He does, however, suggest another route towards the “disenchantment” that discredited magic among the thought-leaders and law-makers of the late 17th and 18th century. Hunter does not dispute the widespread endurance of supernatural lore and rites as part of underground (or even above-ground) popular experience – one fascinating chapter here explores “second sight” in the Highlands of Scotland, its defenders and its debunkers. Yet Keith Thomas amassed much evidence to show that deep-rooted beliefs in occult events and forces lingered on much later than that. By 1749, the radical clergyman Conyers Middleton could declare that “the belief of witches is now utterly extinct”. In legal terms, 'magic' now became imposture. In 1735, the Witchcraft Act redefined all claims to magical powers as a matter of criminal fraud, rather than diabolical possession. ( Pictured below: Amanda Bellamy in Rebecca Lenkiewicz's 2015 play Jane Wenham: Witch of Walkern). 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.

The decline of magic