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. By the later period, however, the use and belief in such ritual means had much diminished in favour of rational, mechanical, and more strictly practical means, informed – at least in principle - by careful observation, experimentation and by “trial and error”. Belief in the danger of witchcraft and sorcery had similarly diminished. This shift was never total, however, but a matter of emphasis. In the sixteenth and earlier centuries, plenty of rationality had co-existed with magic and religious ritual. Conversely, ritual practices have persisted, despite the pre-eminence of science and rational technology. Magic, prophecy, witchcraft and astrology – the outmoded, discredited, untenable intellectual debris of a former era; so one would think, but during the past half century in particular, there has been a recrudescence of interest in each of these, and as for religion, it hardly needs me to draw the reader’s attention to the revival of its poisonous fanaticism across the globe.

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. This was a fascinating read. It is extremely well cited, and very scholarly, so if you dislike that style, you will not like the book. It is not an "exciting" read, but is full of interesting thoughts and ideas. It is also very careful in its reasoning. Thomas goes into considerable detail laying out the influences of Church teachings on demonology, religious despair, possession and the like, and the effect of these on ideas about and belief in witchcraft. He builds a convincing case for the relationship of these two bodies of beliefs, but unfortunately does not explain why this topic remains important in light of his earlier assertion that the role of the demonic in witchcraft was a later and less influential addition to concern with maleficium. Even after this religious exposition he adds again, "Witchcraft prosecution on England did not need the stimulus of religious zeal," but a paragraph later conversely concludes that "religious beliefs were a necessary pre-condition of the prosecutions."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. Thomas heavily footnotes his sources, and this is wonderful. Additionally, he disabuses or challenges the beliefs we have today about some of the beliefs current in Tudor or Stuart times. This is particularly helpful when considering facts about Shakespeare, witches, and people in general. 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.’

The Decline of Magic does not begin, as one might expect, with the Royal Society but with John Wagstaffe’s The Question of Witchcraft Debated (1669, 2 nd enlarged ed. 1671). The opening lines of Wagstaffe’s preface—‘The zealous affirmers of Witchcraft think it no slander to charge all those who deny it with Atheism’—already make the major theme of late 17th-century demonology crystal clear: spirits were a defence against irreligion. (1) I agree with Hunter that The Question of Witchcraft Debated is remarkable, though like him I find it difficult to articulate why. With perhaps one exception, Wagstaffe offers nothing that cannot already be found in Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) a century earlier. Hunter is right to emphasize the work’s ‘punchy, cynical tone’, its ‘boldness and iconoclasm’, though Scot’s sarcasm—‘He that can be perswaded that these things are true ... may soon be brought to believe that the Moon is made of green Cheese’—was already legendary (pp. 47, 35). (2) Certainly Wagstaffe’s work was not notable, pace Hunter, for his humanist learning. The claim that ‘the influence of antiquity can be argued to have had a crucial “modernising” effect’ is by far the least convincing part of Hunter’s argument (p. 51). Wagstaffe lifted his classical references straight out of Martin Delrio’s Disquisitiones magicae (1599–1600), the most-read demonology of the early modern period. (3) Evidence that this Jesuit had adduced to prove the universality of witchcraft was repurposed to demonstrate its ‘heathenish’ origins. Other arguments put forth by Wagstaffe, for instance, that the Bible, when speaking of witchcraft, had been mistranslated, were also decidedly old hat. It's true that the educated metropolitan classes could sometimes be sceptical about magic – but this was a tiny proportion of society. The vast majority of people still lived rural lives in small villages, and religion to them was just another brand of the supernatural.Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and its Transformations (1997); Peter Elmer, Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and Politics in Early Modern England (2016). Also worth reading is Andrew Sneddon, Witchcraft and Whigs: The Life of Bishop Francis Hutchinson (1660–1739) (2008), a target of Hunter’s that does not escape the footnotes. 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-identifier A destitute old woman comes to your door to ask for some butter; you turn her away; you happen to break your ankle later on; and your own feelings of guilt connect the dots. Witches were rarely accused of responsibility for plagues or big fires – it was always personal disasters, individual calamities.

There are tons of other interesting ideas explored, and it really gave me a much better idea of how much religious, magic, and science beliefs changed and were influenced by each other. While Thomas believes that the English Reformation had an impact on belief systems, he also looks at the rise of education, newspapers, and science as well. The book is split into sections moving from religion to magic to witches to ghosts and so on. While a basic knowledge of Tudor and Stuart Britian is helpful in reading this book, you do not have to be a sociology or history graduate student to understand the book. In fact, when I say basic, I really mean basic.

