A further, equally unspoken, assumption is that societies have views, attitudes and, indeed, assumptions, and that these can be fenced off and analysed. Another reason for RDM’s enduring freshness, then, is the fact that it seems to convey the voices of early modern England directly, speaking in their wonderful diversity, as if they rather than Thomas are the true author of the work.

Is there a future for intellectual history in scholarship on the history of magic and if so what might it look like? Evans-Pritchard’s study of witchcraft among the Azande of South Sudan also gave Thomas an early opportunity to reflect on the dynamics of early modern witchcraft accusations. Thomas needed religion and magic, as well as chapters on witchcraft, astrology, fairies, and so on, because they are his fields and his fences.Medieval and early modern peasants, Thomas argued, had little to no knowledge of the Bible or of Church doctrine; they related to their religion via ritual, not dogma. These reflections make explicit what was there from the start, but visible only to the most astute contemporaries.

A recent special issue on the ‘ Marginalization of Astrology ’ (2017), edited by Rienk Vermij and Hiro Hirai, has helped lead to the realisation, paralleled in work on witchcraft, that aspects of astrology were discarded from elite culture piecemeal, rather than all in one go. Historicising a belief or practice can make it seem inescapably human rather than an eternal or natural truth, perhaps enhancing the impact of critiques as well as caricatures of the historicised object. This post will outline some recent work in this area, and offer some reflections on how intellectual history might be able to make further contributions despite recent suspicion of the role of ideas in these historical shifts. richness and freshness’ — the facets that propelled our analysis — but also to the ultimately literary reasons why the book is so loved: ‘for its generosity, for its humor, for the rewards on every page’.Margaret Bowker’s early review had already made clear one obvious objection: ‘what is not justified is the use of example and counter example without any indication of normality or abnormality’. We therefore start by placing a seemingly timeless book in a time-specific set of circumstances: the Oxford History Faculty of the mid twentieth century, when the nature of historical study itself was in flux.

P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost (1965), both of which cut deep into the wider culture. The publication in 2012 of a handsome edition by the Folio Society cemented the book’s status as a classic. The final volume of the Oxford History of England (1965) was a ‘swansong for the dying concept of real history as past politics, and social history as an undemanding subsidiary’.

Change — the rise and fall of mentalities — is exhaustively demonstrated in all of Thomas’s writings but rarely and then only reluctantly explained. Rather embarrassingly, it had been ‘left to Americans’ to study English history with cutting-edge techniques, borrowing social and political theories from sociologists and quantitative tools from statisticians.

This discovery, which led Thomas to mine the rich veins of Lilly’s casebooks for astrological and, eventually, witchy ore, makes for a compelling beginning for RDM and, by grounding it in the university’s manuscript and rare book collections, further underscores Thomas’s emphasis on the book’s Oxford origins. As Geertz observed in 1975, Thomas often uses ‘his own words for classifying the beliefs and practices that he has unearthed’ but ‘his own assumptions about the workings of human societies and minds remain unexamined’. In response to critiques that RDM relied on out-of-date anthropology (by 1971 many anthropologists had abandoned functionalism), Thomas maintained that he did most of his reading in anthropology in the early 1960s, when the books on the shelves were functionalist works from the 1940s and 50s.Declines in witchcraft convictions were at least partly the result of a decline in accusations from middling and lower income social groups, as Brian Levack has argued . 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’. At the same time the Protestant Reformation attempted to take the magic out of religion, and scientists were developing new explanations of the universe. He criticized ‘old’ empirical history for its distrust of theory and assumption that historical writing required ‘no recondite conceptual tools’, just ‘common sense and good judgment’.