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

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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. The supernatural thus had its own practical utility in daily life. Some forms of magic were challenged by the Protestant Reformation, but only with the increased search for scientific explanation of the universe did the English people begin to abandon their recourse to the supernatural. The reason is the author is working with raw data. Testimony from legal proceedings, medical notes by physicians, sermons of priests. Religion and the Decline of Magic attempts to connect a vast collection of tiny data points to build a picture of systemic belief in flux. It’s dense and messy, because humans are messy. You can get an inkling of what many people understood about religious doctrine from the interview carried out with one sixty-year-old on his deathbed, after a lifetime of attending church several times a week: ‘demanded what he thought of God, he answers that he was a good old man; and what of Christ, that he was a towardly young youth; and of his soul, that it was a great bone in his body’. One shepherd, when asked if he knew who the Father, Son and Holy Ghost were, replied, ‘The father and son I know well for I tend their sheep, but I know not that third fellow; there is none of that name in our village.’ This was admittedly somewhat earlier than the main period under discussion here, but the general attitude lasted through to the seventeenth century and beyond: In fact the socioeconomic factor in all this becomes increasingly obvious. The Church had the power and it had the money, which meant ultimately the difference between magic and religion was what the Church said it was: ‘the ceremonies of which it disapproved were “superstitious”; those which it accepted were not.’ 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.

Yet rarely is this influence assessed subsequently: once acclaimed on publication, a book is hardly ever written about individually again. 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. Witchcraft, astrology, divination and every kind of popular magic flourished in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the belief that a blessed amulet could prevent the assaults of the Devil to the use of the same charms to recover stolen goods. At the same time the Protestant Reformation attempted to take the magic out of religion, and scientists were developing new explanations of the universe. Keith Thomas's classic analysis of beliefs held on every level of English society begins with the collapse of the medieval Church and ends with the changing intellectual atmosphere around 1700, when science and rationalism began to challenge the older systems of belief.Michael Hunter, The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment (2020), p. 186; Michael Hunter (ed.), The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-century Scotland (2001), p. 173. This chapter studies the phenomenon of second sight, the ability of some individuals (especially those living in the Scottish Highlands) to see into the future, from Robert Boyle onwards. 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.’ Following the interminable trench warfare of the Tedworth controversy, second sight ‘must have seemed ideal’ (p. 148). Hunter also links the growth of scepticism in the phenomenon to a change in scientific ‘fashion’, namely the displacement of ‘the Boylian tradition of Baconian science’ with ‘an essentially mathematical mode’ based on a ‘new, Newtonian ethos’ and general laws of nature (pp. 154, 161). Boyle’s biographer does not approve. Hunter notes

Laura Sangha, ‘The Social, Personal, and Spiritual Dynamics of Ghost Stories in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal 63/2 (2020): 339–59. This type of contradiction is typical of the book as a whole. Thomas weaves a rich tapestry and constructs many convincing and reasonable arguments. The weakness of the book is his failure to reconcile these into a totality. This difficulty may be explained by his inability to distinguish precisely in what way he sees magic and religion as distinct. After all, the term religion as described by Thomas does not inherently exclude magical belief systems. Thomas never really defines his usage of the term, but appears at times to use it simply as a synonym for "the Church" and at others even more loosely as a "belief system" in which case it seems hard to exclude magic from the category.In closing, it is salutary to recall that intellectual history is not just the history of persuasion. It’s been some time since our field was interested only in the propositional content of the books of a handful of elite European men, even if our progress here has admittedly been rather slow. The interests, and opportunities, of intellectual history are today far broader. Thomas' classic provides an excellent directory for the period sources. As a compendium of the evidence available by c.1970, it is unparalleled, and the ambition required to assemble such a corpus deserves very high praise. Michael Hunter situates the decline of magic between 1650 and 1750, within the areas of research in which he has built his career: the history of the early Royal Society, in particular that ‘Christian Virtuoso’ Robert Boyle, and the widespread fear of atheism in elite circles. 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. 25). Still the overarching argument, previewed bullet-point style in the preface, is extremely well-articulated, as punchy as that of the coffee-house wits that partly occupy Hunter in this volume (pp. vi–vii). In fact, the book could be shorter still. One could quite easily omit two of the book’s six chapters (chapters 4 and 6). These case studies provide useful scaffolding, but without them Hunter’s tree would still stand.

When Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic was first published in 1971, it drew together two disciplines, history and anthropology, which early in the twentieth century had grown apart. But the author has no grand thesis to sell us. The joy of his dry and witty book is in its accumulation of fine detail, and also in its broad humanity. Emerging from most studies of the past, the reader feels a leaden ache, a sense of pity and waste and dread. From this book, the reader emerges exhilarated, provoked, amused, with an insight into the ingenuity and potential of human beings and a sense that the past was not a place of insensate ignorance and darkness, but a place we are privileged to revisit through the craft of such an original, painstaking, and erudite historian. People believed one’s future could be determined by the size of their skull. That the monarch possessed healing powers. That the position of the moon influenced fluid in the brain. That amulets could reveal lost treasure. Please list any fees and grants from, employment by, consultancy for, shared ownership in or any close relationship with, at any time over the preceding 36 months, any organisation whose interests may be affected by the publication of the response. Please also list any non-financial associations or interests (personal, professional, political, institutional, religious or other) that a reasonable reader would want to know about in relation to the submitted work. This pertains to all the authors of the piece, their spouses or partners. But that is not at all the story being told in this fantastically wide-ranging, compendious study of the beliefs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Instead we are given something much more subtle – an examination of the magical thinking that pervaded all of society, religion included, and of what happened to religion and society when that magical thinking became untenable. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century EnglandThe final point goes to the supposed stagnation of arguments against magic across multiple centuries. 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. The power of particular arguments lies not only in their cogency, but also in a host of social, cultural, and material factors including the character of their author or mediator (see Steven Shapin’s A Social History of Truth (1994) and Anne Goldgar’s Impolite Learning (1995)), and the wiles of their publisher (on magic, see Andrew Fix on Balthasar Bekker ). Intellectual historians are well placed to investigate how the re-presentation of arguments could make them more or less compelling in different contexts.