituals of popular piety.

a proper debate did not really occur at all’, ‘it is almost as if intellectual change does not really occur through argument at all’ (pp. The attitudes of the mid-18th-century physicians—in particular Sir Hans Sloane and Richard Mead, surveyed in Chapter Five—provide a similar sense of déjà-vu. but] the association of such ideas with the “vulgar” seems not to have been a causal factor in educated rejection of them but a corollary of it’ (p.The first is that it remains somewhat unclear which of the above aspects were causal, and which were mere corollaries (for recent debate on aspects of this, see this exchange between Michael Hunter and Jan Machielsen).

It is not only a major historical and religious work, but a thoroughly enjoyable book filled with fascinating facts and original insights into an area of human nature that remains controversial today- the belief in the supernatural that still continues in the modern world. 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.Thomas is also anxious to take on board the latest (for 1971) findings in anthropology, and he looks, perhaps too hard, for parallels between Tudor England and traditional ‘African’ cultures: this analysis seems rather unsophisticated nowadays (although charges of ‘racism’, thrown around in a few other reviews here, are absurd). RELIGION AND DECLINE OF MAGIC, his first book, won one of the two Wolfson Literary Awards for History in 1972. What gives way when credulous Catholicism meets the demystifying tendencies of radical Protestantism? In this fascinating and detailed book, Keith Thomas shows how magic, like the medieval Church, offered an explanation for misfortune and a means of redress in times of adversity. Keith Thomas does not induct us into this world through generalities, but by multiplying eloquent examples drawn from contemporary sources.