Magic and Modernity

Michael Hunter. The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. x + 235 pp. 

One of the most vexed questions of modernity is the problem of disenchantment. As articulated by social theorist Max Weber (1864-1920), one of the fundamental conditions of modern life is the gradual loss of a widespread sense of the supernatural. Subsequent generations of historians and philosophers have taken up the challenge of pinpointing how and when the West departed from the previous centrality of the supernatural and preternatural. Others, however, have suggested that the matter is overblown, a metanarrative that needs revising. Michael Hunter’s new monograph, The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 2020) is a welcome contribution to the debate. Hunter claims that, while belief in the supernatural did demonstrably decline in early modern Britain, it did so through the cultural influence of figures largely overlooked in previous scholarship. 

The book crafts a compelling narrative about the cultural vectors of skepticism. Doubt in the supernatural, Hunter argues, was pioneered by free-thinkers and Deists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These skeptics, many of whom came from a nonconformist religious background, assailed stories of ghosts, magic, spirits, and clairvoyance in terms of “priestcraft”—a kind of fraud with strongly sacerdotal and superstitious connotations. They were unwittingly abetted by the institutional, ambivalent silence of the Royal Society. At times, Hunter goes perhaps too far in emphasizing the importance of these earlier radicals. He names only a handful of skeptical writers, failing to account for their minority status in what remained a highly religious and self-consciously Protestant society. Hunter also bases his argument on assertions of a larger oral culture of witty skepticism centered on the coffee-houses and Inns of Court in London—a culture that would, by its very nature, leave few archival traces. Yet at no point does he adequately dispel the doubts that other scholars have cast upon the prevalence of these beliefs. For instance, S.J. Barnett has argued persuasively that anti-Deistic apologists often exaggerated the numbers of their opponents by conflating them with Christian dissenters and nonconformists. In doing so, they authorized their own writing as a necessary defense of the “Church in danger” (see Barnett 2003). Hunter never takes this prospect as seriously as he should, content instead to rest on the paucity of evidence left by an ostensibly oral movement. 

Nevertheless, Hunter is mainly interested in debates about the supernatural that took place in print, and in tracing those exchanges, he displays an admirable scholarly acumen. His most important chapters come in the second half of the book, when he illustrates a shift in skeptical discourse. Instead of free-thinking Deists concerned about imposture, a new generation of physicians began to argue that the experience of paranormal phenomena indicated a kind of mental or physiological illness. This pathologizing move was largely solidified among the learned classes by the nineteenth century. The skeptical doctors thus paved the way for the advent of psychology and for the role that the medical sciences would play in later constructions of the normal, the abnormal, and the paranormal. 

Hunter is to be commended for hewing closely to the concrete realities of textual transmission along social networks and thus avoiding a common pitfall for intellectual historians: the tendency to treat ideas as abstractions afloat in the ether. Yet beyond the particular analysis of the mid-eighteenth-century physicians, Hunter puts forward a compelling argument about a background paradigm shift that foreclosed any countenancing of the supernatural. He gives ample attention to the learned supernaturalists of the Restoration including Joseph Glanvill (1636-1680), Henry More (1614-1687), and Robert Boyle (1627-1691). These writers, disproportionately men of science and philosophy, were committed to the Baconian method of assimilative empiricism against the older scholastic science with its rigid categories inherited from Aristotle and Galen. For researchers like the voraciously curious Boyle, the promise of science lay in the search for data. Whether it was the strange happenings at an ostensibly haunted house in Wiltshire or the empirically verifiable gift of premonitory “second sight” in Scotland, paranormal phenomena furnished more empirical data of the world, and of the invisible, supernatural world in particular. 

But starting in the late seventeenth century, a new model of science came to the fore. Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) re-oriented the scientific method towards the search for and elucidation of universal natural laws. These laws in turn were reified as norms. As his method became more and more widely accepted, paranormal phenomena were thus increasingly deemed impossible a priori. We can characterize this shift as Galen’s revenge, a re-assertion of systems of possibility over against the Baconian methodological priority of experience. Although Newton was not a thoroughgoing skeptic himself (he was, after all, a practicing alchemist and a prophetic exegete), he furnished the skeptics with a powerful tool by which to delegitimize their opponents. This epistemic battle stands at the heart of Hunter’s book and of modernity itself. 

