I

Although its seeds lie in the early modern period itself, the notion that the Reformation helped to precipitate a seismic shift in attitudes towards the sacred and supernatural took its most classic and enduring form in the work of the German sociologist Max Weber. In The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, first published in 1904–5, Weber saw the Reformation as part of a ‘great historic process’ which he later called ‘the disenchantment of the world’. In search of the origins of modern patterns of economic behaviour and organization, Weber argued that, especially in its more ascetic forms, Protestantism fostered a fundamental rejection of sacramental magic as a mechanism for aiding salvation and promoted the evolution of a transcendental and intellectualized religion in which numinous forces were removed from the sphere of everyday life. It helped to undermine a way of seeing, understanding, and seeking to manipulate the surrounding universe that operated as a major obstacle to the emergence of capitalist modes of production and consumption. The doctrine of personal vocation and the elective affinity of Calvinist predestinarianism provided the ideological and psychological incentive for a mode of ‘methodically rationalized ethical conduct’ that was deeply conducive to the pursuit of worldly success and business enterprise.Footnote ² These ideas were developed independently in a more nuanced form by Weber's contemporary, the Heidelberg theologian Ernst Troeltsch, who likewise heralded the Reformation as an agent (albeit an indirect and accidental one) of modernization.Footnote ³

Extracted out of the analytical framework in which it was first articulated, in the hands of later scholars Weber's thesis of desacralization has suffered from a degree of simplification and caricature that has eclipsed some of its original subtleties. It has also taken on broader significance. Although unacknowledged, the outlines of this paradigm are clearly detectable in Keith Thomas's seminal Religion and the decline of magic (1971). Here the Reformation once again assumes a critical role in effecting the development indicated in the title, a key symptom of which was the reconceptualization of religion itself as a set of internalized dogmas rather than ‘a ritual method of living’. Although Thomas himself recognized and highlighted some of the ambiguities and contradictions that accompanied and characterized this process (a point too often forgotten), it remains the case that the overall thrust of his argument reinforced the theory that Protestantism decisively eroded beliefs about the immanence of the holy. Despite the studiously agnostic, anthropological spirit in which he conducted his inquiry, he too subscribed implicitly to the view that the Reformation helped to emancipate the English populace from a ‘superstitious’ understanding of the world around them, from assumptions which, he wrote in the foreword, were now ‘rightly disdained by intelligent persons’. In more than a faint echo of the inflated claims of the reformers themselves, and of the celebratory Protestant historiography to which it gave rise, he also implied that this was a process that spread with remarkable speed. Initiated and driven from below rather than imposed politically from above, it was a swift and successful movement with genuinely popular roots.Footnote ⁴ For Thomas, the more ‘rational’ religiosity ushered in by the Reformation was a transitional stage through which English society travelled on its way to the modern world. It created a favourable mental environment which made possible the later triumph of technology.Footnote ⁵ Echoes of this demystification thesis can be found in the work of many other historians of the early modern period including Bernhard Vogler, Richard van Dulmen, Thomas Nipperdey, and Carlos Eire. The latter links it with the ‘Scientific Revolution’ in laying the ground work for the replacement of the mysterious and wonder-working aspects of late medieval religion with an abstract and cerebral faith based on the principle of reason, which permitted the material universe to be understood in empirical terms.Footnote ⁶

In recent years, however, the notion that the Reformation was a powerful catalyst of ‘the disenchantment of the world' has been seriously questioned and qualified. In large part this is a consequence of a series of what were then provocative and iconoclastic articles written by the late Bob Scribner. Pointing to evidence of continuities and homologies between medieval and Protestant mentalities, Scribner argued that the Reformation played a more marginal role in the processes of desacralization and secularization than Weber and the historians who followed in his footsteps assumed. He admitted that some aspects of Protestantism may have encouraged the eviction or repudiation of ‘magic’, but insisted that others militated strongly against it. Focusing less on the theology of the reformers than on the untidy realities and dissonant features of the phenomenon as it was put into practice at the grass roots, he found that the Reformation did not effect as dramatic or complete a break with the Catholic past as has often been alleged. It modified and curtailed, rather than wholly rejected, the traditional ‘economy of the sacred’: it did not entirely dispense with holy persons, places, times, or objects; it engendered rituals and even a magic of its own. The difference between Protestantism and Catholicism, he inferred, was a matter of degree rather than kind.Footnote ⁷ Reacting against a triumphalist narrative of the impact of the Reformation, Scribner's project may be seen as part of a broader shift of perspective that saw claims about its ‘success’ superseded by a new stress on its ‘failure’.Footnote ⁸ It was linked with a wider enterprise to reconstruct collective mentalities and to recover ‘popular culture’Footnote ⁹ – to detect the points at which it clashed with and resisted the imperialistic pretensions of theologians and politicians intent upon securing ideological and practical hegemony. It was also a telling sign of the loosening grip of a confessional and sectarian historiography of the Reformation – of the demise of a framework of analysis underpinned by self-congratulation, by a desire to recover the glorious struggles in which their Protestant forebears had engaged in ages past and to sweep under the carpet the unedifying compromises that evolved in practice.

