Indeed, one may not expect the final chapter of a work apparently devoted to the decline of magic to conclude that ‘the role of magic in modern society may be more extensive than we yet appreciate’ and to predict, as its final line, that ‘no society will ever be free from it’. Historians have recently asked, for example, whether astrology really fits into a book about the history of magic). Thomas’s use of ‘religion’ and ‘magic’ similarly followed the vocabulary of divines who looked down on popular religion and increasingly lumped together — just like RDM — what was in reality a miscellaneous group of ‘magical’ practices that were often in rivalry with one another. In his review, Copenhaver lamented ‘the open-endedness and self-doubting’ that ‘marred’ the end of the work; William Monter claimed that ‘the only thing which prevents this book from being an unrelieved masterpiece is its conclusion, or rather its lack of one’.

Thomas needed religion and magic, as well as chapters on witchcraft, astrology, fairies, and so on, because they are his fields and his fences. By 1967, Thomas’s student Alan Macfarlane could reflect that ‘witchcraft has been rather flogged at the seminar level’. The publication in 2012 of a handsome edition by the Folio Society cemented the book’s status as a classic. Even the ostensible praise — lauding Trevor-Roper as a ‘master of belles-lettres’ and comparing him to Gibbon — has something of a sting in the tail, given Thomas’s views at the time of literary history. In the papers collected by Elias Ashmole, Thomas found a strange letter from the Leveller Richard Overton to the astrologer William Lilly, in which Overton, a notorious attacker of superstition, surprisingly asked for celestial career advice.

Thomas’s 1961 lament about Oxford’s history curriculum was prompted by a lecture on ‘Anthropology and History’ in Manchester by the All Souls anthropologist E. The second is that there seems to be little space here for the role of science or of ideas more generally. Crucially, writing half a century after the book’s publication, we can read RDM in the context of Thomas’s wider oeuvre.

Is there a future for intellectual history in scholarship on the history of magic and if so what might it look like? Thomas Waters’ Cursed Britain (2019) is only the most recent in a long series of books that have undermined the fantasy of a decline in real terms (which is, after all, unquantifiable), and have pushed back the diminishing fortunes of magic amongst the middle classes to the twentieth century. While it’s indeed the case that most basic arguments against, say, astrology, were by the 1700s many centuries old, to dismiss the effectiveness of argumentation on this account is to abstract ideas from their context.Medieval and early modern peasants, Thomas argued, had little to no knowledge of the Bible or of Church doctrine; they related to their religion via ritual, not dogma. The 1960s saw the publication of several landmark British historical monographs deeply influenced by the social sciences, including E. Initially bolstered by a scholarly obsession with Max Weber’s ‘disenchantment’ of the world, interest amongst historians in topics like witchcraft and astrology only continues to grow. Indeed, while Lucien Febvre had argued in his classic Le problème de l’incroyance au XVI e siècle (1942) that there was no atheism in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, Thomas — much like Hill in The World Turned Upside Down — saw popular religion as essentially practical atheism. He argued that the ‘magical’ solutions offered by various cunning folk filled the resulting gap in the market.

In any case, Thomas later found the ‘lucidity’ of older social anthropology preferable to the ‘inflated pretensions’ of more recent anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, which were ‘harder to relate to historical writing’. Although the success of the reformers’ separation of magic and religion was essential to Thomas’s thesis, today the Reformation is more often seen as a failure.Moreover, were these changes primarily economic, technological, social, cultural, religious, or intellectual? Although British historians elsewhere were developing a ‘new’ social history with help from Marxism, the social sciences and the French Annales school, Oxford dons, Eley continues, ‘willfully closed their eyes to the changes occurring outside’. Intellectual historians are well placed to investigate how the re-presentation of arguments could make them more or less compelling in different contexts. There is considerable irony in the fact that one of the most revolutionary works of modern history writing emerged from an institution that was widely criticized at the time for its perceived insularity and conservatism.