Writing for the Observer, John Kenyon listed it as one of the books of the year, but morosely concluded that ‘there were no really outstanding books in 1971’. Geoff Eley has reflected that ‘the massive prestige of using developmentalist frameworks based on modernization theory’ in the middle decades of the twentieth century meant that while historians ‘wrote their own histories’, they did so ‘not always under conceptual conditions of their own choosing’. Renowned for its rich accumulation of evidence as well as its pioneering engagement with social anthropology, Religion and the Decline of Magic (hereafter RDM) sought to reveal the logic underlying a diverse but ‘interrelated’ set of beliefs: witchcraft, but also magical healing, astrology, prophecy, ghosts, fairies and omens.

The lack of clerical oversight that came with the abolition of the confessional, for instance, left a pressing need for guidance that Thomas suggested was ultimately supplied by astrologers and other ‘wisemen’. Yates’s suggestion in 1972 that the book was one ‘to keep on one’s shelf for constant reference’ has also proved prescient for many modern readers.In a 1989 interview he stressed the importance of reading outside of history because ‘historians don’t have any ideas of their own’. When we organized ‘50 Years of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic’, a hybrid conference held at All Souls College, Oxford, in September 2021, we hoped to stimulate renewed reflection on the book’s legacy and how it came to have such a lasting hold on the historical imagination. RDM connects the generations, perhaps because it connects so many readers to their own beginnings as historians.

Constructions such as ‘as late as’ and their opposites (‘not new’) do good work in all of Thomas’s writings. When Religion and the Decline of Magic appeared, its subject matter was a “neglected area of the past” (p. As Geertz pointed out, the book assumed that, ‘as a means for overcoming specific practical difficulties, [magic was] necessarily ineffective’ — hence Thomas’s suggestion that when technological tools for solving mundane problems were eventually developed, magic declined.When the essay was reprinted as a short book, he took aim at Thomas’s approach to the history of magic, explaining that, by contrast, he was ‘ not concerned with mere witch-beliefs; with those elementary village credulities which anthropologists discover’. Thomas argued that there were good reasons why otherwise intelligent people in the past took these things seriously. These factors enable, but do not on their own explain, the appropriation of the book by witchcraft historians as a foundational text, eliding important works that inspired Thomas. underlying his account is the same modernizing reading of the Reformation in which Protestantism emerges as ‘rational’ and Catholicism as backwards and superstitious. They reflect a generational shift and a campaign for syllabus reform within Oxford, as well as changes in the composition of its History Faculty.