General areas of inquiry within “magic” for this book include healing, prophecy, astrology, ghosts, fairies, omens, and witchcraft. He notes, “The conventional distinction between a prayer and a spell seems to have been first hammered out, not by the nineteenth-century anthropologists, with whom it is usually associated, but by sixteenth-century Protestant theologians” (69). Author Keith Thomas weighs issues of elite and popular cultures, as well as Catholic, Protestant, and dissenting religion. The first sections of the book establish the context, with an empirical attitude and a lot of careful observation. The style is that of a sort of old-fashioned documentary history, with copious references to primary and near-primary sources. It is a voluminous history of magic in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, with particular attention to its social and religious context. Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England by Keith Thomas.Īlthough scholarly interest in the topic has only increased in the subsequent decades, Religion and the Decline of Magic has not become obsolete.
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