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

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When we organized ‘50 Years of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic’, a hybrid conference held at All Souls College, Oxford, in September 2021, we hoped to stimulate renewed reflection on the book’s legacy and how it came to have such a lasting hold on the historical imagination. 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. Thomas’s 1966 manifesto similarly proclaimed that ‘the witchcraft accusations of seventeenth-century England are coming to be seen as a reflection of hostilities engendered by the breakdown of the old village community’.

At the same time the Protestant Reformation attempted to take the magic out of religion, and scientists were developing new explanations of the universe.

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. Hunter muses over a situation in which “people just made up their minds and then grasped at arguments to substantiate their preconceived ideas”. While all of these were now ‘rightly disdained by intelligent persons’ they were taken seriously by ‘equally intelligent persons in the past’. The opposition between religion and magic in RDM is underpinned therefore by more than envelopes and their discrete contents.

Undergraduate historians were taught to produce ‘dogmatic and personal interpretations on the basis of rapid reading of the secondary sources’. Evans-Pritchard’s study of witchcraft among the Azande of South Sudan also gave Thomas an early opportunity to reflect on the dynamics of early modern witchcraft accusations. 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. Half a century after its first publication, Thomas’s masterpiece remains an inspiration — and a foil — for countless students of social, cultural and religious history.Witchcraft, astrology, ghosts, and fairies were firmly anchored in dominant early modern understandings of the world. While RDM engages with anthropologists when their findings present parallels, there is rarely space for engagement with historians or historiography. Some early reviewers presented RDM as an encyclopaedia to be consulted rather than a work to be read. Although apparently sympathetic to religion, RDM, in the words of Michael Bentley, still remains ‘a cultic statement of modernist secularism’. He pointed not only to France, where the Annales school of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre ‘urged the historical study of la psychologie collective’, but also the United States, ‘the home of social sciences par excellence’.

Writing on topics that would have raised eyebrows amongst more conservative historians, Thomas spent much of his time demonstrating the pervasiveness of magic in the early modern period — and hence its importance to the historian — rather than focusing on how things changed. The influence of this approach on RDM — and of Marxist history more generally — is discussed in section III. Even if we discard the disenchantment model, it remains undeniable that something changed across the period, but what, when, where, why and — crucially — for whom?

Josephson-Storm in The Myth of Disenchantment (2017), to tracing the rise and fall of this dying paradigm itself. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a growing, educated class united around mockery of supernatural belief­­—increasingly represented as the preserve of the credulous masses­­—to cement their developing identity.

Both as organizing principles and as categories of analysis, religion, magic and popular belief are key to RDM as they are to understanding the book’s legacy in the discipline of history. For better or worse, Thomas’s book promised to mark a generational shift and became totemic for a new form of history. Indeed, the work plays an important role in a rather problematic and gendered historiographical narrative in which these subjects were ‘rescued’ out of the hands of ‘amateurs’, especially Margaret Murray, whose witch-cult theories had proven particularly durable. Thomas’s use of functionalism is most obvious in RDM’s chapter on ‘Witchcraft and its Social Environment’, where he outlines the social tension model described above. In 1972, it won an inaugural Wolfson History Prize, while the American Historical Association allocated it a session at its annual conference.Developmental–evolutionary models of culture soon came under heavy criticism from social scientists as well as from historians, while social history has been overtaken by the cultural turn. As someone who has predominantly worked in intellectual history and the history of science, this is something I find especially interesting. Thomas described magic as the early modern equivalent of ‘drug-taking’ in the twentieth century as ‘the fashionable temptation for undergraduates’. Thomas has described historical writing as simply ‘an art of representation’, but just how popular were the practices that Thomas re-presented in RDM?