Registrants will be sent the written papers for this roundtable a week in advance of the conference)

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. 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. ix). Thomas argued that there were good reasons why otherwise intelligent people in the past took these things seriously. Witchcraft, astrology, ghosts, and fairies were firmly anchored in dominant early modern understandings of the world. 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. This type of contradiction is typical of the book as a whole. Thomas weaves a rich tapestry and constructs many convincing and reasonable arguments. The weakness of the book is his failure to reconcile these into a totality. This difficulty may be explained by his inability to distinguish precisely in what way he sees magic and religion as distinct. After all, the term religion as described by Thomas does not inherently exclude magical belief systems. Thomas never really defines his usage of the term, but appears at times to use it simply as a synonym for "the Church" and at others even more loosely as a "belief system" in which case it seems hard to exclude magic from the category. I am a lumper, not a splitter. I admire those who write tightly focused micro-studies of episodes or individuals, and am impressed by the kind of quantitative history, usually on demographic or economic topics, which aspires to the purity of physics or mathematics. But I am content to be numbered among the many historians whose books remain literary constructions, shaped by their author’s moral values and intellectual assumptions. 2 How, then, do we get, in the space of only a few decades, from the open-mindedness (or credulity) of Boyle to an almost universal rejection of magical phenomena in elite circles? It is, Hunter suggests, partly a matter of a more deterministic Newtonian framework of science displacing an open-ended Baconian one, though there is a sense in which this was being invoked to justify attitudes already changing for other, more ineffably cultural, reasons. Hunter observes the increasing perception on the part of orthodox Christians that scepticism about the supernatural did not necessarily threaten religion itself. But some mystery remains. If many of the arguments against magic were not new, what made them suddenly compelling, producing what some other scholars have called ‘the tipping point’ in cultural attitudes to the occult? The political divisions in and after the Civil Wars have sometimes been invoked in this context, but Hunter is sharply critical – arguably too critical – of the view that witchcraft beliefs became discredited through entwinement with party politics. This fascinating book offers a stimulating, indeed scintillating, analysis of sceptical opinion in the age of the English Enlightenment. But further work undoubtedly remains to be done on the underlying causes of this paradigm shift in how our ancestors understood the world. Witch’ (like ‘chav’ today) is a term flung at the very poor by the slightly less poor; what we are looking at in many witchcraft trials (this book suggests) is a society trying to resolve its ‘conflict between resentment and a sense of obligation’.

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Changing Conceptions of National Biography: The Oxford DNB in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Few historical enterprises have been as intensively historiographical and reflexive in character as the study of witchcraft in early modern Europe. Doubts about the very existence, let alone the character, of the object of study, together with the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, have ensured that the explosion of studies in this field since the 1960s has been accompanied by a regular rethinking of its intellectual parameters and conceptual tools. One of the most important moments in this process was the publication in 1971 of Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas. The essays in this book, arising from a conference held in 1991, examine the developments in witchcraft scholarship in the last two decades or so in the light of Thomas' contribution. In part a review of his influence, it also offers both prescriptions and examples for alternative approaches. This introduction begins this process by re-examining the arguments of Religion and the Decline of Magic in the light of subsequent studies (particularly, but not exclusively, in the Englishspeaking world), as a way of exploring the changing nature of witchcraft research. Distinguished supporters of Humanism Richard Norman and Colin Blakemore support H4BW". Humanists UK . Retrieved 25 June 2020. By the later period, however, the use and belief in such ritual means had much diminished in favour of rational, mechanical, and more strictly practical means, informed – at least in principle - by careful observation, experimentation and by “trial and error”. Belief in the danger of witchcraft and sorcery had similarly diminished. This shift was never total, however, but a matter of emphasis. In the sixteenth and earlier centuries, plenty of rationality had co-existed with magic and religious ritual. Conversely, ritual practices have persisted, despite the pre-eminence of science and rational technology.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. 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. 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"].

Portraits of Sir Keith Thomas hang at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and the British Academy and National Portrait Gallery, London. [7] [8] Publications [ edit ] 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.Of course, speaking of the transformation or marginalisation of magic still leaves us with a real problem to solve. To take an example from my own research, how do we account for the fact that astrology, once a standard subject in the arts courses of major European universities,no longer appeared on official curricula in the eighteenth century? What made many of the educated elite change their minds about astrology or magic? This leads me to my second point. 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. 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. We could also learn much from biographies that pay attention to collective experience, to emotion, and to the body (e.g., Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther (2016)) in addition to the burgeoning field of the history of emotions more generally (after all, the history of emotions is not the antithesis of intellectual history). Our theories of magic’s transformations are all the richer when populated with the experiences of real people, with all their messy humanness. a b c d "THOMAS, Sir Keith (Vivian)". Who's Who 2016. Oxford University Press. November 2015 . Retrieved 21 October 2016.