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

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I am grateful to Jan Machielsen for his alert and careful reading of my book, with the thrust of which he seems largely to concur—despite various critical asides, often reflecting his absorption in the earlier literature of demonology. However, I feel I should say something about the two ‘more important factors’ which, at the end of his review, he claims that I neglect. 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.

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-03-17 06:01:00 Boxid IA40076014 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Col_number COL-658 Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier 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.

It is hard to disagree with these observations—the latter also has a rather marvellous sense of irony—but an evident tension exists between Boyle’s attempt ‘to prove the reality ... of the supernatural’ and his ‘rather heroic open-mindedness’ about causation. Michael Hunter situates the decline of magic between 1650 and 1750, within the areas of research in which he has built his career: the history of the early Royal Society, in particular that ‘Christian Virtuoso’ Robert Boyle, and the widespread fear of atheism in elite circles. Given Hunter’s decades of rumination on these adjacent subjects, this book unsurprisingly has deep roots—the opening chapter first appeared in 1995 and appears here ‘in close to its original form’; other parts were published more recently (p. 25). Still the overarching argument, previewed bullet-point style in the preface, is extremely well-articulated, as punchy as that of the coffee-house wits that partly occupy Hunter in this volume (pp. vi–vii). In fact, the book could be shorter still. One could quite easily omit two of the book’s six chapters (chapters 4 and 6). These case studies provide useful scaffolding, but without them Hunter’s tree would still stand.

In the murky darkness exists an ever-present silent majority. We learn about the monarch, but we rarely get to know their subjects. What was it like to be a Roman or Victorian? Not just how they washed their clothes or what they learned at school, but more importantly, what was their view of the world and their place in it? 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: So if not science, might we turn to other forms of knowledge to explain the ‘decline’ of magic? Perhaps not. It’s one of the arguments of Hunter’s book that “the Enlightenment did not reject magic for good reasons but for bad ones” (p. vii). Hunter muses over a situation in which “people just made up their minds and then grasped at arguments to substantiate their preconceived ideas”. “It is almost as if intellectual change does not really occur through argument at all” (p. 46). Hunter’s reflections seem to dovetail with social science research that’s grappling with post-truth politics. This research has suggested that, despite what we might like to think, people change their minds for the ‘wrong’ reasons all the time. It seems ‘bare facts’ are not enough to persuade the vaccine hesitant , for example. Alex Ryrie’s Unbelievers (2019) takes these insights to the history of atheism, arguing that people believe what they believe not as a result of a chain of reasoning, but as a consequence of emotional responses to lived realities.The difference between churchmen and magicians lay less in the effects they claimed to achieve than in their social position, and in the authority on which their respective claims rested. 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"]. Theologians made a distinction between religion and superstition, but superstition was loosely defined as any practice having magical qualities that were not already designated as religious ritual. The church had the power to define what constituted legitimate and what it denied became heretical. The Protestant Reformation had a significant effect on how the populace regarded miracles and magic. By elevating the individual' faith in God, and denigrating ritual, a new concept of religion was created. The ignorant peasant had had no need for knowledge of the Bible or scripture; the rituals and rites of the church had become the "" of the supernatural and evidence for his/her belief. " was a ritual set of living, not a set of dogmas." The Protestant theologian insisted on a more personal faith, so it became necessary to invent a theology that explained the threat of plague, natural disasters, and the fear of evil spirits. One could no longer call on the " solutions offered by the medieval church." The solution was predestination. Everything that happened was God's will. Evil became a test. 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.