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

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For better or worse, Thomas’s book promised to mark a generational shift and became totemic for a new form of history.

These notes — handwritten excerpts on paper fragments ‘of all shapes and sizes’ that Thomas organized in old envelopes — have become almost as famous as their author. RDM connects the generations, perhaps because it connects so many readers to their own beginnings as historians.Half a century after its first publication, Thomas’s masterpiece remains an inspiration — and a foil — for countless students of social, cultural and religious history. Ethnography appealed to Thomas for its insistence on cultural and historical specificity, which moved away from earlier anthropological attempts to construct universal laws about human society. If England was the container, then this multiplicity of views and voices was a volatile liquid that proved difficult to stabilize. As we have seen, Thomas’s articles of the 1960s publicly signalled his interest in the theoretical tools of the social sciences, particularly anthropology. Although British historians elsewhere were developing a ‘new’ social history with help from Marxism, the social sciences and the French Annales school, Oxford dons, Eley continues, ‘willfully closed their eyes to the changes occurring outside’.

Thomas’s interest in ‘popular religion’ at a time when most historians of religion were preoccupied with the theology of elites was cutting edge. Certainly, Thomas still describes his life’s work as an exercise in historical ethnography and has frequently acknowledged his debts to anthropological studies of witchcraft. On the other hand, we should consider how changing ‘popular’ practices contributed to elite attitudes. The Warburg’s Francis Yates, whose important Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) was making waves, spoke at a seminar run by Trevor-Roper and Thomas.

Writing for the Observer, John Kenyon listed it as one of the books of the year, but morosely concluded that ‘there were no really outstanding books in 1971’. In this regard, Thomas’s handling of religion and magic is indebted not just to Weber, but also to his mentor Hill. Josephson-Storm in The Myth of Disenchantment (2017), to tracing the rise and fall of this dying paradigm itself.

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. 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.Although intellectual historians in particular were once enthralled by a grand narrative that presented modernity as disenchanted and European science as the driver of progress, a different story is in development. 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.

In making these claims, Thomas drew largely on the writings of clerics, who complained about the laity in exactly these terms. This also came with broader ambitions around what social history could address: not simply labour history or the history of class, but perhaps every part of human life.Renowned for its rich accumulation of evidence as well as its pioneering engagement with social anthropology, Religion and the Decline of Magic (hereafter RDM) sought to reveal the logic underlying a diverse but ‘interrelated’ set of beliefs: witchcraft, but also magical healing, astrology, prophecy, ghosts, fairies and omens. With a section devoted to the ‘function’ of witch beliefs and a promise to examine such beliefs ‘in the light of anthropological studies of witchcraft elsewhere’, its debt to the functionalist school of social anthropology may indeed seem as ‘obvious’ as the author hoped. He criticized ‘old’ empirical history for its distrust of theory and assumption that historical writing required ‘no recondite conceptual tools’, just ‘common sense and good judgment’. For those of us who work on earlier periods, it’s useful to think about what it might look like for us to adopt instead metaphors of transformation, fragmentation, displacement, and marginalisation.