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.īut Thomas was also interested in how and why this situation changed. Witchcraft, astrology, ghosts, and fairies were firmly anchored in dominant early modern understandings of the world. Thomas argued that there were good reasons why otherwise intelligent people in the past took these things seriously. 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. It was this, Thomas argues, that explains the survival of what we now think of as 'magic' at a time such beliefs might have been expected to decline – at least until science arose to offer alternative paradigms.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. That left farmers looking for other ways of ensuring a good harvest.

It was this that allowed Thomas to reach his famous conclusion that the advent of Protestantism – which drove out much of the 'superstition' that characterised the Catholicism of the period – created a vacuum filled by other forms of belief for example, Catholic priests had once blessed their crops, but Protestants refused to do so. Thomas asked productive questions, not least challenging the prevailing assumption that folk belief was unworthy of serious scholarly attention, and his work usefully reframed the existing debate in much broader terms, allowing for more extensive exploration of correlations, not only between different sorts of popular belief, but also between popular belief and state religion. At root, his book can be seen as a superb exercise in problem-solving: one that actually established 'magic' as a historical problem worthy of investigation.

Keith Thomas's classic study of all forms of popular belief has been influential for so long now that it is difficult to remember how revolutionary it seemed when it first appeared.īy publishing Religion and the Decline of Magic, Thomas became the first serious scholar to attempt to synthesize the full range of popular thought about the occult and the supernatural, studying its influence across Europe over several centuries.

The decline of magic