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

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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:

Jonathan Barry, University of Exeter , Marianne Hester, University of Bristol , Gareth Roberts, University of Exeter If anything, after the Reformation, Protestant doctrines denying transubstantiation and downplaying the satanic sources of the power of witchcraft seemed to reduce the explanatory and operational resources available to the average church-going citizen. Science discredited alchemy and astrology without offering more reasonable explanations of natural versus supernatural events. Medicine continued to offer cures which seemed to the laymen little better than old wives' tales and little more effective than the local cunning man or woman still offered.But that is not at all the story being told in this fantastically wide-ranging, compendious study of the beliefs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Instead we are given something much more subtle – an examination of the magical thinking that pervaded all of society, religion included, and of what happened to religion and society when that magical thinking became untenable.

Depiction of the Devil giving magic puppets to witches, from Agnes Sampson trial, 1591. Image via Wikimedia Commons.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. 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. This essay will appear as the introduction to a two-volume illustrated edition of Religion and the Decline of Magic, to be published in June by the Folio Society. ↩