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

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What does all this mean for intellectual history? Has the field arrived at an impasse? Is there a future for intellectual history in scholarship on the history of magic and if so what might it look like? As someone grappling with the marginalisation of astrology, I’ve come to think that intellectual history—armed as it is today with new sets of tools and (thankfully) a far broader remit­­—is well-equipped to contribute answers to many of the questions that remain unanswered in the knotty history of magic, religion, and science. In what follows I outline three possible ways forward.

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. 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 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, thenThe legal system in England was, happily, less willing to accept witch-hunts against defenceless old women than were courts on the continent: indeed one judge in 1712 is said to have responded to some of the more outlandish testimony against one ‘witch’ by remarking cheerfully that there was no law against flying, and promptly dismissing the case. A destitute old woman comes to your door to ask for some butter; you turn her away; you happen to break your ankle later on; and your own feelings of guilt connect the dots. Witches were rarely accused of responsibility for plagues or big fires – it was always personal disasters, individual calamities. 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. Magic, prophecy, witchcraft and astrology – the outmoded, discredited, untenable intellectual debris of a former era; so one would think, but during the past half century in particular, there has been a recrudescence of interest in each of these, and as for religion, it hardly needs me to draw the reader’s attention to the revival of its poisonous fanaticism across the globe.

Let me end therefore with two other, more important, factors, implicit in The Decline of Magic but which its author seems intent to keep under wraps. When they surface as part of a quotation, they pointedly elicit no comment. The first is to emphasize (again) the conservative and derivative nature of the arguments put forth by the newfound orthodox sceptics. Hutchinson, as Hunter already concedes, was no Wagstaffe. Nor was he, we might add, a Balthasar Bekker. There was no rejection of the spirit world. Hunter surveys some of the well-trodden arguments advanced by the ‘orthodox’: particularly fraud and ‘physiological or psychological defects’, yet he pays scant attention to the new historicizing wrapper in which they were often delivered (p. 177). By the time Hutchinson came to write, it had been—the 1712 trial of Jane Wenham notwithstanding—‘thirty five years last past’ that a witch had been hanged in England, and the clergyman who entitled his essay An Historical Essay well knew it. (13) Part of this historicizing umbrella was an accommodationist approach to Scripture, mentioned by Hunter: the argument that Christ, when curing demonic possession, ‘could only be expected to speak the language of his own time’ (p. 136). Yet witchcraft was also presented as the product of the ignorance and superstition of past generations (see the quotes on pp. 61, 137–38). At the most pusillanimous end of the spectrum, as I noted elsewhere, 18th-century thinkers could merely wonder why the devil had stopped working his magic. (14) One straightforward way of dealing with witchcraft, then, was to banish it to the past. This chapter studies the phenomenon of second sight, the ability of some individuals (especially those living in the Scottish Highlands) to see into the future, from Robert Boyle onwards. Hunter argues that Boyle turned away from witchcraft and towards ‘new sources of evidence to prove the reality and elucidate the workings of the supernatural realm.’ Following the interminable trench warfare of the Tedworth controversy, second sight ‘must have seemed ideal’ (p. 148). Hunter also links the growth of scepticism in the phenomenon to a change in scientific ‘fashion’, namely the displacement of ‘the Boylian tradition of Baconian science’ with ‘an essentially mathematical mode’ based on a ‘new, Newtonian ethos’ and general laws of nature (pp. 154, 161). Boyle’s biographer does not approve. Hunter notes Jan Machielsen, Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation (2015), pp. 265–66.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. When Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic was first published in 1971, it drew together two disciplines, history and anthropology, which early in the twentieth century had grown apart. But the author has no grand thesis to sell us. The joy of his dry and witty book is in its accumulation of fine detail, and also in its broad humanity. Emerging from most studies of the past, the reader feels a leaden ache, a sense of pity and waste and dread. From this book, the reader emerges exhilarated, provoked, amused, with an insight into the ingenuity and potential of human beings and a sense that the past was not a place of insensate ignorance and darkness, but a place we are privileged to revisit through the craft of such an original, painstaking, and erudite historian. Of course, speaking of the transformation or marginalisation of magic still leaves us with a real problem to solve. To take an example from my own research, how do we account for the fact that astrology, once a standard subject in the arts courses of major European universities,no longer appeared on official curricula in the eighteenth century? What made many of the educated elite change their minds about astrology or magic? This leads me to my second point. Intellectual biography remains a dependable procedure for moving beyond the rational argumentation of printed books (which is indeed often ex post facto justification) and instead tracing the formation and development of beliefs and doubts in individuals. When coupled with tools like bibliometry and the history of reading, we are better able to access the mental worlds of a more diverse range of people. We could also learn much from biographies that pay attention to collective experience, to emotion, and to the body (e.g., Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther (2016)) in addition to the burgeoning field of the history of emotions more generally (after all, the history of emotions is not the antithesis of intellectual history). Our theories of magic’s transformations are all the richer when populated with the experiences of real people, with all their messy humanness. Thomas 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. cunning men" to use white magic for healing, when doctor's applied approved medical cures that were seemingly no more likely to cure and often did more harm than good, or recovery of lost or stolen property when effective police forces were non-existent for the poor.

