'Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, one of the 20th century’s seminal historical texts. “evelops a different argument in suggesting that it was sceptical humanists and freethinkers, rather than scientists, who did most to discredit traditional magic.”-Tony Barber, Financial Times When it did, this owed less to the testing of magic than to the growth of confidence in a stable world in which magic no longer had a place. Even if the religious heterodoxy of such men tarnished their reputation and postponed the general acceptance of anti-magical views, slowly change did come about.

While some scientists defended the reality of supernatural phenomena, these sceptical humanists drew on ancient authors to mount a critique both of orthodox religion and, by extension, of magic and other forms of superstition. But is this justified? Michael Hunter argues that those pioneering the change in attitude were not scientists but freethinkers.

Credit for this great change is usually given to science – and in particular to the scientists of the Royal Society. Yet in the eighteenth century such certainties were swept away. Among both educated and ordinary people the absolute existence of a spiritual world was taken for granted. A new history that overturns the received wisdom that science displaced magic in Enlightenment Britain-named a Best Book of 2020 by the Financial Times In early modern Britain, belief in prophecies, omens, ghosts, apparitions and fairies was commonplace.

Keith thomas decline of magic