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

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This post will outline some recent work in this area, and offer some reflections on how intellectual history might be able to make further contributions despite recent suspicion of the role of ideas in these historical shifts. RDM is also fundamentally a polyphonous work because in many instances it is the people of early modern England who appear to be speaking in all their diversity.

There is a unity to that corpus both in terms of its author’s preoccupations — ‘a retrospective ethnography of early modern England’ — and method. 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. Crucially, writing half a century after the book’s publication, we can read RDM in the context of Thomas’s wider oeuvre. Arguably, the perspective that guides the analysis of RDM is thus less ‘popular beliefs’ and more ‘elite ideas about popular beliefs’. richness and freshness’ — the facets that propelled our analysis — but also to the ultimately literary reasons why the book is so loved: ‘for its generosity, for its humor, for the rewards on every page’.

After fifty years, the book ‘still weaves its spell over successive generations of readers’, to quote the cover of the Penguin edition. While it’s indeed the case that most basic arguments against, say, astrology, were by the 1700s many centuries old, to dismiss the effectiveness of argumentation on this account is to abstract ideas from their context. This is in some ways a rather crude reading of RDM, as it ignores the extent to which it also discussed the intellectual and cultural frameworks of magic. 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.

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. Initially bolstered by a scholarly obsession with Max Weber’s ‘disenchantment’ of the world, interest amongst historians in topics like witchcraft and astrology only continues to grow. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost (1965), both of which cut deep into the wider culture. RDM connects the generations, perhaps because it connects so many readers to their own beginnings as historians. Caught up in post-Reformation confessional and political struggles, magical beliefs and practices came to be allied with particular groups who eventually found themselves on the losing end.In a 1989 interview he stressed the importance of reading outside of history because ‘historians don’t have any ideas of their own’. On the one hand, elite knowledge was increasingly accessible to the middling sort, mediated through sermons as well as cheap print, newspapers and periodicals, and libraries.

On the other hand, RDM’s interpretation of popular belief, with its emphasis on a gulf between popular (practical) and elite (intellectual) religion, belongs to a distinct historiographical moment in the 1970s. Thomas ultimately approaches religion as an outsider (and it is worth noting that he has been a patron of Humanists UK for many decades).

As someone who has predominantly worked in intellectual history and the history of science, this is something I find especially interesting.