RELIGION AND THE DECLINE OF MAGIC

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Ways of Doing Cultural History", in Rik Sanders (ed.), Balans en perspectief van de Nederlandse cultuurgeschiedenis (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991) 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.

Laura Sangha, ‘The Social, Personal, and Spiritual Dynamics of Ghost Stories in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal 63/2 (2020): 339–59. There’s a lot I’ve left out here on other magical practises pre and post Reformation including a few unusual ones supposedly linked to ‘classical times’ and the common attempts by the church to link Witchcraft to Satanic practises. A shame that my expectations of bizarre pagan practises being more common were not met, for novelty value, so at least I learnt that! But interesting to see that many of the superstitions people held at that time are still maintained to some degree today, even if paying for the service of a local cunning man or witch has (mostly) died out. I am grateful to Jan Machielsen for his alert and careful reading of my book, with the thrust of which he seems largely to concur—despite various critical asides, often reflecting his absorption in the earlier literature of demonology. However, I feel I should say something about the two ‘more important factors’ which, at the end of his review, he claims that I neglect. Keith Thomas’s magisterial volume detailing the transformation in educated and popular beliefs relating to matters natural and supernatural in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, is a work that anyone interested in this period should read. No other single book issued since this was published in 1971 can be said to have dealt with this theme more comprehensively, and although the fruit of extensive scholarly labours, copiously referenced and footnoted, it makes for an engaging read. Although my first reading of this was as an undergraduate many years ago, I have lately re-read it for the first time since, and enjoyed it even more than the first time around. Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England is a standard in early modern European history. This wide-ranging study examines both the tensions and the congruences between the established church’s teachings and popular belief.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. Later in the early modern period, however, magic’s decline accelerated. With seventeenth-century thought’s “emancipation from the past,” Thomas writes, the “possibility of infinite intellectual progress” led many to break from the traditions of the ancients, creating a discontinuous modernity in the process. As the century wore on, increased levels of skepticism brought about the end of witchcraft prosecutions, but only social changes that made the world more impersonal and urban would lead to the virtual end of magic. Urbanization and the growth of insurance as an economic practice, among other seventeenth-century projects, had more to do with magic’s fall than did changes in knowledge production and the rise of science. No advance in technique, however, replaces genius. Filing and sorting is a creative activity when a lively mind is directing the operation. Thomas’s devoted and labor-intensive methods, allied to what must be an almost superhuman memory and power of organization, have allowed him to create a dense network of cross-referenced and linked information, in a way that would be beyond the “moderately diligent” or the narrowly schematic researcher. “When I read, I am looking out for material relating to several hundred different topics…. In G.M. Young’s famous words, my aim is to go on reading till I can hear the people talking.” You can get an inkling of what many people understood about religious doctrine from the interview carried out with one sixty-year-old on his deathbed, after a lifetime of attending church several times a week: ‘demanded what he thought of God, he answers that he was a good old man; and what of Christ, that he was a towardly young youth; and of his soul, that it was a great bone in his body’. One shepherd, when asked if he knew who the Father, Son and Holy Ghost were, replied, ‘The father and son I know well for I tend their sheep, but I know not that third fellow; there is none of that name in our village.’ This was admittedly somewhat earlier than the main period under discussion here, but the general attitude lasted through to the seventeenth century and beyond: 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

