![]() ![]() He sees that they were not quaint deviations from mainstream thought they were not marginal to the early modern world, but intrinsic to it. ![]() Keith Thomas has made a special study of magic and magical thinking. To keep at bay the misfortunes of the world, he followed the prayers framed for him in Latin, a language he did not understand, attributing a mechanical efficiency to their enunciation, heaping them up as if he could build a staircase to a capricious God, whom he hoped, one day, to see face to face. 1 To understand that world, we have to take ourselves back to the beginning of the period, into the mindset of a preindustrial society, when most people were engaged in agriculture, most people could not read, and the ritual year of Roman Catholicism shaped the experience of the ordinary man going about his ordinary days. In his Religion and the Decline of Magic his subject is early modern England, roughly between 15. The English historian Keith Thomas has revealed modes of thought and ways of life deeply strange to us, and he illustrates them with precise evidence. There never was a merry world since the fairies left off dancing and the parson left conjuring. ‘The Concert in an Egg’ painting after Hieronymus Bosch, circa 1561 Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille/Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource ![]()
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