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

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RELIGION AND DECLINE OF MAGIC, his first book, won one of the two Wolfson Literary Awards for History in 1972. Although understated in this particular chapter, the rhetorical nature of the free-thinkers’ disdain, as exemplified by their carefree application of ‘superstition’, is equally clear. Elizabeth Barton, the ‘Holy Maid of Kent’, was already accused of fraud before the Reformation in Britain had properly started. The scepticism of others, notably Robert Hooke and Henry Oldenburg, created ‘a kind of stalemate’ (p. The Society’s records on the subject of magic were ‘extraordinarily taciturn’ because, despite their best efforts, Glanvill and company were never able to persuade it to take an interest (p.

In fact, it is perhaps more revealing of the type of historical argument, located in the realm of ideas, that Hunter is most comfortable with. Wagstaffe’s sarcasm found an audience, whereas Scot’s had not, at least not originally ( The Discoverie was reprinted in 1651, 1654, and 1665).

Religion and the Decline of Magic provides a detailed account of how and why people practiced an eclectic systems of belief in early modern England. Evidence may be partial, contradictory, or baffling, but the author’s capacious technique scoops it all in. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a growing, educated class united around mockery of supernatural belief­­—increasingly represented as the preserve of the credulous masses­­—to cement their developing identity.

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Keith Thomas has performed his life’s work with scissors and ink, staples, index books, old envelopes, cardboard boxes, and a forest of slips of paper: “Some of them get loose and blow around the house, turning up months later under a carpet or a cushion. Thomas appears most convinced by the idea that over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries English people developed a belief in their own capacity to help themselves thus rendering the everyday power of magic redundant. 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. Alex Ryrie’s Unbelievers (2019) takes these insights to the history of atheism, arguing that people believe what they believe not as a result of a chain of reasoning, but as a consequence of emotional responses to lived realities. Central to the mass was the rite of transubstantiation, which changed bread and wine to Christ’s actual body and blood.