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

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The association of magical powers with church ritual was not ostentatiously promoted by medieval church leaders; in fact, it' often through their writings refuting such claims that we know about them. But the imputation of magical powers was a logical result of church actions. In their intense desire to convert the heathens, the church incorporated many pagan rituals into religious practice. Ancient worship of natural phenomena was modified: hence, New Year' Day became the Feast of Circumcision, the Yule log became part of Christmas tradition and May Day was turned into Saints' Days, for example.

The notion that miracles existed only in the past - in Biblical times - nevertheless continued to be used only selectively. Some divine interventions were therefore regarded as genuine and others as more suspect. The belief that human actions in the form of rituals could change a person's destiny in matters large or small, did, of course, chime in well with post-Lutheran Protestantism. Anglican orthodoxy therefore came to reduce the role of divine intervention. Perhaps surprisingly, the smaller sects, particularly in the Interregnum, remained keener on it.

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. Theologians made a distinction between religion and superstition, but superstition was loosely defined as any practice having magical qualities that were not already designated as religious ritual. The church had the power to define what constituted legitimate and what it denied became heretical. The Protestant Reformation had a significant effect on how the populace regarded miracles and magic. By elevating the individual' faith in God, and denigrating ritual, a new concept of religion was created. The ignorant peasant had had no need for knowledge of the Bible or scripture; the rituals and rites of the church had become the "" of the supernatural and evidence for his/her belief. " was a ritual set of living, not a set of dogmas." The Protestant theologian insisted on a more personal faith, so it became necessary to invent a theology that explained the threat of plague, natural disasters, and the fear of evil spirits. One could no longer call on the " solutions offered by the medieval church." The solution was predestination. Everything that happened was God's will. Evil became a test. There is much to learn and because the book is restricted in scope to England, the author is careful to only make claims about this area (in general), and looks at mulitple possible theories. What you learn is how people thought about magic, such as astrology, witchcraft, and hell/demons/fairies. I never realized how disbelief in most magical ideas had its origins in the Reformation. How there were cunning men/women (essentially magic healers or finders of thieves, etc.). How witchcraft was viewed (it peaked, and then the people in the criminal justice system started to require higher standards of evidence, making prosecutions pretty much impossible). In England, witches were hanged not burned, and the author even comes up with a hypothesis why old women were the most likely to be branded witches [they were the most vulnerable, and people usually accused people of lower "class" as being witches when they felt that they had not been charitable enough and so had been justifiable cursed by the "witch"].

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-03-17 06:01:00 Boxid IA40076014 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Col_number COL-658 Collection_set printdisabled External-identifiercunning men" to use white magic for healing, when doctor's applied approved medical cures that were seemingly no more likely to cure and often did more harm than good, or recovery of lost or stolen property when effective police forces were non-existent for the poor. In his discussion of medieval and immediately post-medieval religion, I found his use of the term “magic” confusing. In this period, much reliance was placed upon prayers, relics, etc., to gain access to the assistance of God and the saints to stave off misfortunes of different kinds. Many Protestants came to dismiss these aids – along with more mainstream activities, among them the mass – as “magical” and Thomas broadly accepts their usage. I see no reason, however, to follow their lead. The distinction seems to rest upon the idea that such objects and practices tried to coerce supernatural entities to intervene on one’s behalf, whereas a properly religious practices merely asked for help. This is, I fear, a fairly tenuous distinction. Moreover, if approaches to God and other supernatural beings to solve one’s problems cannot be described as “religion”, then nothing can. More properly, one should say that, in the early period, God – and also the saints and even the fairies – were supposed to intervene frequently in the trivia of daily life, often in response to human supplications. Later, God, the saints and the fairies had withdrawn and were held to intervene only occasionally, if at all. Thomas looks at the transition point from a medieval world to the more modern version as it relates to religion and magic in England. He provides some contrasts to information from the continent, but England is the focus. It is remarkably detailed and examines the reasons that religion and magic were once almost inseparable, but became antithetical. That process came from the nature of change in the reform of Christian religion and was manifest in official pronouncements long before there was much effect on the way the people understood either religion or magic. While some of the arguments rest on premises now refuted, such as the idea that elite individuals drive changes in our conception of ourselves, the depth of detail and its clear engaging prose makes this book a must for anyone interested in the history of belief in early modern England. The idea that religion maintained importance in English society into the eighteenth century, despite increased emphasis on scientific and rational understandings of the world, significantly challenged previous explanations of the incompatibility between religion and science at the time of publication. This radical conclusion represents the key legacy of this excellent classic work of history.

I am a lumper, not a splitter. I admire those who write tightly focused micro-studies of episodes or individuals, and am impressed by the kind of quantitative history, usually on demographic or economic topics, which aspires to the purity of physics or mathematics. But I am content to be numbered among the many historians whose books remain literary constructions, shaped by their author’s moral values and intellectual assumptions. 2 Sir Keith Thomas was born in 1933 and has been shedding light on history, in a manner inimitable, since he began his career at Oxford in 1955. Religion and the Decline of Magic is one of the outstanding works of history of the last half-century, and will lead the reader to Man and the Natural World, published in 1983, as well as his 2009 work, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England. How are such complex and wide-ranging works produced? In an insouciant, self-deprecating article in the London Review of Books Keith Thomas explained that historians like to keep their secrets to themselves:Yet rarely is this influence assessed subsequently: once acclaimed on publication, a book is hardly ever written about individually again. An interesting and quite hefty volume dealing with the various magical beliefs during the stated centuries in England - although the author does contrast the situation then with that in the middle ages - describing the tensions between them and the established church, and the change in the strength of those beliefs over time, especially with the effect of the Reformation and later Civil War. He makes a good case that in the middle ages, the church had its own "magic" in the form of rituals, Latin prayers, holy water, etc, which people could have confidence in when these were deployed against negative magic such as that of bad witches. In the later period, with all these swept away, the only remedy the church could offer was fasting and prayer, which led people to look more to alternative means of protection such as the services of cunning/wise men and women, and astrologers. 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. Renowned for its rich accumulation of evidence—an approach to history writing beautifully described in Thomas’s account of his own working methods in the LRB —as well as its pioneering fusion of history and anthropology, the book sought to illuminate the logic underlying a set of early modern beliefs that are today “rightly disdained by intelligent persons” (p. ix). Thomas argued that there were good reasons why otherwise intelligent people in the past took these things seriously. Witchcraft, astrology, ghosts, and fairies were firmly anchored in dominant early modern understandings of the world. 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.