Introduction: Keith Thomas and the problem of witchcraft (Chapter 1) - Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe He starts by setting the context of that environment--disease was common, crops and financial survival uncertain, societal safeguards for the poor few, and geographic and class boundaries close and seldom crossed, natural disasters like fire and flood seemingly unpreventable, unpredictable, and capricious. The 16h and 17th centuries of his scope encompassed the bubonic plague, the great London fire (and many disastrous fires on smaller scales in other cities), short and often brutal lifespans fraught with pain and danger from childbirth. The Catholic church before the Reformation offered incantations in the form of prayer, talismans in the form of holy relics of the saints, and magic in the form of transubstantiation during Communion and exorcism at infant baptisms (to remove the demon of original sin from the unbaptized newborn). From there, despite legal restrictions and church sanctions, it was a small step in the mind and life of the average layman to the use of 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." 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.

This type of contradiction is typical of the book as a whole. Thomas weaves a rich tapestry and constructs many convincing and reasonable arguments. The weakness of the book is his failure to reconcile these into a totality. This difficulty may be explained by his inability to distinguish precisely in what way he sees magic and religion as distinct. After all, the term religion as described by Thomas does not inherently exclude magical belief systems. Thomas never really defines his usage of the term, but appears at times to use it simply as a synonym for "the Church" and at others even more loosely as a "belief system" in which case it seems hard to exclude magic from the category.

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In this fascinating and detailed book, Keith Thomas shows how magic, like the medieval Church, offered an explanation for misfortune and a means of redress in times of adversity. The supernatural thus had its own practical utility in daily life. Some forms of magic were challenged by the Protestant Reformation, but only with the increased search for scientific explanation of the universe did the English people begin to abandon their recourse to the supernatural. How the folk belief in magic influenced the established Christianity, particularly Catholicism, is the sine qua non of mesmerism of popular psychology and its portent efficacy of evangelization with a promise of magical healing. The church incorporated the magical elements of pagan belief to its rituals and doctrines of the catechism, such as transubstantiation and holy relics by reconciling the esoteric pagan knowledge with the orthodox Christian teaching. The investment of supernatural power through religious ceremony propitiated the minds of the low and high alike non-discriminately via syncretism until the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and the English Reformation that necessitated the emerging of new natural science and mechanical philosophy and the accordant mode of thinking ultimately debilitating the supreme power of magic and the magical elements used in the church. urn:lcp:religiondeclineo0000thom:epub:35483696-8499-4fe0-8947-fcbc7040e215 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier religiondeclineo0000thom Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t5w76t75d Invoice 1652 Isbn 0684106027 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.’ Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England

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.astrologers to forecast the weather and planting and harvesting times to ensure successful crops, when astrology was the only system claiming scientific rigor that offered seemingly rational forecasts. According to Keith Thomas in his hefty, historical non-fictional book, Religion and the Decline of Magic Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth- Century England, the Church was in the process of undergoing a drastic, cataclysmic upheaval. It may be inferred that this was because the people were changing, society was changing, the government was changing, and the times were changing. In a nutshell, the ideas of rational-thinking intellectuals were beginning to catch on and take hold, based on scientific methods and concrete proof. The author then goes into great, painstakingly elaborate detail, describing the people, their thoughts, their beliefs, society, day-to-day activities, government, the laws, the environment in which they lived, and--most importantly, considering the subject matter and theme of the book, the power and influence exerted over them by the Church, during five crucial time periods: medieval times, the Reformation, Civil War, Interregnum, and the Industrial Age. With that explanation for my no rating I should say there’s a lot of interesting stuff in the book. I was under the misapprehension that maybe medieval magic still included bizarre practises inherited from pagan Anglo Saxon, or Viking times, or even Roman and pre-Roman. But no, over 1000 years of Christianity in Britain ensured that magic and religion were linked, parallel rivals. For the late Medieval Catholic Church with its arcane ceremonies, icons, holy water, holy relics, it wasn’t so much of a step to the practises of cunning men and white witches in villages, who commonly used pseudo religious incantations and charms, sometimes even using stolen holy water or communion hosts! In my humble opinion, Keith Thomas reveals the terrible truth that the various religions of England appeared to be in an almost olympic-like competition for winning God's favor, being held in highest esteem by the Grace of God, and perpetuating good health, prosperity, and happiness exclusively for church members. In essence, each church strived to become the sole, direct intermediary between God and men. A result of this endeavor and the authority gained thereby was to put them at odds with the other rival churches. Yes, certainly, it caused them to excommunicate, ostracize, ban, and burn all persons who were not of their faith. This is probably why, in later years, the Pilgrims sailed for America on the Mayflower and many others caught the first available sailing vessel bound for Australia. Probably about this time, it transpired that some "planetary travelers" began thinking about eternity in earnest. The danger for the ruling elite comes only if the belief is that God is on the opposition=s side and it foments radical social dynamism. Religious fervor could be tolerated only as long as the voice of the people could never be confused or associated with the voice of God. Today=s efforts by some on the Religious Right to confound religion with politics plays right into the hands of political leaders because then religion can be manipulated to political ends. That is what often happened in Europe.

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’. Science and technology have made us less vulnerable to some of the hazards which confronted the people of the past. Yet Religion and the Decline of Magic concludes that "if magic is defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then in eschewing the not beleeving of [confessions] altogether on the one part, least that drawe vs to the errour that there is no Witches: and on the other parte in beleeving of it, make vs to eschew the falling into innumerable absurdities, both monstruouslie against all Theologie diuine, and Philosophie humaine.’ (9) To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account.

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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 In the murky darkness exists an ever-present silent majority. We learn about the monarch, but we rarely get to know their subjects. What was it like to be a Roman or Victorian? Not just how they washed their clothes or what they learned at school, but more importantly, what was their view of the world and their place in it? Michael Hunter, The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment (2020), p. 186; Michael Hunter (ed.), The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-century Scotland (2001), p. 173. Authors of popular history often concern themselves with the main events: discoveries and dictatorships, the Henry VIIIs and Alexander the Greats. As readers we enjoy watching the drama unfold on the global stage. But what about life beyond the spotlight?

The reason is the author is working with raw data. Testimony from legal proceedings, medical notes by physicians, sermons of priests. Religion and the Decline of Magic attempts to connect a vast collection of tiny data points to build a picture of systemic belief in flux. It’s dense and messy, because humans are messy. What was magic actually like in England? There are a lot of things we "know," but are they true? Why did people turn to magic? And, almost more importantly, why did they stop? The modern world assumes that there is a fundamental gap between the two. Thomas examines how that gap developed and how it was manifest in public and private practice. 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.People believed one’s future could be determined by the size of their skull. That the monarch possessed healing powers. That the position of the moon influenced fluid in the brain. That amulets could reveal lost treasure. In the eighteenth century, for example, physicians finally ceased to regard epilepsy as supernatural, although they had not yet learned to understand it in any other way. But they now grasped that the problem was a technical one, open to human investigation, whereas a hundred years earlier, as a contemporary remarked, people were 'apt to make everything a supernatural work which they do not understand'. The change was less a matter of positive technical progress than of an expectation of greater progress in the future. Men became more prepared to combine impotence in the face of current misfortune with the faith that a technical solution would one day be found, much in the spirit in which we regard cancer today. (p 790)