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. Laura Sangha, ‘The Social, Personal, and Spiritual Dynamics of Ghost Stories in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal 63/2 (2020): 339–59. a degree of intellectual arrogance about the infallibility of this [new] paradigm which contrasted with the rather humble sense of the provisional nature of knowledge that had characterised Boyle .... For better or worse, the new scientific world view challenged both the inclusiveness of the Boylian style of science and the rather heroic open-mindedness that Boyle displayed about the causation of phenomena.’ (p. 162) Thomas’s method is similar to that in Euan Cameron’s more recent Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250-1750 , which interprets religious life in the era partly as a function of the types of harm that “people could expect to suffer.” For Cameron, religion and magic responded to, and offered some control of, the dismal circumstances of late medieval and early modern life. Like Thomas, Cameron sees the woes of life in early modern England as strong elements in, if not entirely shaping, people’s belief in the supernatural.

Jan Machielsen, Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation (2015), pp. 265–66. A similar process (not, however, discussed here) can be seen in the New Light found in Quakerism and in the Scottish and Ulster Presbyterianism of the later seventeenth century, but which persisted into the nineteenth century. Here God revealed himself centrally in the indwelling “Light” of Conscience and Reason found in the human heart. It was a view that gave its name to the “Enlightenment”. Unfortunately for religion, it became possible to see Reason and Conscience as entirely human faculties, and forget they were supposed to be divine ones. 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. Ways of Doing Cultural History", in Rik Sanders (ed.), Balans en perspectief van de Nederlandse cultuurgeschiedenis (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991)This year sees the 50th anniversary of Sir Keith Thomas’s masterpiece, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), one of the most significant British historical monographs of the last century. This short conference will celebrate and reflect on Thomas’s achievement as well as publicise new interdisciplinary work on the history of magic and religion. 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.

In this fascinating and detailed book, Keith Thomas shows how magic, like the medieval Church, offered an explanation for misfortune and a means of redress in times of adversity. The supernatural thus had its own practical utility in daily life. Some forms of magic were challenged by the Protestant Reformation, but only with the increased search for scientific explanation of the universe did the English people begin to abandon their recourse to the supernatural.

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Registrants will be sent the written papers for this roundtable a week in advance of the conference) 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. After an introductory chapter establishing the durability of magic in orthodox thinking, we are treated to a close reading of the content and reception of John Wagstaffe’s Question of Witchcraft Debated (1669) – a moderately sceptical work which, Hunter argues, was disturbing because of its perceived affinities to more extreme views circulating orally in the Restoration period. There is a distinct topicality to Hunter’s reflection that intellectual change does not come about as a result of reasoned argument: ‘People just made up their minds and then grasped at arguments to substantiate their preconceived ideas.’ Confirmation bias is not an invention of the social media age. Sir Keith Thomas (b.1933), President (1986–2000) – Art UK Art UK – Discover Artworks Sir Keith Thomas (b.1933), President (1986–2000)". Art UK.

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. 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. Michael Hunter, The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment (2020), p. 186; Michael Hunter (ed.), The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-century Scotland (2001), p. 173. Francis Hutchinson, An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718), pp. 150–51; James VI, Daemonologie (1597), p. 42. Many wizards and conjurers called on God for their enchantments, and many religious rites and prayers were assumed to work purely mechanically as charms. Priests would routinely ring church bells during a thunderstorm to drive off evil spirits; women were ‘churched’ after childbirth to re-fit them for Christian society. The whole structure of the medieval Church ‘appeared as a vast reservoir of magical power, capable of being deployed for a variety of secular purposes’.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.