‘Scepticism about witchcraft had escaped from its dangerous affiliations with freethinking to become an acceptable viewpoint for orthodox thinkers of various houses. Rawlinson, a Jacobite, alongside Francis Hutchinson, a Whig, continuing that this illustrates how: With reference to the work of Ian Bostridge – Witchcraft and its Transformations c.1650-c.1750 (1997) – and Peter Elmer – Witchcraft, Witch- Hunting, and Politics in Early Modern England (2016), Hunter rejects a political location for the decline of belief in witchcraft. This work is likely to attract considerable favourable attention, so may I start with the last as I find the combination of thesis and review problematic. Particular case- studies take up much of the relatively short text (there are valuable notes and interesting appendices), before the conclusion, which offers a pulling together of the case-studies and themes, including a review of other literature. The scholarly move away from an emphasis on science leads to the observation that assertion, rather than proof, was important to the dismantling of belief in magic.
The package, however, proved difficult, because an overlap with scepticism about religion encouraged hostility to their views and delayed acceptance. In addition, in a valuable methodological thesis, he proposes that their arguments were more often expressed orally than in printed form. Hunter, Emeritus Professor of History at Birkbeck College, London, and a distinguished scholar who has produced particularly significant work on Robert Boyle, the Royal Society, and the Scientific Revolution, re-examines the change in educated attitudes towards magical beliefs in Britain between about 16 and argues that this was not so much because of work by scientists, but rather due to humanist freethinkers. Britain in the Enlightenment, by Michael Hunter The book also contains handsomely-reproduced and varied illustrations.
Throughout it is interesting, perceptive, and well-written, there is a good deployment of primary and secondary material, a skilful interweaving of the main analysis with particular case studies that have been well-mined, and the work is handsomely produced by Yale who repeatedly offer works that are more attractive as well as important than those coming from Cambridge or Oxford.
With pardon for the analogy, I will play ‘the Devil’s Advocate’ in much of this review, probing what I see as a few of the more problematic issues, but let me begin by offering the praise this book deserves. Completely overhauls our view,’ this is at once an instructive work and, because it is likely to be much applauded, deserves a critical scrutiny.
An important book, acclaimed on its front cover with ‘Deserves to become another classic’ and ‘Important and remarkable….
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