Witch’ (like ‘chav’ today) is a term flung at the very poor by the slightly less poor; what we are looking at in many witchcraft trials (this book suggests) is a society trying to resolve its ‘conflict between resentment and a sense of obligation’. Whereas beliefs relating to these matters during the period in question – a period of great social, political and intellectual upheaval – were far from uniform, towards its end in particular, the beliefs of the educated elite had diverged greatly from those still adhered to by the uneducated mass of the people. By 1700, Aristotelian scholasticism, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism and the attendant paraphernalia of beliefs in astrology, occult forces and mystical correspondences had largely been consigned to the intellectual fringes, where they have since remained, supplanted by the rationalistic natural philosophy. Advances in science, technology and – perhaps surprisingly, insurance – served as the solvents in the dissolution of the old beliefs, which still lingered on in the remoter rural communities into the nineteenth century. Thomas chronicles in easy to read prose the conflict and change among beliefs in magic and religion during the Tudor and Stuart periods in England. Keith Thomas’s magisterial volume detailing the transformation in educated and popular beliefs relating to matters natural and supernatural in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, is a work that anyone interested in this period should read. No other single book issued since this was published in 1971 can be said to have dealt with this theme more comprehensively, and although the fruit of extensive scholarly labours, copiously referenced and footnoted, it makes for an engaging read. Although my first reading of this was as an undergraduate many years ago, I have lately re-read it for the first time since, and enjoyed it even more than the first time around.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 closing, it is salutary to recall that intellectual history is not just the history of persuasion. It’s been some time since our field was interested only in the propositional content of the books of a handful of elite European men, even if our progress here has admittedly been rather slow. The interests, and opportunities, of intellectual history are today far broader.

It's true that the educated metropolitan classes could sometimes be sceptical about magic – but this was a tiny proportion of society. The vast majority of people still lived rural lives in small villages, and religion to them was just another brand of the supernatural. There is much to learn and because the book is restricted in scope to England, the author is careful to only make claims about this area (in general), and looks at mulitple possible theories. What you learn is how people thought about magic, such as astrology, witchcraft, and hell/demons/fairies. I never realized how disbelief in most magical ideas had its origins in the Reformation. How there were cunning men/women (essentially magic healers or finders of thieves, etc.). How witchcraft was viewed (it peaked, and then the people in the criminal justice system started to require higher standards of evidence, making prosecutions pretty much impossible). In England, witches were hanged not burned, and the author even comes up with a hypothesis why old women were the most likely to be branded witches [they were the most vulnerable, and people usually accused people of lower "class" as being witches when they felt that they had not been charitable enough and so had been justifiable cursed by the "witch"].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: It is important not to exaggerate the grimness of the early modern age. Our ancestors in Tudor and Stuart England may well have been healthier, happier, and saner than those who toiled in the factories of the industrial revolution. Even though two centuries were marked by plague, civil war, and religious turmoil, the English were spared some of the depredations of the long wars and cyclical famines that afflicted continental Europe. Even so, life expectancy was low and the levels of routine pain and misery were high. It was a world of thatch and bedstraw, where an unattended candle could burn down a town. One third of infants died before the age of five, even among the aristocracy. The harvest failed about one year in six, and epidemics broke out in the wake of hunger. The Decline of Magic does not begin, as one might expect, with the Royal Society but with John Wagstaffe’s The Question of Witchcraft Debated (1669, 2 nd enlarged ed. 1671). The opening lines of Wagstaffe’s preface—‘The zealous affirmers of Witchcraft think it no slander to charge all those who deny it with Atheism’—already make the major theme of late 17th-century demonology crystal clear: spirits were a defence against irreligion. (1) I agree with Hunter that The Question of Witchcraft Debated is remarkable, though like him I find it difficult to articulate why. With perhaps one exception, Wagstaffe offers nothing that cannot already be found in Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) a century earlier. Hunter is right to emphasize the work’s ‘punchy, cynical tone’, its ‘boldness and iconoclasm’, though Scot’s sarcasm—‘He that can be perswaded that these things are true ... may soon be brought to believe that the Moon is made of green Cheese’—was already legendary (pp. 47, 35). (2) Certainly Wagstaffe’s work was not notable, pace Hunter, for his humanist learning. The claim that ‘the influence of antiquity can be argued to have had a crucial “modernising” effect’ is by far the least convincing part of Hunter’s argument (p. 51). Wagstaffe lifted his classical references straight out of Martin Delrio’s Disquisitiones magicae (1599–1600), the most-read demonology of the early modern period. (3) Evidence that this Jesuit had adduced to prove the universality of witchcraft was repurposed to demonstrate its ‘heathenish’ origins. Other arguments put forth by Wagstaffe, for instance, that the Bible, when speaking of witchcraft, had been mistranslated, were also decidedly old hat. The book is about magic in the 1500's and 1600's, exactly as the title suggests. I do not remember whey I bought this book (maybe I mistook it for another), but it turned out to be an interesting read. It covers the intellectual and popular milieu of England during two centuries and the enormous changes in people's beliefs during this period. This includes the Reformation (and making of the Anglican Church), the English Civil War, the Restoration, and the beginnings of modern science. The reason is the author is working with raw data. Testimony from legal proceedings, medical notes by physicians, sermons of priests. Religion and the Decline of Magic attempts to connect a vast collection of tiny data points to build a picture of systemic belief in flux. It’s dense and messy, because humans are messy.