Astute readers will no doubt have noticed that Hunter’s title echoes a more famous text, Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). Hunter builds on Thomas in an attempt to illuminate the titular “decline,” a social change that Thomas himself was unable to adequately account for. In doing so, Hunter intervenes in a burgeoning field of recent scholarship on disenchantment in early modern England. He writes in conversation with early modernists like Jane Shaw, Jonathan Barry, and Brian Copenhaver, as well scholars such as Owen Davies who specialize in later periods. One major interlocutor is Paul Monod, whose 2013 volume Solomon’s Secret Arts Hunter cites frequently as something of a foil. Monod revises our understanding of the Enlightenment by illustrating the importance of esotericism and occultism throughout the long eighteenth century. Although Hunter doesn’t dispute that central claim, he wishes to redress what he sees as an imbalance in the revisionist turn by re-focusing on the rise of skepticism. Hunter also targets another scholar, Ian Bostridge, whose work has examined the political dimension of disenchantment and ties the process to the development of partisan politics in early modern Britain. Hunter strongly disagrees with this interpretation, asserting that there are no consistent partisan qualities to disenchantment as an epistemic phenomenon. Tories could be doubtful, and Whigs could be credulous. 

This is all fine so far as it goes. There are, however, important problems with Hunter’s study. The first is the conflation of a wide range of theological positions under the common title of “orthodox” in contrast to the more variegated “free-thinkers,” “Deists,” “heterodox,” and “skeptics” that litter the text. Church historians would in general be leery of using that term without problematizing it—or at least defining it. At times, Hunter seems not to realize that some of the most committed supernaturalists like Henry More and Bishop Edward Fowler (1632-1714) were moderate, broad-church Latitudinarians, not conservative High Churchmen or dyed-in-the-wool Calvinists. The result means a foggier view of how the religious landscape contributed to and was affected by disenchantment. His attention to the Rev. Francis Hutchinson’s anti-“enthusiastic” motives in debunking witchcraft, though convincing in itself, does not overcome the general fault. Yet Hunter is a historian of science; a certain imprecision on this point is thus forgivable. 

What is more of an issue is the fact that, for all of Hunter’s inquiry into the legacy of the Baconian method, he forgets that most famous of Bacon’s maxims: “Knowledge is power.” He comprehensively misses the extent to which power relations structure knowledge claims in this period, as in all epochs. Throughout the text, it’s never entirely clear who has the real epistemic power at any given moment. The universities? The lawyers and “wits” who crowd the metropolitan coffee-houses? The Royal Society? The Deists? The established Church? In this sense, Hunter’s rejection of Bostridge perhaps leads him to certain lacunae of his own. His attempt to avoid the political has deprived him of the chance to interrogate power.

Even in his otherwise strong chapter on the phenomenon of “second sight” in Western Scotland, Hunter fails to note the fairly straightforward point that skepticism about it consistently came from exponents of metropolitan episteme. Scottish Presbyterian clergymen who wanted to seem “Enlightened,” travelers from London, and post-Newtonian scientists all represent the more powerful knowledge of the cultural center. Yet the local Highlanders who experienced “second sight” belong to the periphery, and thus have their experiences delegitimized (see especially pages 157 to 163).  

For all that, perhaps the true measure of an historical study is whether it provokes useful questions. One of those questions, latent in Hunter’s text, is about the inherent ambiguity of the empirical method. The popular narrative about early modernity posits that empiricism as enunciated by Bacon and Locke was inimical to the supernatural and hastened the process of disenchantment. Yet Hunter paints a different picture, one that anticipates the epistemic battles of later modernity. In the empirical, apologetic supernaturalists like More and Glanvill, we recognize affinities with Johann Georg Hamann’s Humean Glaubensphilosphie or Charles Fort’s “procession of the damned,” compiled facts against scientific positivism. Boyle’s “rather heroic open-mindedness . . . about the causation of phenomena” would find a later echo in the works of computer scientist, astronomer, and anomalist Jacques Vallée. These epistemic battles in early modern Britain can thus help us think about the same kinds of conflicts in our own postmodern moment. 

Richard Yoder is pursuing a Ph.D. in History at Penn State University, where he specializes in early modern religious history.