Progress depends’, Thomas wrote, ‘on building up a picture from a mass of casual and unpredictable references accumulated over a long period’. As the new story goes, scepticism about magical beliefs and practices, which had actually long existed in Christian Europe, slowly came to the fore during the early modern period as a result of social, political, and religious transformations. Intellectual historians are well placed to investigate how the re-presentation of arguments could make them more or less compelling in different contexts. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that the now-standard periodization ‘early modern’ — which as we saw above Thomas considered using in his title — is itself tied up in older assumptions about the linear progression of history and the importance of this period in the making of ‘modernity’. The book shared the Wolfson prize (as was customary then), with the larger sum going to a work of military history.

There are good grounds, then, for endorsing the Oxford roots the book’s author has repeatedly emphasized. Although David Wootton’s The Invention of Science (2015) (admittedly something of an outlier­­) asserts that science “must” be responsible for shifting attitudes to magic, Michael Hunter’s The Decline of Magic (2020) argues that the science of the scientific revolution actually left a lot of scope for supernatural belief. In this regard, Thomas’s handling of religion and magic is indebted not just to Weber, but also to his mentor Hill. In 2010, Thomas described his books as ‘literary constructions’, ‘lack[ing] anything approaching scientific precision’.Through the lens of functionalism, early modern belief in witchcraft emerged as a ‘conservative social force’ that on the one hand discouraged individuals from transgressing moral and social codes of charity (for fear of igniting the ire of a village witch) and on the other hand encouraged older women to reconsider before cursing their neighbours (for fear of being accused). Witchcraft, astrology, divination and every kind of popular magic flourished in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the belief that a blessed amulet could prevent the assaults of the Devil to the use of the same charms to recover stolen goods. At a conference in 1972, Trevor-Roper accused Thomas of creating a ‘synthetic witch, a Frankenstein monster with a head from Essex, a right leg from the Azande, a left from the Navajo Indians, etc.

The book’s origins were, in his view, ‘largely a matter of chance’, a fortuitous by-product of his undergraduate teaching. Thomas’s response reminds us again of how RDM did not in the end herald in a new form of scientific history. 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’. He argued that the ‘magical’ solutions offered by various cunning folk filled the resulting gap in the market. With a section devoted to the ‘function’ of witch beliefs and a promise to examine such beliefs ‘in the light of anthropological studies of witchcraft elsewhere’, its debt to the functionalist school of social anthropology may indeed seem as ‘obvious’ as the author hoped.In 2006, Thomas considered the broadening of history ‘beyond recognition’ the ‘greatest triumph’ of the Times Literary Supplement manifesto of 1966.

As the next section outlines, the debates, arguments and rivalries of the 1960s led to a work of scholarship very different from what that world expected or, indeed, what readers of this article might have expected, based on our discussion so far. While RDM breaks new ground in terms of its subject matter and ambitions, the work was a battleground which pitted new social-scientific modes of history against the age-old tools of literary, empirical history. Yet in the 1960s and 70s, the modern history curriculum at Oxford remained largely impervious to these changes, despite the efforts of students — and some staff — to encourage reform. Josephson-Storm in The Myth of Disenchantment (2017), to tracing the rise and fall of this dying paradigm itself. Ethnography appealed to Thomas for its insistence on cultural and historical specificity, which moved away from earlier anthropological attempts to construct universal laws about human society.The influence of this approach on RDM — and of Marxist history more generally — is discussed in section III. In its methods as well as its conceptual framing, it looks Janus-like simultaneously backwards and forwards. Yet, as Sir Keith’s reference to his weekly competition with Cooper suggests, there was also a competitive edge to this community of early modernists and to RDM itself, which accounts in part for its bifurcated origins.