Product Description

Witchcraft, astrology, divination and every kind of popular magic flourished in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the belief that a blessed amulet could prevent the assaults of the Devil to the use of the same charms to recover stolen goods. At the same time the Protestant Reformation attempted to take the magic out of religion, and scientists were developing new explanations of the universe. Keith Thomas's classic analysis of beliefs held on every level of English society begins with the collapse of the medieval Church and ends with the changing intellectual atmosphere around 1700, when science and rationalism began to challenge the older systems of belief.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29396 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 880 pages

About the Author
Keith Thomas is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was formerly President of Corpus Christi College and, before that, Professor of Modern History and Fellow of St John's College. RELIGION AND DECLINE OF MAGIC, his first book, won one of the two Wolfson Literary Awards for History in 1972. He was knighted in 1988 for services to the study of history.

Customer Reviews

A Controversial Masterpiece.
This is unquestionably one of the great works of history written in Englsh in the 20th century. It is hard, over thirty years later, to conceive of just how radical and imaginative this book appeared when it was first published. It not only transformed our understanding of English religious history, but also helped to permanently change our approach to the past. I would encourage prospective buyers not to pay too much attention to the negative comments in some of other reviews: the fact that this book still inspires controversy and debate a whole generation after its first printing is testimony to its greatness.

More then History.
Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic was the first of my books for summer reading, and I doubt that any novel that I choose will be half as entertaining or any text as informative. By the conclusion I felt that I was completing an odessey throughout the early modern era with a sympathy and understanding of a world far different then ours in some respects, yet, as Thomas succinctly points out in the conclusion, profoundly similar. No other history book has granted me a deeper sense of understanding about human drives for stability and for explaination in all things. This is a book that grants insight and understanding far beyond its proclaimed subject matter, with positive and sweeping consequences for the objective thinker

A Book that is good on what it covers
This book is a classic. It should be read by all serious students of the esoteric and all with a genuine interest in the spiritual history of Western Europe.

The book provides a great deal of detail on the superstitions and quack medicine of the 16th and 17th centuries in Britain. It gives wonderful detail, and some lovely anecdotes, concerning the horrors of 16th and 17th century medicine, and the apothecaries that offered a cheaper, and no less effective service to the poor.

After a general overview of the historical trend there is an in depth study of Astrology, as practised at the time.

Where the book fails, and it fails badly, is that it gives the impression that magic was for the ignorant only. Very little space, about two pages, are devoted to the work of Frances Yates, work I do not think Thomas was keen to understand, but keen to dismiss. The overall result is that I feel Thomas wishes to dismiss magic as old-fashioned mumbo-jumbo, indulged in by the poor and the ignorant in desperate times, and so tells the story of superstition rather than magic.

It is a book that provides a great overview of the social climate of the time, but works with a deliberately narrow definition of magic, a definition that is never properly expounded or discussed, and deals very poorly with hermetic, gnostic and masonic trends, and so does not deal with what the average modern lay-thinker is interested in at all.