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

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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. Thomas Waters’ Cursed Britain (2019) is only the most recent in a long series of books that have undermined the fantasy of a decline in real terms (which is, after all, unquantifiable), and have pushed back the diminishing fortunes of magic amongst the middle classes to the twentieth century.

Thomas argued that there were good reasons why otherwise intelligent people in the past took these things seriously. Wagstaffe’s one innovation was to tie his criticism of inquisitors to witchcraft’s supposedly ‘heathenish’ origins and develop it into a historical narrative of clerical cynicism and malfeasance. The former, of course, invokes Keith Thomas’s half-century-old Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), one of the foundational texts for the study of early modern witchcraft.

Please list any fees and grants from, employment by, consultancy for, shared ownership in or any close relationship with, at any time over the preceding 36 months, any organisation whose interests may be affected by the publication of the response. The popularity of the holistic system of astrology, however, which seemed to do both, provides a counterpoint to this distinction. A couple even contradict one another, leading me to suppose that the author wrote them some years apart. As the preserve of the common people, witchcraft and ‘superstition’ enabled the construction of an alterity against which enlightened male identities could be defined—not just those of orthodox clergymen, but those of coffee house wits, deists, free-thinkers, and scientists as well. The English population was exceedingly liable to pain, sickness, and premature death; many were illiterate; epidemics such as the bubonic plague plowed through English towns, at times cutting the number of London's inhabitants by a sixth; fire was a constant threat; the food supply was precarious; and for most diseases there was no effective medical remedy.

This chapter studies the phenomenon of second sight, the ability of some individuals (especially those living in the Scottish Highlands) to see into the future, from Robert Boyle onwards. The subject warrants only a single, grudging sentence in the conclusion: ‘It may be true that a more rigid polarisation between popular and educated belief than hitherto was coming into place .Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses.