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

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The key rival here was not Cooper but the older Trevor-Roper, who in 1966 was also ‘working like mad on witches’.

While RDM engages with anthropologists when their findings present parallels, there is rarely space for engagement with historians or historiography. Employing ‘marginalisation’, for Vermij and Hirai, acknowledges astrology’s ‘weakening position’ in science and politics, without disregarding its continued flourishing in ‘private opinion and popular culture’ (p. As Hugh Trevor-Roper put it in The European Witch-Craze (1969), “in matters of ideology, it is not generally the ideas which convince” (p. Yet Hill’s influence on Thomas was also procedural and stylistic: many years later Thomas would endorse the view of Hill and himself as representing an ‘Oxford method’ of excerption, accumulation and re-presentation of source material, a concept we examine in section II below. As we have seen, Thomas’s articles of the 1960s publicly signalled his interest in the theoretical tools of the social sciences, particularly anthropology.Meanwhile, functionalism was attractive to Thomas because it helped explain why ‘intelligent’ people in the past made use of apparently ineffective magical techniques. While early reviews of RDM read like a who’s who of the historical discipline in the 1970s, in April 1971 one of Thomas’s students could complain that it ‘hasn’t had the reviews it deserves’, probably because of the difficulties of dealing with a book that was ‘so huge’. And, as Michael Hunter recently pointed out, RDM devotes remarkably few pages to explicit discussion of magic’s ‘decline’. This was a pioneering thesis that foreshadowed some recent scholarship and, as Robert Scribner pointed out, ‘might have led to a reconceptualization of the Reformation’s understanding of religion had less attention been devoted on [Thomas’s] discussion of witchcraft’.

In its methods as well as its conceptual framing, it looks Janus-like simultaneously backwards and forwards. There is a unity to that corpus both in terms of its author’s preoccupations — ‘a retrospective ethnography of early modern England’ — and method. As John Bossy pointed out, ‘the book’s purpose is to assemble a corpus of information with interpretive commentary rather than to propose a controlling synthesis’.When Religion and the Decline of Magic appeared, its subject matter was a “neglected area of the past” (p. In certain scholarly circles, particularly in the fields in which the concept originated, this modernizing model of disenchantment is alive and well. It is often presented, alongside a 1967 essay by Hugh Trevor-Roper, as the starting point for the modern historiography of witchcraft, but the book ranged significantly beyond that topic. Together they create a legitimate space for beliefs that conflict with the central thesis, as either ahead of their time or relics of an earlier mentality. Both are crucial to the book’s overarching argument, not only for the practical, organizational reasons we have already stressed but for conceptual ones as well.

Renowned for its rich accumulation of evidence as well as its pioneering engagement with social anthropology, Religion and the Decline of Magic (hereafter RDM) sought to reveal the logic underlying a diverse but ‘interrelated’ set of beliefs: witchcraft, but also magical healing, astrology, prophecy, ghosts, fairies and omens. Magic’s endurance, however, makes sense within the yin–yang structure we have just laid out; to paraphrase Hotel California, magic may check out but can never leave. When it came to it, Thomas tended to use his anthropological examples (drawn from ‘primitive peoples’, ‘primitive societies’ and ‘primitive countries’) mostly comparatively, rather than to carry a historical argument.

Although deeply influenced by methodological developments in faculties elsewhere in Britain, Europe and America, RDM is thus an Oxford book in more ways than one. The History Faculty boasted a thriving seminar culture that drew rising stars from outside Oxford who were also working on the history of magic. One described the latter as ‘a chipped and crumbling monument to a dusty and cloistered lack of imagination’. These reflections make explicit what was there from the start, but visible only to the most astute contemporaries.

Thomas saw the medieval church — a tapestry of diverse rituals — as blurring the distinctions between two distinct concepts or categories, religion and magic, offering so many supernatural solutions to earthly problems that on a popular level it was viewed as ‘a vast reservoir of magical power’. Intellectual historians are well placed to investigate how the re-presentation of arguments could make them more or less compelling in different contexts. The material he gathers is transcribed, filed and, when the time for writing arrives, emptied from its envelope and scrutinized until patterns emerge.Ultimately, the skirmishes and methodological conflicts with Trevor-Roper helped produce two of the most important contributions to witchcraft history of the mid to late twentieth century. RDM connects the generations, perhaps because it connects so many readers to their own beginnings as historians. In 1968, Trevor-Roper had confessed to his confidante, the one-time Somerville historian Valerie Pearl, that he could not face a conference in the United States, ‘listening to all the Keith Thomases of America pontificating about “new ways in history” — it is too much’. Although the success of the reformers’ separation of magic and religion was essential to Thomas’s thesis, today the Reformation is more often seen as a failure. Purely intellectualist explanations of magic’s ‘decline’ look even more out of touch in light of the dozens of new studies that cumulatively suggest that, if we look beyond the world of the learned elite, the paradigm of decline collapses.