![]() ![]() But The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment, despite a catch-all title that promises more than Hunter’s tightly-focused study can deliver, does break fresh ground in the quest to understand how minds change, how paradigms shift, and how societies progress.Įngland’s last significant witch trial, of Jane Wenham, took place in 1712. His closely argued book modifies rather than overturns the conventional narrative, which sees the cleansing forces of Enlightenment banish the clutter of superstition from mainstream thought, law, and, indeed, religion. Now, almost half-a-century later, Michael Hunter revises the story to suggest that Thomas and his followers ignored some crucial solvents at work in the dissolution of magical beliefs. In 1971, Keith Thomas published a classic account of the process as it unfolded in Britain: Religion and the Decline of Magic. ![]() The “disenchantment” of our world, and the wholesale migration of the paranormal realm into the safely fenced domain of fantasy and fiction, has long fascinated historians. They began, after all, as beings whose supposed reality shaped the ideas and actions of almost everybody in pre-modern communities. Yet the afterlife of such supernatural entities, now the cast of choice for tall tales of every kind, rests on the utter annihilation of their first existence. They have seldom seemed so robust and so resilient. The creatures dismissed by a sceptical thinker in 1709 as “ghosts, hobgoblins, witches and spectres” now enjoy a second life across swathes of British popular and literary culture. ![]()
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