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

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Ser my desier is you would be pleased to anser me thes queareyes I am indetted and am in danger of aresting. My desier is to know wether the setey or the conterey will be best for me, if the setey whatt part thearof if the contery what partt therof, and whatt tim will be most dangeros unto me, and when best to agree with my creditores I pray doe youer best. 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. 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 urn:lcp:religiondeclineo0000thom:epub:35483696-8499-4fe0-8947-fcbc7040e215 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier religiondeclineo0000thom Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t5w76t75d Invoice 1652 Isbn 0684106027 Sir Keith Thomas was born in 1933 and has been shedding light on history, in a manner inimitable, since he began his career at Oxford in 1955. Religion and the Decline of Magic is one of the outstanding works of history of the last half-century, and will lead the reader to Man and the Natural World, published in 1983, as well as his 2009 work, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England. How are such complex and wide-ranging works produced? In an insouciant, self-deprecating article in the London Review of Books Keith Thomas explained that historians like to keep their secrets to themselves:

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. Few historical enterprises have been as intensively historiographical and reflexive in character as the study of witchcraft in early modern Europe. 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. One of the most important moments in this process was the publication in 1971 of Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas. The essays in this book, arising from a conference held in 1991, examine the developments in witchcraft scholarship in the last two decades or so in the light of Thomas' contribution. In part a review of his influence, it also offers both prescriptions and examples for alternative approaches. This introduction begins this process by re-examining the arguments of Religion and the Decline of Magic in the light of subsequent studies (particularly, but not exclusively, in the Englishspeaking world), as a way of exploring the changing nature of witchcraft research. 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. It is important not to exaggerate the grimness of the early modern age. Our ancestors in Tudor and Stuart England may well have been healthier, happier, and saner than those who toiled in the factories of the industrial revolution. Even though two centuries were marked by plague, civil war, and religious turmoil, the English were spared some of the depredations of the long wars and cyclical famines that afflicted continental Europe. Even so, life expectancy was low and the levels of routine pain and misery were high. It was a world of thatch and bedstraw, where an unattended candle could burn down a town. One third of infants died before the age of five, even among the aristocracy. The harvest failed about one year in six, and epidemics broke out in the wake of hunger.

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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. The author apologises for being fairly superficial with his publication, intending it to be a popular exposition. But one historian’s superficiality can be a lay reader’s in-depth history, it seems! The author usually supports, often with several referenced examples, any statements he’s trying to make. So, at least for me, it came across as a more academic work than I wanted. I just dipped in and out of various well labelled chapters in the end, skipping what seemed to me an over emphasis of the points being made.

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. In his analysis of witchcraft, Thomas does not speak generally of the magical or superstitious practices previously described in his book, such as astrology and other forms of divination. Rather, this term refers here to a specific type of magic which contemporary Englishpersons regarded as harmful, or in modern parlance, anti-social. Thomas defines this as "attribution of misfortune to occult human agency." Contemporaries imagined such agency to function in various ways and to cause various misfortunes, but witchcraft's key characteristic way malice. The evil intention and result distinguished witchcraft from other, potentially beneficial, forms of magic. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, this power was attributed to explicit demonic pacts, thus compounding the crime by the addition of apostasy and devil-worship. In the minds of most Latin-illiterate English people malicious activity remained the key conception of witchcraft; whereas on the Continent more emphasis was placed on the role of the Devil, English witchcraft trials focused on allegations of damage to property or persons, rarely raising the issue of devil-worship. Of the persons accused of witchcraft, a high percentage were found guilty of property damage, but very few of invoking spirits or worshiping devils. Judges were mostly likely to condemn when deaths had occurred, and in these cases the conviction was often for murder rather than witchcraft; as matter of fact, it was not until after 1600 that England even passed a law against compacting with the Devil. In brief, persecution of witches stemmed primarily from fear on the part of their neighbors, not from religious outrage. After 1736, witchcraft was prosecuted as fraud rather than magic; in the years preceding this legislation, skepticism had so increased that trials for witchcraft had ceased, although spontaneous lynching continued sporadically in rural areas. This is in accord with the general history of witchcraft in England, the demand for which generally proceeded from a popular level, not from pressure by religious or political leaders.

Francis Hutchinson, An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718), pp. 150–51; James VI, Daemonologie (1597), p. 42. 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). Thomas takes to task the great anthropologist, Brontislaw Malinowski. Malinowski had argued that magical practices were used when rational practices promised only limited success. Thus, the Trobriand Islanders, whom he studied, used entirely rational, practical methods in the horticulture and fishing on which their lives depended. But such rational practices did not always produce the hoped-for results. So, argued Malinowski, the Trobrianders employed magic to supplement their rationality and to assuage their fear of failure. Thomas, in contrast, notes that the shift in England away from magical towards rational practices occurred before the arrival of superior technology, and not after. If formerly, God and magic had filled the gaps in rationality, latterly, religion and magic diminished, leaving these same gaps exposed.