religion and the decline of magic review

(2) Certainly Wagstaffe’s work was not notable, pace Hunter, for his humanist learning. may soon be brought to believe that the Moon is made of green Cheese’-was already legendary (pp. Hunter is right to emphasize the work’s ‘punchy, cynical tone’, its ‘boldness and iconoclasm’, though Scot’s sarcasm-‘He that can be perswaded that these things are true. With perhaps one exception, Wagstaffe offers nothing that cannot already be found in Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) a century earlier. (1) I agree with Hunter that The Question of Witchcraft Debated is remarkable, though like him I find it difficult to articulate why. The opening lines of Wagstaffe’s preface-‘The zealous affirmers of Witchcraft think it no slander to charge all those who deny it with Atheism’-already make the major theme of late 17th-century demonology crystal clear: spirits were a defence against irreligion. The Decline of Magic does not begin, as one might expect, with the Royal Society but with John Wagstaffe’s The Question of Witchcraft Debated (1669, 2 nd enlarged ed. These case studies provide useful scaffolding, but without them Hunter’s tree would still stand. One could quite easily omit two of the book’s six chapters (chapters 4 and 6). In fact, the book could be shorter still. Still the overarching argument, previewed bullet-point style in the preface, is extremely well-articulated, as punchy as that of the coffee-house wits that partly occupy Hunter in this volume (pp. Given Hunter’s decades of rumination on these adjacent subjects, this book unsurprisingly has deep roots-the opening chapter first appeared in 1995 and appears here ‘in close to its original form’ other parts were published more recently (p. Michael Hunter situates the decline of magic between 16, within the areas of research in which he has built his career: the history of the early Royal Society, in particular that ‘Christian Virtuoso’ Robert Boyle, and the widespread fear of atheism in elite circles.

Can the present work, which comes in at exactly 180 pages if we exclude the appendices and notes, live up to the praise and aspirations? This book undoubtedly makes an important contribution and fills in parts of the puzzle, but the last word on the decline of belief in witchcraft and magic remains to be written.

That work was over 700 pages in length, though Thomas’s prose is so mesmerizing few readers will notice either its length or the passage of time. 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. Both the title- The Decline of Magic-and the subtitle- Britain in the Enlightenment-promise sweeping panoramas. The work itself is not shy of ambition either. It ‘ompletely overhauls our view’, observes Ronald Hutton somewhat further down. The book ‘eserves to become another classic’, opines Peter Burke at the top of the front cover.

Religion and the decline of magic review