Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (Penguin History)

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The book introduces us to countless charming tales, such as that of the Cambridge scholar ‘Ashbourner’, who went missing after selling his soul to the devil in exchange for a doctorate and a round trip to Padua. In the 1960s and 70s, when the history of Christianity was increasingly written by ‘outsiders’ who were more detached and hostile to their subject, the book stood out to some early reviewers as overly ‘humane’. A further, equally unspoken, assumption is that societies have views, attitudes and, indeed, assumptions, and that these can be fenced off and analysed. underlying his account is the same modernizing reading of the Reformation in which Protestantism emerges as ‘rational’ and Catholicism as backwards and superstitious. Josephson-Storm in The Myth of Disenchantment (2017), to tracing the rise and fall of this dying paradigm itself.

A recent special issue on the ‘ Marginalization of Astrology ’ (2017), edited by Rienk Vermij and Hiro Hirai, has helped lead to the realisation, paralleled in work on witchcraft, that aspects of astrology were discarded from elite culture piecemeal, rather than all in one go. Thomas’s 1966 manifesto similarly proclaimed that ‘the witchcraft accusations of seventeenth-century England are coming to be seen as a reflection of hostilities engendered by the breakdown of the old village community’. It was ultimately a story of ‘collective, organized lunacy and cruelty’, and Trevor-Roper wrestled with the question of why ‘liberal, humane, learned men’ were caught up in ‘an artificial system of nonsense’. He pointed not only to France, where the Annales school of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre ‘urged the historical study of la psychologie collective’, but also the United States, ‘the home of social sciences par excellence’.As Geertz observed in 1975, Thomas often uses ‘his own words for classifying the beliefs and practices that he has unearthed’ but ‘his own assumptions about the workings of human societies and minds remain unexamined’.

Although much attention has been paid to the book’s engagement with anthropology (discussed in section II below), here particular emphasis is placed on the book’s approach to theory, method and historiography. Historians have since undermined the assumption of any decline of magic in real terms (which is, after all, as Thomas himself noted back in 1971, unquantifiable), and have pushed back the diminishing fortunes of magic amongst the middle classes from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. It is often presented, alongside a 1967 essay by Hugh Trevor-Roper, as the starting point for the modern historiography of witchcraft, but the book ranged significantly beyond that topic. RDM is also fundamentally a polyphonous work because in many instances it is the people of early modern England who appear to be speaking in all their diversity.Indeed, some readers, especially critical ones, immediately embraced an anthropological reading of RDM. 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 1968, Trevor-Roper had confessed to his confidante, the one-time Somerville historian Valerie Pearl, that he could not face a conference in the United States, ‘listening to all the Keith Thomases of America pontificating about “new ways in history” — it is too much’.

In certain scholarly circles, particularly in the fields in which the concept originated, this modernizing model of disenchantment is alive and well. The book’s origins were, in his view, ‘largely a matter of chance’, a fortuitous by-product of his undergraduate teaching. The book shared the Wolfson prize (as was customary then), with the larger sum going to a work of military history. The year 2021 marked the fiftieth 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 supernatural beliefs. In comparison to the story presented in RDM, more recent work tends to present the Reformation as a slow, gradual process and emphasizes continuity over rupture.The lack of clerical oversight that came with the abolition of the confessional, for instance, left a pressing need for guidance that Thomas suggested was ultimately supplied by astrologers and other ‘wisemen’.

The material he gathers is transcribed, filed and, when the time for writing arrives, emptied from its envelope and scrutinized until patterns emerge. The middle decades of the twentieth century witnessed the proliferation in Britain of endeavours to institutionalize social history through the founding of new societies and journals that helped shape and direct the study of the history of below. There is considerable irony in the fact that one of the most revolutionary works of modern history writing emerged from an institution that was widely criticized at the time for its perceived insularity and conservatism. The key rival here was not Cooper but the older Trevor-Roper, who in 1966 was also ‘working like mad on witches’. While Protestant reformers worked to ‘take the magical elements out of religion’, Thomas stressed that the practical problems for which the medieval church had provided answers had not gone away.The concluding conviction that a ‘functional interpretation of the role of witch beliefs’ could be combined ‘with a theory of social and intellectual change’ helped to set the expectations with which RDM — a book ‘which I plan to publish shortly’ — would be greeted. Relatedly, it’s also vital to avoid the old fallacy—implicit in the assumption that intellectual history can only speak to elite experience—that uneducated, ‘ordinary’ people had no intellectual life. Crucially, writing half a century after the book’s publication, we can read RDM in the context of Thomas’s wider oeuvre. The History Faculty boasted a thriving seminar culture that drew rising stars from outside Oxford who were also working on the history of magic.