Book contents

So if not science, might we turn to other forms of knowledge to explain the ‘decline’ of magic? Perhaps not. It’s one of the arguments of Hunter’s book that “the Enlightenment did not reject magic for good reasons but for bad ones” (p. vii). Hunter muses over a situation in which “people just made up their minds and then grasped at arguments to substantiate their preconceived ideas”. “It is almost as if intellectual change does not really occur through argument at all” (p. 46). Hunter’s reflections seem to dovetail with social science research that’s grappling with post-truth politics. This research has suggested that, despite what we might like to think, people change their minds for the ‘wrong’ reasons all the time. It seems ‘bare facts’ are not enough to persuade the vaccine hesitant , for example. Alex Ryrie’s Unbelievers (2019) takes these insights to the history of atheism, arguing that people believe what they believe not as a result of a chain of reasoning, but as a consequence of emotional responses to lived realities. Thomas chronicles in easy to read prose the conflict and change among beliefs in magic and religion during the Tudor and Stuart periods in England. An interesting popular historical treatise. I’m not rating it however as I only dipped in and out of the book upon finding it wasn’t quite what I was after. My fault, I emphasise, not the authors.

urn:lcp:religiondeclineo0000thom:epub:35483696-8499-4fe0-8947-fcbc7040e215 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier religiondeclineo0000thom Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t5w76t75d Invoice 1652 Isbn 0684106027 Medical practitioners had built up an elaborate theoretical edifice, but it was of little use in practice, and even if it had been, poor people relied on the cheap and locally available services of herbalists and wise women. Every childbirth brought a woman to a liminal state, poised between this world and the next; the midwives who attended her were (alas for feminist sentimentality) often dirty, cruel, and useless. There was nothing to buffer the individual from fatal or life-changing disaster. There was no insurance. There was no compensation. Sudden death could whisk you before God for his eternal judgment, without any chance of confession and forgiveness; hell gaped, its torments graphically illustrated for you, in color, on the walls of your parish church. Keith Thomas’s magisterial volume detailing the transformation in educated and popular beliefs relating to matters natural and supernatural in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, is a work that anyone interested in this period should read. No other single book issued since this was published in 1971 can be said to have dealt with this theme more comprehensively, and although the fruit of extensive scholarly labours, copiously referenced and footnoted, it makes for an engaging read. Although my first reading of this was as an undergraduate many years ago, I have lately re-read it for the first time since, and enjoyed it even more than the first time around. Laura Sangha, ‘The Social, Personal, and Spiritual Dynamics of Ghost Stories in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal 63/2 (2020): 339–59.

Summary

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. Two things initially strike me about this story. The first is that it remains somewhat unclear which of the above aspects were causal, and which were mere corollaries (for recent debate on aspects of this, see this exchange between Michael Hunter and Jan Machielsen). The second is that there seems to be little space here for the role of science or of ideas more generally. As someone who has predominantly worked in intellectual history and the history of science, this is something I find especially interesting. While Thomas left room in his account for the intellectual changes brought about by the scientific revolution—experimentalism and mechanical philosophy—scholarship has happily let go of the idea that ‘superstition’ is a case of arrested development resolved only through scientific enlightenment. Although David Wootton’s The Invention of Science (2015) (admittedly something of an outlier­­) asserts that science “must” be responsible for shifting attitudes to magic, Michael Hunter’s The Decline of Magic (2020) argues that the science of the scientific revolution actually left a lot of scope for supernatural belief. As Charles Webster argued some time ago in From Paracelsus to Newton (1982), “we must look in places other than science for the explanation of these changes” (p. 100). What is the difference between religion and magic, anyway? It's not easy, even for believers, to give a satisfying answer. Theologians liked to say that prayers and religious ceremonies, unlike spells, were ‘propitiatory, not constraining’ – one asked god for help, one did not compel him to act in a certain way. But this was a distinction made by the educated thinkers at the top: for ordinary people (much of the clergy not excluded) it just didn't exist. Many wizards and conjurers called on God for their enchantments, and many religious rites and prayers were assumed to work purely mechanically as charms. 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. The whole structure of the medieval Church ‘appeared as a vast reservoir of magical power, capable of being deployed for a variety of secular purposes’.