A Work Out of Time: Religion and the Decline of Magic at Fifty

IF 1.8 1区历史学 Q1 HISTORY

Past & Present Pub Date : 2023-08-18 DOI:10.1093/pastj/gtad012

Jan Machielsen, Michelle Pfeffer

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Abstract

The year 2021 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), a book that set the agenda for decades of scholarship on the history of popular religion and supernatural beliefs. The book brought to life a lost world of early modern English magic, its success ultimately confirming popular beliefs and practices as respectable objects of historical study. This review essay, emerging out of a conference celebrating the book’s legacy, explores why Religion and the Decline of Magic came to have such a lasting hold on the historical imagination and why, despite half a century of historiographical development, it has managed to achieve a kind of ahistorical permanence. The essay traces this apparent timelessness, in part, to the book’s contested origins. Religion and the Decline of Magic was an unusual and unexpected work to emerge out of the Oxford History Faculty and the maelstrom of social history in the 1960s. While much attention has been paid to its engagement with anthropological theory, we argue that the book’s longevity owes more to its status as ethnography and to Thomas’s methods as a historian, allowing generations of new readers to gain fresh insights from a work out of time.

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过时的作品:五十岁时的宗教与魔法的衰落

2021年是基思·托马斯的《宗教与魔法的衰落》(1971)出版50周年，这本书为几十年来关于大众宗教和超自然信仰历史的学术研究设定了议程。这本书给人们带来了一个失落的早期现代英国魔法世界，它的成功最终证实了流行的信仰和实践是值得尊敬的历史研究对象。这篇评论文章是在一次庆祝这本书遗产的会议上发表的，它探讨了为什么《宗教与魔法的衰落》会对历史想象产生如此持久的影响，以及为什么尽管经历了半个世纪的史学发展，它还是成功地实现了一种非历史的持久性。这篇文章将这种明显的永恒部分归因于这本书有争议的起源。《宗教与魔法的衰落》是牛津大学历史系和20世纪60年代社会历史的大漩涡中出现的一部不同寻常、出人意料的作品。虽然人们对它与人类学理论的接触给予了很多关注，但我们认为，这本书的长寿更多地归功于它作为民族志的地位，以及托马斯作为历史学家的方法，让一代又一代的新读者从一部过时的作品中获得新的见解。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Past & Present Multiple-

CiteScore

2.80

自引率

5.60%

发文量

期刊介绍： Founded in 1952, Past & Present is widely acknowledged to be the liveliest and most stimulating historical journal in the English-speaking world. The journal offers: •A wide variety of scholarly and original articles on historical, social and cultural change in all parts of the world. •Four issues a year, each containing five or six major articles plus occasional debates and review essays. •Challenging work by young historians as well as seminal articles by internationally regarded scholars. •A range of articles that appeal to specialists and non-specialists, and communicate the results of the most recent historical research in a readable and lively form. •A forum for debate, encouraging productive controversy.