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

Product Information

Moreover, were these changes primarily economic, technological, social, cultural, religious, or intellectual? For instance, its length — the Penguin edition is over eight hundred pages long — was commonly held against it. In making these claims, Thomas drew largely on the writings of clerics, who complained about the laity in exactly these terms. Through the lens of functionalism, early modern belief in witchcraft emerged as a ‘conservative social force’ that on the one hand discouraged individuals from transgressing moral and social codes of charity (for fear of igniting the ire of a village witch) and on the other hand encouraged older women to reconsider before cursing their neighbours (for fear of being accused).

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. A further, equally unspoken, assumption is that societies have views, attitudes and, indeed, assumptions, and that these can be fenced off and analysed. 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. If magic was effective, Thomas’s question would not need to be asked, at least not with the same urgency.Thomas Waters’ Cursed Britain (2019) is only the most recent in a long series of books that have undermined the fantasy of a decline in real terms (which is, after all, unquantifiable), and have pushed back the diminishing fortunes of magic amongst the middle classes to the twentieth century. H. Hexter as unscientific in a Times Literary Supplement review that divided all historians into lumpers and splitters. Although the process of disenchantment sketched above is ultimately one about ideas, particularly about the forging of a more ‘rational’ religion, material circumstances are nevertheless fundamental. Such note-taking and filing practices appear less idiosyncratic when considered in the context of the middle decades of the twentieth century, when the organization and storage of one’s notes was a chief practical preoccupation of scholars.

Thomas’s 1961 lament about Oxford’s history curriculum was prompted by a lecture on ‘Anthropology and History’ in Manchester by the All Souls anthropologist E.Intellectual biography remains a dependable procedure for moving beyond the rational argumentation of printed books (which is indeed often ex post facto justification) and instead tracing the formation and development of beliefs and doubts in individuals. 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. On the one hand, elite knowledge was increasingly accessible to the middling sort, mediated through sermons as well as cheap print, newspapers and periodicals, and libraries. Both Thomas and Macfarlane were involved in the anthropology seminars run by Mary Douglas out of University College London as well as the 1968 Association of Social Anthropologists conference in Cambridge.

Margaret Bowker’s early review had already made clear one obvious objection: ‘what is not justified is the use of example and counter example without any indication of normality or abnormality’. All of Thomas’s later writings are similarly structured by juxtapositions, two yin and yang concepts at odds with each other whose fates are fundamentally intertwined. Although seemingly an attempt to avoid ‘the charge of untypicality’, for Thompson this method produced only ‘the gross reiterative impressionism of a computer’.At the same time, however, the field has developed in important ways and aspects of the book now look old-fashioned. Caught up in post-Reformation confessional and political struggles, magical beliefs and practices came to be allied with particular groups who eventually found themselves on the losing end. 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’.

P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost (1965), both of which cut deep into the wider culture.While RDM breaks new ground in terms of its subject matter and ambitions, the work was a battleground which pitted new social-scientific modes of history against the age-old tools of literary, empirical history. The influence of this approach on RDM — and of Marxist history more generally — is discussed in section III.