Event Description

Virtual workshop series organized by Jan Machielsen (Cardiff) and William Pooley (Bristol).

In the almost fifty years that have passed since the appearance of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), a huge range of work by historians, folklorists, anthropologists and literary scholars has complicated and refined our understanding of the supposed “decline of magic” from the seventeenth to the twenty–first century. And yet in many ways this explosion of new research has raised more questions than it has answered: not simply when, how, and why magic declined, but even more fundamentally whether “decline” is the right way to think about the history of magic at all.

Tricia Peone, Preternature and the Ambiguity of Magical Experiences

Will Pooley, Who Believed in Witchcraft? France, 1790-1940

Helen Cornish, In Search of Cunning Ancestry: the Turn to Magic in Modern Witchcraft

Thomas Waters, A Revival of Magic: Has There Been a Global Growth of Esotericism since the c. 1970’s?

Friday 3 July 2020, 13:00–15:00 BST

Source: https://twitter.com/willpooley/status/1272873692658380805

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