The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment

by Michael Hunter

A new history which overturns the received wisdom that science displaced magic in Enlightenment Britain

In early modern Britain, belief in prophecies, omens, ghosts, apparitions and fairies was commonplace. Among both educated and ordinary people the absolute existence of a spiritual world was taken for granted. Yet in the eighteenth century such certainties were swept away. Credit for this great change is usually given to science – and in particular to the scientists of the Royal Society. But is this justified?

Michael Hunter argues that those pioneering the change in attitude were not scientists but freethinkers. While some scientists defended the reality of supernatural phenomena, these sceptical humanists drew on ancient authors to mount a critique both of orthodox religion and, by extension, of magic and other forms of superstition. Even if the religious heterodoxy of such men tarnished their reputation and postponed the general acceptance of anti-magical views, slowly change did come about. When it did, this owed less to the testing of magic than to the growth of confidence in a stable world in which magic no longer had a place.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Science, Sociology, Religion, Magic, British Literature

256 pages, Hardcover

Published January 14, 2020

About the author

Michael Hunter is Emeritus Professor of History, Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of numerous works on early modern science and culture such as The Occult Laboratory and the award-winning Boyle: Between God and Science.

Reviews

[Pam Baddeley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite an interesting book which demonstrates how the attitudes towards magic and related subjects - witchcraft, poltergeists, the second sight etc - changed from a total acceptance to a total rejection and scepticism, lead by the upper and 'educated' classes. The book explains how this change, usually attributed to the development of the scientific outlook, is due more to the strain of 'freethinking' championed in London coffee houses and at court. Certain apologists wrote books deploring such freethinking attitudes on the grounds that they veered too close towards atheism, on the grounds that those who didn't believe in witches, spirits etc were also rejecting God as the supreme spirit. Gradually though, the scepticism spread to the more orthodox in society.

I was aware that the subject wasn't "cut and dried" - Newton, for example, was a researcher into alchemy. The style of the book is accessible, rather than academic, but its origin as the compilation of several papers published previously by the author is a little too obvious. He also makes frequent references to the "Jane Wenham" case which I expected to be explained somewhere but wasn't. I has to look it up on Wikipedia to discover the details. The book does come across as a bit repetitive in places, probably because of the less than perfect splicing together of the essays. Altogether I would rate it at 3 stars.

[Salli · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not so much about the Decline of Magic as a survey of the why thought about magic and the supernatural changed through the enlightenment period. I think I need to know the sources to get a full understanding of this book. It wasn't too academic so not too bad to read (Nescience, sacerdotal, deism, preternatural, latitudunarian, microscopist etc) and has backed up the ideas I had for the piece I want to write. If I were an academic I wonder if it might be thought too light but for me it was acceptable as a place to start and get a broad idea of the field.

[Chloe Barnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice introductory book with lots of different aspects of magic in the enlightenment, the book is not really academic and easily accessible. However, they could have dealt with a smaller scope and produced a more cohesive body of work.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little uncohesive, its origins as separate papers are obvious, but on the whole good stuff

[Ankh156 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book. A fine and balanced account of the early enlightenment period which can often seem so much wit and whiggery proceeding from their coffee-house discussions. The main problem is the gloss put on the era by empirical scientists who want to prortray it as the discovery of ration thought and the 'experimental method', and a consequent abandonment of silly superstitious beliefs from the previous century. This is naive, simplistic and ultimately mendacious. There was no simple switch from medieval credulity to rationalist method. It was a complex affair, as this book shows admirably. In the previous century 'magic' included a lot of what we now call 'science'. In the 18th, certain persons (eg, Hooke) wanted to pour scorn on older perspectives, but not the *real* proto-scientific 'heroes' like Newton and Boyle made no simple distinction between the 'spiritual' (or moral) aspects of knowledge and the emprical observations which support it. The battleground in the 18th century was the repeal of the witchcraft legislation on moral and humanistic grounds, not just the advance of 'rationalism'. Then there is the emergence of *chemistry* from its alchemical (spiritual) foundations. Boyle was crucial in this, but he was an avowed spiritualist. Newton was fascinated with the emergence of chemistry, anticipating the unified theory of atomic weights discovered by Mendelev at the start of the 19th century. Scientists like to simplify this complex process into a simplified 'just-so' story, where everything before Newton was *wrong*, and everything after was *right*. This is mug and simply wrong. Contemporary speculative physics sees some of the spiritual aspects underpinning the scientific world-view seeping back into the foreground, and its effect is enriching rather than obfuscating. All this can get overlooked in potted histories of science which wallow in the muddy shallows of smugness. Kant has amply demonstrated that even perception of simple 'facts' is a multi-faceted affair requiring imaginative leaps synthesis of the part of the perciever. This clear and very readable book shows how even the establishment of the Royal Society was acieved by thinker who had far from abandoned the humanist, spiritual and moralist underpinnings of their enterprise.