On the other hand, the general arc of Thomas’s account—from magic to religion, then from religion to science—tends to result in a secularizing narrative that students of history and religion have justifiably challenged. When, for instance, Thomas posits that “The Reformation took a good deal of magic out of religion,” he sets the stage for a larger historical interpretation that errantly pits the forces of science and religion as necessarily conflictin g against one another. Only recently have scholars begun to grapple seriously with the implications of such an interpretation, arguing that the Reformation and later the Enlightenment did not “disenchant” the West (deprive it of spirituality or magic) as much as the social theorist Max Weber and his disciples supposed they did. Jan Machielsen, Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation (2015), pp. 265–66. In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England (London: Yale University Press, 2018) 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.

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. 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.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. Though the Reformation deliberately tried to get rid of a lot of the hocus-pocus, even afterwards there were ‘magical elements surviving in religion, and there were religious facets to the practice of magic’. Sir Keith Vivian Thomas CH FBA FRHistS FLSW (born 2 January 1933) is a Welsh historian of the early modern world based at Oxford University. He is best known as the author of Religion and the Decline of Magic and Man and the Natural World. From 1986 to 2000, he was president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Distinguished supporters of Humanism Richard Norman and Colin Blakemore support H4BW". Humanists UK . Retrieved 25 June 2020. Let me end therefore with two other, more important, factors, implicit in The Decline of Magic but which its author seems intent to keep under wraps. When they surface as part of a quotation, they pointedly elicit no comment. The first is to emphasize (again) the conservative and derivative nature of the arguments put forth by the newfound orthodox sceptics. Hutchinson, as Hunter already concedes, was no Wagstaffe. Nor was he, we might add, a Balthasar Bekker. There was no rejection of the spirit world. Hunter surveys some of the well-trodden arguments advanced by the ‘orthodox’: particularly fraud and ‘physiological or psychological defects’, yet he pays scant attention to the new historicizing wrapper in which they were often delivered (p. 177). By the time Hutchinson came to write, it had been—the 1712 trial of Jane Wenham notwithstanding—‘thirty five years last past’ that a witch had been hanged in England, and the clergyman who entitled his essay An Historical Essay well knew it. (13) Part of this historicizing umbrella was an accommodationist approach to Scripture, mentioned by Hunter: the argument that Christ, when curing demonic possession, ‘could only be expected to speak the language of his own time’ (p. 136). Yet witchcraft was also presented as the product of the ignorance and superstition of past generations (see the quotes on pp. 61, 137–38). At the most pusillanimous end of the spectrum, as I noted elsewhere, 18th-century thinkers could merely wonder why the devil had stopped working his magic. (14) One straightforward way of dealing with witchcraft, then, was to banish it to the past.

ed. with Donald Pennington) Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) 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."

The 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. It is hard to disagree with these observations—the latter also has a rather marvellous sense of irony—but an evident tension exists between Boyle’s attempt ‘to prove the reality ... of the supernatural’ and his ‘rather heroic open-mindedness’ about causation.