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

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urn:lcp:religiondeclineo0000thom:epub:35483696-8499-4fe0-8947-fcbc7040e215 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier religiondeclineo0000thom Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t5w76t75d Invoice 1652 Isbn 0684106027 The difference between churchmen and magicians lay less in the effects they claimed to achieve than in their social position, and in the authority on which their respective claims rested. The decline of magic thus emerges from an oral culture of sarcasm and wit that flourished in the coffee houses. At first, this was seen as a threat to orthodoxy, in part because it was taken up by free-thinking Deists, but later the position was co-opted by religious, medical, and scientific establishment figures who worked hard to elide its heterodox origins and implications. Hunter is careful to stress the ‘pluralism that has come to be seen as characteristic of Enlightenment thought’, perhaps because in his mind the pendulum has swung too far towards the study of occultism (p. 142). Chapter Six, the second case study, partly fills in this pluralist picture further and provides some reasons behind the orthodox shift in attitude.

In his discussion of medieval and immediately post-medieval religion, I found his use of the term “magic” confusing. In this period, much reliance was placed upon prayers, relics, etc., to gain access to the assistance of God and the saints to stave off misfortunes of different kinds. Many Protestants came to dismiss these aids – along with more mainstream activities, among them the mass – as “magical” and Thomas broadly accepts their usage. I see no reason, however, to follow their lead. The distinction seems to rest upon the idea that such objects and practices tried to coerce supernatural entities to intervene on one’s behalf, whereas a properly religious practices merely asked for help. This is, I fear, a fairly tenuous distinction. Moreover, if approaches to God and other supernatural beings to solve one’s problems cannot be described as “religion”, then nothing can. More properly, one should say that, in the early period, God – and also the saints and even the fairies – were supposed to intervene frequently in the trivia of daily life, often in response to human supplications. Later, God, the saints and the fairies had withdrawn and were held to intervene only occasionally, if at all. 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? In sum, Hunter has taken us on a fascinating journey, providing us with some astute case studies and pointed observations along the way, but it is almost as if he refused to look down to study the stones his path was made out of. 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. So, as well as reviewing recently published books, History Today intends to include an occasional series on books of major historical importance, to re-examine their reputation and consider the impact they have made in the years since their first appearance.

Indeed the debate over magic was often a class issue. This is especially true of witchcraft (as Reginald Scot put it, the Pope ‘canonizeth the rich for saints and banneth the poor for witches’). When it came to accusations of witchcraft, Thomas makes the intriguing observation that, paradoxically, ‘it tended to be the witch who was morally in the right and the victim who was in the wrong’. Victims of witchcraft, in other words, often lodged formal complaints in situations where they were feeling guilty about something and considered that in some sense they'd had it coming.

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 This year marks the 50 th anniversary of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), a book that set the agenda for decades of scholarship on the history of popular belief. 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. ix). Thomas argued that there were good reasons why otherwise intelligent people in the past took these things seriously. Witchcraft, astrology, ghosts, and fairies were firmly anchored in dominant early modern understandings of the world. Moreover, and here Thomas took his cue from the anthropologists, they also served deeply useful functions in insecure societies that were under constant threat of famine, fire, and disease. Lccn 74141707 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9782 Ocr_module_version 0.0.12 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA18537 Openlibrary_edition Jonathan Barry, University of Exeter , Marianne Hester, University of Bristol , Gareth Roberts, University of ExeterThomas takes to task the great anthropologist, Brontislaw Malinowski. Malinowski had argued that magical practices were used when rational practices promised only limited success. Thus, the Trobriand Islanders, whom he studied, used entirely rational, practical methods in the horticulture and fishing on which their lives depended. But such rational practices did not always produce the hoped-for results. So, argued Malinowski, the Trobrianders employed magic to supplement their rationality and to assuage their fear of failure. Thomas, in contrast, notes that the shift in England away from magical towards rational practices occurred before the arrival of superior technology, and not after. If formerly, God and magic had filled the gaps in rationality, latterly, religion and magic diminished, leaving these same gaps exposed. 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." 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. Keith Thomas’s justly acclaimed book tells of the decline of medieval styles of religion and magic and of the rise of secular thought. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, he shows a shift in emphasis between two different ways of dealing with life’s problems. In the earlier period, there was a heavy emphasis upon the use of magic and what Thomas calls the “magical” aspects of religious ritual. To cure illness, to win a lover, to foretell the future, individuals characteristically employed charms, amulets, rituals and the like. Conversely, it was often assumed that misfortune came from the animosity of sorcerers or witches who used similar means to bring afflictions. The poor in particular might use sorcery or witchcraft when the well-heeled neglected their obligation to give them alms or other assistance. And the relatively well-to-do might attribute their misfortunes to an impoverished crone whom, they might suspect, they had inadvertently failed to assist.