Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (Penguin History)

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Indeed, there can be no doubt that Thomas saw himself as dragging Oxford into the twentieth century. Arguably RDM is as much about how early modern people experienced religion as it is about how they experienced magic. 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. Thomas admitted that the contents of his envelopes (which run into the thousands) occasionally ‘get loose and blow around the house’ and, in worst-case scenarios, have been known to disappear altogether, probably ending up in the waste-paper bin he keeps by his desk. In response to critiques that RDM relied on out-of-date anthropology (by 1971 many anthropologists had abandoned functionalism), Thomas maintained that he did most of his reading in anthropology in the early 1960s, when the books on the shelves were functionalist works from the 1940s and 50s.

William Lecky made a similar point a century earlier in History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism (1865): “disbelief always precedes, when it does not prevent, examination” (vol. With a handful of exceptions (including Hill, Hobsbawm, Stone and Laslett), British historians, Thomas maintained, were ‘decades behind their colleagues in other countries’.To Pearl, he confessed that he had been rash to tackle the subject ‘but it will annoy Keith Thomas, which (I suppose) is something’. As intellectual and cultural historians ourselves, however, we would suggest that intellectual history still has further contributions to make to many of the questions that remain unanswered in the knotty history of magic, religion and science — even if, as Thomas’s book taught us, historians should not forget the fact that beliefs and ideas gain much of their power and prestige from their social relevance.

As Alexandra Walsham pointed out at our 2021 conference, there is an ambivalence in RDM, as if Thomas — like the early modern clerics whose writings he (like Weber) relied on — was ‘torn between fascination and disapproval, curiosity and censure’. When we organized ‘50 Years of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic’, a hybrid conference held at All Souls College, Oxford, in September 2021, we hoped to stimulate renewed reflection on the book’s legacy and how it came to have such a lasting hold on the historical imagination. While their evidentiary status is never articulated, the implicit assumption is that the part may stand for the whole. Not only are ideas and mentalités not mutually exclusive, but scholarship is increasingly pointing to mutual transactions of knowledge between learned elites and ordinary men and women in the early modern period.

Thomas saw the medieval church — a tapestry of diverse rituals — as blurring the distinctions between two distinct concepts or categories, religion and magic, offering so many supernatural solutions to earthly problems that on a popular level it was viewed as ‘a vast reservoir of magical power’. 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. The book’s origins were, in his view, ‘largely a matter of chance’, a fortuitous by-product of his undergraduate teaching. In RDM, Thomas regretted being unable to provide ‘exact statistical data upon which the precise analysis of historical change must so often depend’, coming to the conclusion that there was ‘no genuinely scientific method of measuring changes in the thinking of past generations’.

We argue that the sense of enduring freshness surrounding RDM can also be attributed to three overlapping characteristics of the book, namely its approach to theory, method and historiography, which are as much a product of the contexts sketched above as of Thomas’s own distinctive approach to history writing. If RDM contains the voices of early modern England, then the fences were of Thomas’s own construction, as they are in his other works. He criticized ‘old’ empirical history for its distrust of theory and assumption that historical writing required ‘no recondite conceptual tools’, just ‘common sense and good judgment’. Apparently unlike the anthropologists whom Thomas so admired, the task of the historian was ‘infinitely harder’, for anthropologists studied ‘small homogenous communit[ies] in which all inhabitants share the same beliefs’ while historians were faced with ‘dynamic and infinitely various societ[ies]’. In his later writings Thomas carefully carved out his native Wales from consideration as ‘culturally distinct’ from England.

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’. As Geertz pointed out, the book assumed that, ‘as a means for overcoming specific practical difficulties, [magic was] necessarily ineffective’ — hence Thomas’s suggestion that when technological tools for solving mundane problems were eventually developed, magic declined.

We therefore start by placing a seemingly timeless book in a time-specific set of circumstances: the Oxford History Faculty of the mid twentieth century, when the nature of historical study itself was in flux. From the outset Thomas acknowledged his ‘substantial indebtedness to the long flow of anthropological studies of witchcraft’.The opposition between religion and magic in RDM is underpinned therefore by more than envelopes and their discrete contents.