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

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The evidence adduced to establish Wagstaffe as a free-thinker and ‘a quintessential “wit”’ (33) is plausible but marred by an odd emphasis on his drinking habits. Given Hunter’s decades of rumination on these adjacent subjects, this book unsurprisingly has deep roots—the opening chapter first appeared in 1995 and appears here ‘in close to its original form’; other parts were published more recently (p. Few historical enterprises have been as intensively historiographical and reflexive in character as the study of witchcraft in early modern Europe. Priests would routinely ring church bells during a thunderstorm to drive off evil spirits; women were ‘churched’ after childbirth to re-fit them for Christian society.

Other threats, such as crop failure, fire and other natural disasters were also warded off by magical means. Hunter argues that Boyle turned away from witchcraft and towards ‘new sources of evidence to prove the reality and elucidate the workings of the supernatural realm. One of the central features of the beliefs with which Thomas is concerned was "a preoccupation with the explanation and relief of human misfortune.Hunter himself is aware that we might need to look at other pastures for answers, that ‘there was an element of the emperor’s new clothes’ about the new orthodoxy. Hunter illustrates this point with a fabulous retort by Richard Bentley: ‘What then has lessen’d in England your stories of Sorceries?

The Society’s records on the subject of magic were ‘extraordinarily taciturn’ because, despite their best efforts, Glanvill and company were never able to persuade it to take an interest (p. 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. RELIGION AND DECLINE OF MAGIC, his first book, won one of the two Wolfson Literary Awards for History in 1972. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. Doubts about the very existence, let alone the character, of the object of study, together with the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, have ensured that the explosion of studies in this field since the 1960s has been accompanied by a regular rethinking of its intellectual parameters and conceptual tools.

Political and religious discord, disease, famine, fire, and death afflicted the lives of the English population between 1500 and 1700. Is there a future for intellectual history in scholarship on the history of magic and if so what might it look like? Hunter’s impressive mastery of the manuscript material allows him to shine light in some dark corners, although the sources may not take him as far as he would like.

Yet witchcraft was also presented as the product of the ignorance and superstition of past generations (see the quotes on pp. He also proposes that the pursuit of ‘civil religion’, a subject about which my Cardiff colleague Ashley Walsh has just published an eloquent book, was a possible factor. When the Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge bought a charm, ‘the King’s Professor of Divinity in a famous university’ was being ridiculed for being ‘such a fool’ (p.

Intellectual historians are well placed to investigate how the re-presentation of arguments could make them more or less compelling in different contexts. cite book|author=Keith Thomas |date=1971 |title=Religion and the decline of magic |url=https://archive. Purely intellectualist explanations of magic’s ‘decline’ look even more out of touch in light of the dozens of new studies that cumulatively suggest that, if we look beyond the world of the learned elite, the paradigm of decline collapses. You might think from the title of Religion and the Decline of Magic that there is going to be some causal relationship between the two noun phrases: that this is a story of how religion grew as magic diminished. 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.