Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a growing, educated class united around mockery of supernatural belief-increasingly represented as the preserve of the credulous masses-to cement their developing identity. Technological and socioeconomic improvements were also rendering some forms of magic less crucial to everyday life. Procedural caution and higher standards for legal evidence, meanwhile, were making witchcraft convictions less likely. 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.

As the new story goes, scepticism about magical beliefs and practices, which had actually long existed in Christian Europe, slowly came to the fore during the early modern period as a result of social, political, and religious transformations. 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. 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.

When Religion and the Decline of Magic appeared, its subject matter was a “neglected area of the past” (p. 'Witches’ Sabbath', Francisco Goya (1798). 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. 797), it’s a testament to his insight and his influence that many of his broad brush strokes can still be seen in today’s scholarship. Although he presented his account as “only approximate” (p. 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.īut Thomas was also interested in how and why this situation changed.

Witchcraft, astrology, ghosts, and fairies were firmly anchored in dominant early modern understandings of the world. Thomas argued that there were good reasons why otherwise intelligent people in the past took these things seriously. Renowned for its rich accumulation of evidence-an approach to history writing beautifully described in Thomas’s account of his own working methods in the LRB -as well as its pioneering fusion of history and anthropology, the book sought to illuminate the logic underlying a set of early modern beliefs that are today “rightly disdained by intelligent persons” (p. This year marks the 50 th anniversary of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), a book that set the agenda for decades of scholarship on the history of popular belief.

Sookie stackhouse book 10