Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (Penguin History)

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In this sense, Thomas’s most revealing book is the one that is the least read: The Oxford Book of Work (1999), an ‘anthology’ of excerpts of ‘some intrinsic literary value’, which show ‘some of the ways in which the experience of work has changed over time’. This, too, contributes to the timelessness of the book: its ability to present a new face to successive generations of readers and historians.

A framework built on binaries and change over time can easily find a home for all manner of belief, but these anecdotes are effectively sleeper agents, ready to help a rebellious reader topple the author’s original edifice by rejigging the material.

Magic’s endurance, however, makes sense within the yin–yang structure we have just laid out; to paraphrase Hotel California, magic may check out but can never leave. The opposition between religion and magic in RDM is underpinned therefore by more than envelopes and their discrete contents.

But it does seem to have shaped Thomas’s interest in and materialist approach towards the social history of religion. Moreover, and here Thomas took his cue from the anthropologists, they also served deeply useful functions in insecure societies that were under constant threat of famine, fire, and disease.While Thomas insisted in the preface of RDM that the sum was greater than its parts, he arranged the book ‘so that the reader who wishes to skip some of the sections can easily do so’. When he reviewed the Douglas volume, he charged Thomas and Macfarlane with setting off together ‘on the fashionable anthropological broomstick, non-stop to darkest Africa’. Taking his cue from anthropology, Thomas also showed the deeply useful functions of these beliefs for those living in a world under constant threat of hunger, disease and death.