Distinguished supporters of Humanism Richard Norman and Colin Blakemore support H4BW". Humanists UK . Retrieved 25 June 2020. Sir Keith Vivian Thomas CH FBA FRHistS FLSW (born 2 January 1933) is a Welsh historian of the early modern world based at Oxford University. He is best known as the author of Religion and the Decline of Magic and Man and the Natural World. From 1986 to 2000, he was president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. The event will be live streamed from All Souls College, Oxford. Due to a limit on numbers only a small audience will be invited to attend the conference in person. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) (first American edition published as Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

The Reformation did not put an end to prophecy and the association of miracle working to religious supremacy. The period following Elizabeth and during the Civil War reflected growing unease with social inequities. Women, normally excluded from political debate and discussion, used prophecy and dream interpretation to express political dissatisfaction. A virtual army of pseudo-messiahs appeared, claiming all sorts of personal relationships with God. Mostly they were the targets of humor unless their messages conveyed secular political implications. Punishment for heresy (the last burning for heresy occurred in 1642) could be a useful tool to eliminate political opposition. Common prayer served as a useful mechanism to bring people together for the purpose of harnessing group perceptions and action against a common social ill or malady. It became an act of solidarity. In his analysis of witchcraft, Thomas does not speak generally of the magical or superstitious practices previously described in his book, such as astrology and other forms of divination. Rather, this term refers here to a specific type of magic which contemporary Englishpersons regarded as harmful, or in modern parlance, anti-social. Thomas defines this as "attribution of misfortune to occult human agency." Contemporaries imagined such agency to function in various ways and to cause various misfortunes, but witchcraft's key characteristic way malice. The evil intention and result distinguished witchcraft from other, potentially beneficial, forms of magic. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, this power was attributed to explicit demonic pacts, thus compounding the crime by the addition of apostasy and devil-worship. In the minds of most Latin-illiterate English people malicious activity remained the key conception of witchcraft; whereas on the Continent more emphasis was placed on the role of the Devil, English witchcraft trials focused on allegations of damage to property or persons, rarely raising the issue of devil-worship. Of the persons accused of witchcraft, a high percentage were found guilty of property damage, but very few of invoking spirits or worshiping devils. Judges were mostly likely to condemn when deaths had occurred, and in these cases the conviction was often for murder rather than witchcraft; as matter of fact, it was not until after 1600 that England even passed a law against compacting with the Devil. In brief, persecution of witches stemmed primarily from fear on the part of their neighbors, not from religious outrage. After 1736, witchcraft was prosecuted as fraud rather than magic; in the years preceding this legislation, skepticism had so increased that trials for witchcraft had ceased, although spontaneous lynching continued sporadically in rural areas. This is in accord with the general history of witchcraft in England, the demand for which generally proceeded from a popular level, not from pressure by religious or political leaders.

Religion and the decline of magic

By the later period, however, the use and belief in such ritual means had much diminished in favour of rational, mechanical, and more strictly practical means, informed – at least in principle - by careful observation, experimentation and by “trial and error”. Belief in the danger of witchcraft and sorcery had similarly diminished. This shift was never total, however, but a matter of emphasis. In the sixteenth and earlier centuries, plenty of rationality had co-existed with magic and religious ritual. Conversely, ritual practices have persisted, despite the pre-eminence of science and rational technology.

Sir Keith Thomas (b.1933), President (1986–2000) – Art UK Art UK – Discover Artworks Sir Keith Thomas (b.1933), President (1986–2000)". Art UK. Science and technology have made us less vulnerable to some of the hazards which confronted the people of the past. Yet Religion and the Decline of Magic concludes that "if magic is defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then Though the Reformation deliberately tried to get rid of a lot of the hocus-pocus, even afterwards there were ‘magical elements surviving in religion, and there were religious facets to the practice of magic’. The difference between churchmen and magicians lay less in the effects they claimed to achieve than in their social position, and in the authority on which their respective claims rested. History and Literature: the Ernest Hughes Memorial Lecture Delivered at the College on 7 March 1988 (Swansea: University College of Swansea, 1988)Two things initially strike me about this story. The first is that it remains somewhat unclear which of the above aspects were causal, and which were mere corollaries (for recent debate on aspects of this, see this exchange between Michael Hunter and Jan Machielsen). The second is that there seems to be little space here for the role of science or of ideas more generally. As someone who has predominantly worked in intellectual history and the history of science, this is something I find especially interesting. While Thomas left room in his account for the intellectual changes brought about by the scientific revolution—experimentalism and mechanical philosophy—scholarship has happily let go of the idea that ‘superstition’ is a case of arrested development resolved only through scientific enlightenment. Although David Wootton’s The Invention of Science (2015) (admittedly something of an outlier­­) asserts that science “must” be responsible for shifting attitudes to magic, Michael Hunter’s The Decline of Magic (2020) argues that the science of the scientific revolution actually left a lot of scope for supernatural belief. As Charles Webster argued some time ago in From Paracelsus to Newton (1982), “we must look in places other than science for the explanation of these changes” (p. 100). This type of contradiction is typical of the book as a whole. Thomas weaves a rich tapestry and constructs many convincing and reasonable arguments. The weakness of the book is his failure to reconcile these into a totality. This difficulty may be explained by his inability to distinguish precisely in what way he sees magic and religion as distinct. After all, the term religion as described by Thomas does not inherently exclude magical belief systems. Thomas never really defines his usage of the term, but appears at times to use it simply as a synonym for "the Church" and at others even more loosely as a "belief system" in which case it seems hard to exclude magic from the category.

Portraits of Sir Keith Thomas hang at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and the British Academy and National Portrait Gallery, London. [7] [8] Publications [ edit ]ancient prophecies to predict political outcomes, when the ancient was valued more than the current events which were only beginning to be referred to as "news", and the idea of progress was new. A similar process (not, however, discussed here) can be seen in the New Light found in Quakerism and in the Scottish and Ulster Presbyterianism of the later seventeenth century, but which persisted into the nineteenth century. Here God revealed himself centrally in the indwelling “Light” of Conscience and Reason found in the human heart. It was a view that gave its name to the “Enlightenment”. Unfortunately for religion, it became possible to see Reason and Conscience as entirely human faculties, and forget they were supposed to be divine ones. a degree of intellectual arrogance about the infallibility of this [new] paradigm which contrasted with the rather humble sense of the provisional nature of knowledge that had characterised Boyle .... For better or worse, the new scientific world view challenged both the inclusiveness of the Boylian style of science and the rather heroic open-mindedness that Boyle displayed about the causation of phenomena.’ (p. 162)