Thomas heavily footnotes his sources, and this is wonderful. Additionally, he disabuses or challenges the beliefs we have today about some of the beliefs current in Tudor or Stuart times. This is particularly helpful when considering facts about Shakespeare, witches, and people in general. He was a member of the Economic and Social Research Council 1985–90, and of the Reviewing Committee on Exports of Works of Art 1990–93, and, since 1992, of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. From 1991 to 1998, he was a trustee of the National Gallery and since 1997 he has been chairman of the British Library Advisory Committee for Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. [ citation needed] Personal life [ edit ] Hunter’s critique of the whiggish assumptions which, for all the book’s insight and subtlety, underpinned the concluding chapters of Religion and the Decline of Magic is encompassed in his very different approach. Thomas built up his mosaic of interpretation by meticulous accumulation of examples, but Hunter prefers to wield the brush of the miniaturist, drawing wider inferences from the analysis of detailed case studies. Some chapters are, indeed, versions of previously published articles and essays, but these have been reworked for the purposes of the volume. The Reformation did not put an end to prophecy and the association of miracle working to religious supremacy. The period following Elizabeth and during the Civil War reflected growing unease with social inequities. Women, normally excluded from political debate and discussion, used prophecy and dream interpretation to express political dissatisfaction. A virtual army of pseudo-messiahs appeared, claiming all sorts of personal relationships with God. Mostly they were the targets of humor unless their messages conveyed secular political implications. Punishment for heresy (the last burning for heresy occurred in 1642) could be a useful tool to eliminate political opposition. Common prayer served as a useful mechanism to bring people together for the purpose of harnessing group perceptions and action against a common social ill or malady. It became an act of solidarity. On the other hand, the general arc of Thomas’s account—from magic to religion, then from religion to science—tends to result in a secularizing narrative that students of history and religion have justifiably challenged. When, for instance, Thomas posits that “The Reformation took a good deal of magic out of religion,” he sets the stage for a larger historical interpretation that errantly pits the forces of science and religion as necessarily conflictin g against one another. Only recently have scholars begun to grapple seriously with the implications of such an interpretation, arguing that the Reformation and later the Enlightenment did not “disenchant” the West (deprive it of spirituality or magic) as much as the social theorist Max Weber and his disciples supposed they did.What is the difference between religion and magic, anyway? It's not easy, even for believers, to give a satisfying answer. Theologians liked to say that prayers and religious ceremonies, unlike spells, were ‘propitiatory, not constraining’ – one asked god for help, one did not compel him to act in a certain way. But this was a distinction made by the educated thinkers at the top: for ordinary people (much of the clergy not excluded) it just didn't exist. Francis Hutchinson, An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718), pp. 150–51; James VI, Daemonologie (1597), p. 42.

Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971; New York, Scribner 1971; Harmondsworth; London: Penguin, 1973; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978; London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997) The notion that miracles existed only in the past - in Biblical times - nevertheless continued to be used only selectively. Some divine interventions were therefore regarded as genuine and others as more suspect. The belief that human actions in the form of rituals could change a person's destiny in matters large or small, did, of course, chime in well with post-Lutheran Protestantism. Anglican orthodoxy therefore came to reduce the role of divine intervention. Perhaps surprisingly, the smaller sects, particularly in the Interregnum, remained keener on it. Witch’ (like ‘chav’ today) is a term flung at the very poor by the slightly less poor; what we are looking at in many witchcraft trials (this book suggests) is a society trying to resolve its ‘conflict between resentment and a sense of obligation’.Art UK https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/historians-of-past-and-present-standing-eric-john-ernest-hobsbawm-rodney-howard-hilton-lawrence-stone-sir-keith-vivian-thomas-seated-john-edward-christopher-hill-sir-john-huxtable-elliott-joan-thirsk-155620 What happens when a village witch meets a skeptical judge? What gives way when credulous Catholicism meets the demystifying tendencies of radical Protestantism? For centuries, strategies for self-help run alongside the hopes reposed in magic, and rationality and superstition mingle, the same head often accommodating both. Evidence may be partial, contradictory, or baffling, but the author’s capacious technique scoops it all in. Keith Thomas has given us a book of questions, rather than answers. It is an incitement to further investigation rather than an attempt to categorize, define, or delimit the world we have lost. The event will be live streamed from All Souls College, Oxford. Due to a limit on numbers only a small audience will be invited to attend the conference in person. The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England: The Creighton Trust Lecture 1983, Delivered before the University of London on Monday 21 November 1983 (London: University of London, 1983)

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. It is hard to disagree with these observations—the latter also has a rather marvellous sense of irony—but an evident tension exists between Boyle’s attempt ‘to prove the reality ... of the supernatural’ and his ‘rather heroic open-mindedness’ about causation. This was a fascinating read. It is extremely well cited, and very scholarly, so if you dislike that style, you will not like the book. It is not an "exciting" read, but is full of interesting thoughts and ideas. It is also very careful in its reasoning. 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.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: cunning men" to use white magic for healing, when doctor's applied approved medical cures that were seemingly no more likely to cure and often did more harm than good, or recovery of lost or stolen property when effective police forces were non-existent for the poor. 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. Changing Conceptions of National Biography: The Oxford DNB in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) ISBN 0-19-924723-4; ISBN 978-0-19-924723-3 [9]