Witchcraft, astrology, divination and every kind of popular magic flourished in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This analysis of beliefs held on different levels of English society begins with the collapse of the medieval Church and ends with the changing intellectual atmosphere around 1700.
Keith Thomas is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was formerly President of Corpus Christi College and, before that, Professor of Modern History and Fellow of St John's College. RELIGION AND DECLINE OF MAGIC, his first book, won one of the two Wolfson Literary Awards for History in 1972. He was knighted in 1988 for services to the study of history.
