Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England is a standard in early modern European history. This wide-ranging study examines both the tensions and the congruences between the established church’s teachings and popular belief.

Generally, Thomas offers a functionalist interpretation of Christianity. That is, in explaining a belief’s traction, he stresses its usefulness to believers. If a practice fills a need, it will likely endure, even against prevailing reactionary or reformist impulses. Thomas begins with what he calls “the environment,” a list of the potential needs of early modern Europeans—especially things they needed protection against. He cites the plague and fire as the primary threatening conditions, but also gives due attention to high child mortality rates and wealth disparity, among other factors. In England’s early modern era, magic, religion, and science all had their days.

Thomas’s method is similar to that in Euan Cameron’s more recent Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250-1750, which interprets religious life in the era partly as a function of the types of harm that “people could expect to suffer.” For Cameron, religion and magic responded to, and offered some control of, the dismal circumstances of late medieval and early modern life. Like Thomas, Cameron sees the woes of life in early modern England as strong elements in, if not entirely shaping, people’s belief in the supernatural.

In his section on religion, Thomas argues that the early medieval church was the “repository for supernatural power” for the faithful, providing common people with a kind of magic that offered control over ordinary life through the ritualistic repetition of certain prayers and the potency of consecrated holy objects. He then discusses what he describes as the competing storehouse of supernatural power: the set of beliefs and practices that he collectively calls “magic.”

In his section on magic, Thomas charts popular healing practices, especially as they related to psychosomatic conditions, and details the place of those who engaged in them (known as “cunning folk”) in English society—generally, that the laity both feared and respected them. He finds that religion provided a “rival system of ecclesiastical magic” to take the place of folk magic. But despite religion’s ascendancy as a means of protection from life’s hazards, folk magic persisted to some degree. In contrast, astrology apparently “ceased, in all but the most unsophisticated circles, to be regarded as either a science or a crime.” Whereas magic could sustain competition from Christianity, astrology could not.

Later in the early modern period, however, magic’s decline accelerated. With seventeenth-century thought’s “emancipation from the past,” Thomas writes, the “possibility of infinite intellectual progress” led many to break from the traditions of the ancients, creating a discontinuous modernity in the process. As the century wore on, increased levels of skepticism brought about the end of witchcraft prosecutions, but only social changes that made the world more impersonal and urban would lead to the virtual end of magic. Urbanization and the growth of insurance as an economic practice, among other seventeenth-century projects, had more to do with magic’s fall than did changes in knowledge production and the rise of science.

Almost fifty years after its publication, the legacy of Religion and the Decline of Magic seems unclear. On the one hand, Thomas undoubtedly paved the way for many social and religious historians interested in popular beliefs and the occult in the early modern period. Within this field of history, he identified enough significant topics that hadn’t yet been sufficiently studied that he can be considered one of its founders. Historians of both sides of the Atlantic owe him a scholarly debt, and for general readers. Religion and the Decline of Magic is a praiseworthy introduction to a fascinating world.

On the other hand, the general arc of Thomas’s account—from magic to religion, then from religion to science—tends to result in a secularizing narrative that students of history and religion have justifiably challenged. When, for instance, Thomas posits that “The Reformation took a good deal of magic out of religion,” he sets the stage for a larger historical interpretation that errantly pits the forces of science and religion as necessarily conflicting against one another. Only recently have scholars begun to grapple seriously with the implications of such an interpretation, arguing that the Reformation and later the Enlightenment did not “disenchant” the West (deprive it of spirituality or magic) as much as the social theorist Max Weber and his disciples supposed they did.

Whatever its faults, Religion and the Decline of Magic ought to remain a standard work in early modern European religious history. Both newcomers to the field and specialists will delight in Thomas’s easy prose, quick wit, and commendably approachable intellectual style. For the undergraduate, this book is a useful and highly recommended primer. For the graduate students of early modern Europe, it belongs on the study list for one’s oral exams. Religion and the Decline of Magic has stood the test of time. Reviewing Thomas’s magnum opus for The New York Review of Books, Hilary Mantel said it best: “It is not just about magic, but also, in its mercurial agility, it is a magical work in itself.”