Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (Penguin history)

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.


Shallow but informative   February 5, 2002
C. SKALA (London, United Kingdom United Kingdom)
16 out of 24 found this review helpful

This book comes highly recommended and is indeed a milestone in the merging of sociology and history in the late sixties. It is however, badly in need of revision. Thomas's book has been rightly criticised for an unduly shallow sociological approach to religious and magical phenomena for the period covered. With little or no genuine interpretative inquiry from the author, the book rapidly descends into 'list-making' under generic headings. As such, it fasincates with its archeological unearthing of details but ultimately bores this reader with its undue emphasis on repetition. For a stimulating, critically robust and sophisticated approach to particular instances of 'witchcraft', please read Carlo Ginzburg's ECSTASIES.


More then History.   September 7, 2001
T. Mazerolle (Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada)
28 out of 30 found this review helpful

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