RELIGION AND THE DECLINE OF MAGIC

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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. 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 He starts by setting the context of that environment--disease was common, crops and financial survival uncertain, societal safeguards for the poor few, and geographic and class boundaries close and seldom crossed, natural disasters like fire and flood seemingly unpreventable, unpredictable, and capricious. The 16h and 17th centuries of his scope encompassed the bubonic plague, the great London fire (and many disastrous fires on smaller scales in other cities), short and often brutal lifespans fraught with pain and danger from childbirth. The Catholic church before the Reformation offered incantations in the form of prayer, talismans in the form of holy relics of the saints, and magic in the form of transubstantiation during Communion and exorcism at infant baptisms (to remove the demon of original sin from the unbaptized newborn). From there, despite legal restrictions and church sanctions, it was a small step in the mind and life of the average layman to the use of urn:lcp:religiondeclineo0000thom:epub:35483696-8499-4fe0-8947-fcbc7040e215 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier religiondeclineo0000thom Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t5w76t75d Invoice 1652 Isbn 0684106027 How, then, do we get, in the space of only a few decades, from the open-mindedness (or credulity) of Boyle to an almost universal rejection of magical phenomena in elite circles? It is, Hunter suggests, partly a matter of a more deterministic Newtonian framework of science displacing an open-ended Baconian one, though there is a sense in which this was being invoked to justify attitudes already changing for other, more ineffably cultural, reasons. Hunter observes the increasing perception on the part of orthodox Christians that scepticism about the supernatural did not necessarily threaten religion itself. But some mystery remains. If many of the arguments against magic were not new, what made them suddenly compelling, producing what some other scholars have called ‘the tipping point’ in cultural attitudes to the occult? The political divisions in and after the Civil Wars have sometimes been invoked in this context, but Hunter is sharply critical – arguably too critical – of the view that witchcraft beliefs became discredited through entwinement with party politics. This fascinating book offers a stimulating, indeed scintillating, analysis of sceptical opinion in the age of the English Enlightenment. But further work undoubtedly remains to be done on the underlying causes of this paradigm shift in how our ancestors understood the world.

ancient prophecies to predict political outcomes, when the ancient was valued more than the current events which were only beginning to be referred to as "news", and the idea of progress was new. 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

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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]

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.” 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.An interesting popular historical treatise. I’m not rating it however as I only dipped in and out of the book upon finding it wasn’t quite what I was after. My fault, I emphasise, not the authors. In his section on magic, Thomas charts popular healing practices, especially as they related to psychosomatic conditions, and details the place of those who engaged in them (known as “cunning folk”) in English society—generally, that the laity both feared and respected them. He finds that religion provided a “rival system of ecclesiastical magic” to take the place of folk magic. But despite religion’s ascendancy as a means of protection from life’s hazards,folk magic persisted to some degree. In contrast, astrology apparently “ceased, in all but the most unsophisticated circles, to be regarded as either a science or a crime.” Whereas magic could sustain competition from Christianity, astrology could not. in eschewing the not beleeving of [confessions] altogether on the one part, least that drawe vs to the errour that there is no Witches: and on the other parte in beleeving of it, make vs to eschew the falling into innumerable absurdities, both monstruouslie against all Theologie diuine, and Philosophie humaine.’ (9) Changing Conceptions of National Biography: The Oxford DNB in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) astrologers to forecast the weather and planting and harvesting times to ensure successful crops, when astrology was the only system claiming scientific rigor that offered seemingly rational forecasts.

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) Francis Hutchinson, An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718), pp. 150–51; James VI, Daemonologie (1597), p. 42. 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. Distinguished supporters of Humanism Richard Norman and Colin Blakemore support H4BW". Humanists UK . Retrieved 25 June 2020. In the eighteenth century, for example, physicians finally ceased to regard epilepsy as supernatural, although they had not yet learned to understand it in any other way. But they now grasped that the problem was a technical one, open to human investigation, whereas a hundred years earlier, as a contemporary remarked, people were 'apt to make everything a supernatural work which they do not understand'. The change was less a matter of positive technical progress than of an expectation of greater progress in the future. Men became more prepared to combine impotence in the face of current misfortune with the faith that a technical solution would one day be found, much in the spirit in which we regard cancer today. (p 790)

In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England (London: Yale University Press, 2018)