Religion and the Decline of Magic

1126 Pages·2012·7.54 MB·English

by  Keith Thomas

PENGUIN BOOKS
RELIGION AND THE DECLINE OF MAGIC
Keith Thomas is President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford and a former
President of the British Academy. He was previously Professor of Modern
History and Fellow of St John's College. He has written extensively on
the social and intellectual history of the early modern period. He is the
general editor of the Past Masters series (Oxford University Press) and of
Oxford Studies in Social History (Clarendon Press). Religion and the Decline
of Magic, his first book, won one of the two Wolfson Literary Awards for
History in 1972. He is the author of Man and the Natural World: Changing
Attitudes in England 1500–1800, which is also published in Penguin, and
the editor of The Oxford Book of Work (1999). He was knighted in 1988
for services to the study of history.
RELIGION AND THE DECLINE OF MAGIC
STUDIES IN POPULAR BELIEFS IN SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-
CENTURY ENGLAND
KEITH THOMAS
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1971
Published in Penguin University Books 1973
Reissued in Peregrine Books 1978
Reprinted in Penguin Books 1991
16
Copyright © Keith Thomas, 1971
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the
condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,
hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published
and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed
on the subsequent purchaser ISBN: 978-0-14-193240-8
To my parents
CONTENTS
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Table of Abbreviations
PROLOGUE
1 The Environment
RELIGION
2 The Magic of the Medieval Church
3 The Impact of the Reformation
4 Providence
5 Prayer and Prophecy
6 Religion and the People
MAGIC
7 Magical Healing
8 Cunning Men and Popular Magic
9 Magic and Religion
ASTROLOGY
10 Astrology: its Practice and Extent
11 Astrology: its Social and Intellectual Role
12 Astrology and Religion
THE APPEAL TO THE PAST
13 Ancient Prophecies
WITCHCRAFT
14 Witchcraft in England: the Crime and its History
15 Witchcraft and Religion
16 The Making of a Witch
17 Witchcraft and its Social Environment
18 Witchcraft: Decline
ALLIED BELIEFS
19 Ghosts and Fairies
20 Times and Omens
CONCLUSION
21 Some Interconnections
22 The Decline of Magic
Index
FOREWORD
THIS book began as an attempt to make sense of some of the systems of
belief which were current in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England,
but which no longer enjoy much recognition today. Astrology,
witchcraft, magical healing, divination, ancient prophecies, ghosts and
fairies, are now all rightly disdained by intelligent persons. But they
were taken seriously by equally intelligent persons in the past, and it is
the historian's business to explain why this was so. I have tried to show
their importance in the lives of our ancestors and the practical utility
which they often possessed. In this task I have been much helped by the
studies made by modern social anthropologists of similar beliefs held in
Africa and elsewhere.
As my work progressed, I became conscious of the close relationship
which many of these beliefs bore to the religious ideas of the period. In
offering an explanation for misfortune, and a means of redress at times
of adversity, they seemed to be discharging a role very close to that of
the established Church and its rivals. Sometimes they were parasitic
upon Christian teaching; sometimes they were in sharp rivalry to it. I
therefore widened my scope, so as to make room for a fuller
consideration of this aspect of contemporary religion. By juxtaposing it
to the other, less esteemed, systems of belief, I hope to have thrown
more light on both, and to have contributed to our knowledge of the
mental climate of early modern England. I have also tried to explore the
relationship between this climate and the material environment more
generally.
The result, inevitably, is a very long book. Even so, I am well aware of
the compressions and over-simplifications which have resulted from
handling so many different topics over so long a period of time. But I am
anxious to bring out the interrelated nature of these various beliefs and
can only do this by treating them together. The book is arranged so that
the reader who wishes to skip some of the sections can easily do so, but
the whole is meant to be more than the sum of its parts. I also wish to
emphasize the essential unity of the period between the Reformation and
the dawn of the Enlightenment. This is why the book begins with the
collapse of the medieval Church in the early sixteenth century and ends
with the change in the intellectual atmosphere which is so striking in the
years approaching 1700. The sources also indicate a halt at the end of
the seventeeenth century, since the records of both lay and church courts
cease around that time to be so informative on the matters with which I
am concerned.
Few of the topics under consideration are peculiarly English; indeed
most of them form part of the general cultural history of the Western
world. But this survey has been strictly limited to England (with
occasional excursions into Wales) and I have resisted the temptation to
draw parallels with Scotland, Ireland, and the continent of Europe. An
exercise in comparative history, however desirable, is not possible until
the data for each country have been properly assembled. As it is, I have
only skimmed the surface of the English material and have blurred some
important regional distinctions.
I particularly regret not having been able to offer more of those exact
statistical data upon which the precise analysis of historical change must
so often depend. Unfortunately, the sources seldom permit such
computation, although it is to be hoped that the information contained
in the largely unpublished judicial records of the time will one day be
systematically quantified. My visits to these widely scattered archives
have been less frequent and less systematic than I should have liked. In
my attempt to sketch the main outlines of the subject I have only too
often had to fall back upon the historian's traditional method of
presentation by example and counter-example. Although this technique
has some advantages, the computer has made it the intellectual
equivalent of the bow and arrow in a nuclear age. But one cannot use
the computer unless one has suitable material with which to supply it,
and at present there seems to be no genuinely scientific method of
measuring changes in the thinking of past generations. As a result, there
are many points in my argument at which the reader can be given no
statistical evidence on which to accept or reject the impressions I have
formed after my reading in contemporary sources. But I have been
pleased to see that, so far as the subject of witchcraft is concerned, my
impressions have been abundantly confirmed by the statistical findings
of Dr Alan Macfarlane, whose systematic study of witchcraft