The final point goes to the supposed stagnation of arguments against magic across multiple centuries. Tellingly, Thomas himself has since presented his interest in anthropology as simply a stimulus to his historical imagination. In his later writings Thomas carefully carved out his native Wales from consideration as ‘culturally distinct’ from England. With a handful of exceptions (including Hill, Hobsbawm, Stone and Laslett), British historians, Thomas maintained, were ‘decades behind their colleagues in other countries’. H. Hexter as unscientific in a Times Literary Supplement review that divided all historians into lumpers and splitters.

In the 1960s and 70s, when the history of Christianity was increasingly written by ‘outsiders’ who were more detached and hostile to their subject, the book stood out to some early reviewers as overly ‘humane’. Indeed, there can be no doubt that Thomas saw himself as dragging Oxford into the twentieth century. The book’s success can be attributed to numerous factors, not least its pioneering contribution to the study of magic and popular religion, its fresh approach to social and cultural history and its function as a model for interdisciplinary history. If magic was effective, Thomas’s question would not need to be asked, at least not with the same urgency. Geoff Eley, reflecting on his experience at Balliol College in the late 1960s, remarks that in those years Oxford’s History Faculty ‘seemed organized precisely for the purposes of restraining imaginative thought, keeping our perceptions tethered to the discipline’s most conservative notations’.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. While RDM breaks new ground in terms of its subject matter and ambitions, the work was a battleground which pitted new social-scientific modes of history against the age-old tools of literary, empirical history. Trevor-Roper’s already-mentioned criticism of RDM’s ‘Frankenstein’ witch stemmed in part from his objecting to Thomas’s excluding continental European witchcraft beliefs, while turning at the same time to modern ethnographic data from much further afield.

To paraphrase her critique, functionalism ended up functioning as a way to ‘rationalize’ not just magic but also religion, enabling Thomas to focus on its material and social uses and largely avoid dealing with the fact that the witch-hunt occurred because early modern people simply believed in witches. Renowned for its rich accumulation of evidence—an approach to history writing beautifully described in Thomas’s account of his own working methods in the LRB —as well as its pioneering fusion of history and anthropology, the book sought to illuminate the logic underlying a set of early modern beliefs that are today “rightly disdained by intelligent persons” (p. New scholarship continues to point out that Enlightenment arguments against witchcraft were largely the same critiques that had been in play since at least the sixteenth century. While Protestant reformers worked to ‘take the magical elements out of religion’, Thomas stressed that the practical problems for which the medieval church had provided answers had not gone away.As we have seen, Thomas’s articles of the 1960s publicly signalled his interest in the theoretical tools of the social sciences, particularly anthropology. Thomas Waters’ Cursed Britain (2019) is only the most recent in a long series of books that have undermined the fantasy of a decline in real terms (which is, after all, unquantifiable), and have pushed back the diminishing fortunes of magic amongst the middle classes to the twentieth century.

While Thomas insisted in the preface of RDM that the sum was greater than its parts, he arranged the book ‘so that the reader who wishes to skip some of the sections can easily do so’.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. We have already suggested that historiographical overemphasis on the witchcraft chapters has led to misunderstandings of RDM.

Similarly, Hunter’s The Decline of Magic (2020) recently concluded that intellectual argument was not responsible for these changes. Early modern discoveries about the history of astrology, as I’ve recently argued , jettisoned associations of the art with the biblical patriarchs and contributed to astrology’s cultural rebranding as baseless, pagan superstition.There is considerable irony in the fact that one of the most revolutionary works of modern history writing emerged from an institution that was widely criticized at the time for its perceived insularity and conservatism. 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.