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

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

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

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While Thomas insisted in the preface of RDM that the sum was greater than its parts, he arranged the book ‘so that the reader who wishes to skip some of the sections can easily do so’. 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.

Thomas has pointed to a third-year special subject, ‘Commonwealth and Protectorate’, which he co-taught at Oxford with John P. Thomas saw the medieval church — a tapestry of diverse rituals — as blurring the distinctions between two distinct concepts or categories, religion and magic, offering so many supernatural solutions to earthly problems that on a popular level it was viewed as ‘a vast reservoir of magical power’. While RDM engages with anthropologists when their findings present parallels, there is rarely space for engagement with historians or historiography.The anecdotal foundations of RDM and this practice of collecting take us to Thomas’s famous envelopes and the moment when, ‘tipping out my notes onto the table’ in a friend’s cottage in Herefordshire, the writing of RDM began. Such note-taking and filing practices appear less idiosyncratic when considered in the context of the middle decades of the twentieth century, when the organization and storage of one’s notes was a chief practical preoccupation of scholars.

As Geertz observed in 1975, Thomas often uses ‘his own words for classifying the beliefs and practices that he has unearthed’ but ‘his own assumptions about the workings of human societies and minds remain unexamined’.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. A further, equally unspoken, assumption is that societies have views, attitudes and, indeed, assumptions, and that these can be fenced off and analysed.

Both as organizing principles and as categories of analysis, religion, magic and popular belief are key to RDM as they are to understanding the book’s legacy in the discipline of history. Arguably, the perspective that guides the analysis of RDM is thus less ‘popular beliefs’ and more ‘elite ideas about popular beliefs’. Moreover, historians studying these questions would do well to turn once again, as Thomas did in the 1960s, to social scientists, who have been studying with renewed vigour belief and unbelief, the relationships between in- and out-groups, the formation of elite and other identities, and the processes through which we change our minds. This discovery, which led Thomas to mine the rich veins of Lilly’s casebooks for astrological and, eventually, witchy ore, makes for a compelling beginning for RDM and, by grounding it in the university’s manuscript and rare book collections, further underscores Thomas’s emphasis on the book’s Oxford origins.When we organized ‘50 Years of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic’, a hybrid conference held at All Souls College, Oxford, in September 2021, we hoped to stimulate renewed reflection on the book’s legacy and how it came to have such a lasting hold on the historical imagination. When coupled with tools like bibliometry and the history of reading, we are better able to access the mental worlds of a more diverse range of people.



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