Religion and the Decline of Magic

Thomas's 1971 study set out to explain why belief in astrology, witchcraft, and providential magic was so central to English life before 1700 and then collapsed so thoroughly afterward, and he answers it with an overwhelming accumulation of primary-source detail rather than a single unifying theory. That method drew real criticism at the time — Lawrence Stone accused him of "intellectual overkill," burying argument under example after example — but the same density is what let the book outlast its initial reception to become a foundational text of English social and religious history. Five decades on, historians still treat it as both a model to build from and a target to argue against, which is a rarer form of staying power than being simply agreed with.