This bold revisionist backlash against the confident teleologies and polarities embedded in older models of ‘modernization’ now represents something approaching the current historical consensus. It has left a palpable mark on much recent historiography in this field, including my own. The themes of a recent survey of Reformation Europe by Ulinka Rublack (one of Scribner's own pupils) are a measure of this general trend: here we find not only a striking emphasis on the limits of disenchantment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also (in a further swing of the pendulum) the suggestion that, on the contrary, the period to c. 1650 witnessed a partial or temporary intensification of the assumptions that underpinned the late medieval sacramental universe.Footnote ¹⁰

A further index of this process of reinterpretation is the extent to which it has begun to move forward to encompass the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a trend that also reflects the growing tendency to speak of a ‘Long Reformation’ – to envisage the movement of religious reform and renewal less as a telescoped historical moment that lasted at most a few decades, than as something that extended over several centuries.Footnote ¹¹ Important recent work by Owen Davies, Jane Shaw, Sasha Handley, and others has drawn attention to the resilience and persistence of belief in magic and the supernatural after 1700, and not merely at the level of the illiterate and unlearned. It has shown how assumptions about miracles, prodigies and providence, ghosts, angels, demons, and other inhabitants of the invisible world, survived and adapted to the intellectual and cultural challenges of a period immortalized as the ‘Age of Reason’, in a manner that clouds the very concept of Enlightenment itself. Fresh studies of the occult in Hanoverian and Victorian England are rendering the notion of a decisive cultural rupture in this sphere increasingly contentious and pointing to the possibility that the apparent resurgence of magic and alternative cosmologies in modern British society may represent less a new departure than the re-emergence of vigorous older traditions that previously lay beneath its surface.Footnote ¹²

Three further historiographical developments deserve to be mentioned. The first is the concomitant transformation in writing about the Catholic or Counter Reformation. Setting aside the older view that this was merely a conservative reaction against or defensive response to the shock of the Protestant assault, historians have emphasized the extent to which both movements grew out of a common set of impulses and shared many priorities. Both sought to intensify and spiritualize the piety of the populace and to prune away the dubious accretions and corruptions Christianity was perceived to have accumulated in the course of its entrenchment and institutionalization in the preceding half-millennium. Both wanted to eradicate ‘superstition’, to police the boundaries between sacred and secular more tightly, and to intensify the interior faith and moral fervour of the laity.Footnote ¹³ This trend has served to stress the extent to which the Tridentine Church was itself engaged in a campaign that, in some respects at least, contributed to the developments that have come to be encapsulated in the phrase ‘the disenchantment of the world’. It too tried to restrain manifestations of lay enthusiasm, to curtail unorthodox aspects of the cult of saints, and to subject manifestations of the divine to rigorous testing and investigation, particularly in the fifty years following Luther's bold protest against indulgences in Wittenberg in 1517. In this sense, the Reformation may be seen as part of a broader humanist moment which prompted Catholic evangelicals themselves to retreat from the more extravagant efflorescences of traditional piety for at least a generation. Thereafter, the Catholic Church re-embraced the miraculous in a manner that made it one of the hallmarks of the baroque, though we should not overlook the scrupulous wariness about authenticating the sacred that remained a continuing thread in ecclesiastical life.Footnote ¹⁴ The records of the Spanish, Venetian, and Roman Inquisitions are a testament to the anxieties about imposture that surrounded the thaumaturgic and prophetic claims made about images and relics and about aspiring saints, whether cloistered nuns, zealous priests, or devout laity.Footnote ¹⁵ While it is important to recognize the significant doctrinal differences that divided the two Reformations and the divergent theological assumptions that shaped their endeavours,Footnote ¹⁶ the fact remains that both in various ways were seeking to redraw the boundaries between ‘religion’ and ‘magic’, ‘superstition’ and official religion. That they drew these boundaries in different places does not detract from the observation that early modern Catholicism and Protestantism had some key objectives in common.

The second historiographical trend concerns the medieval centuries. Over the last three decades our understanding of religion in this period has been enriched, revised, and extended by an increasingly sophisticated scholarship, a chief effect of which has been to challenge one of the fundamental bases upon which traditional interpretations of the Reformation were built. As Eamon Duffy and others have shown with much sympathy and sensitivity, late medieval religion was not in terminal decline. It had remarkable vitality, vigour, and inventiveness and retained the respect and loyalty of perhaps the vast majority of the laity, many of whom proved reluctant to relinquish it for the new religion.Footnote ¹⁷ How far it had willingly co-opted and skillfully syncretized with the pagan beliefs and practices of Europeans remains a moot point,Footnote ¹⁸ but it is erroneous to dismiss religious culture in the late middle ages as no more than superficially Christian.Footnote ¹⁹ To speak (with Keith Thomas) of ‘magic of the medieval Church’ is to judge it by criteria that contemporaries did not share, to see it through the distorting lens of anachronistic assumptions.Footnote ²⁰ At the same time, we cannot ignore the fact that churchmen of this era were engaged in a periodic and ongoing struggle to relieve Christianity of ‘superstitious’ excrescences and to establish the parameters of orthodoxy, which peaked at various junctures, notably in the twelfth century. Church councils, vigilant bishops like Guibert de Nogent, and ecclesiastical reformers such as John Gerson were conscious of areas of vulnerability and the concerns they articulated anticipate the themes of post-Reformation writers in ways that help to explain the surprising fragility which some features of late medieval piety exhibited when confronted by Protestantism.Footnote ²¹ This body of work has also taught us that ‘scepticism’ and ‘belief’ with regard to manifestations of the supernatural – whether divine or diabolical – coexisted throughout the middle ages, with circumstances determining the explanation that triumphed on a given occasion. ‘Medical’ techniques and ‘scientific’ arguments, for example, were regularly deployed to test the claims of candidates for sainthood in the course of canonization proceedings.Footnote ²² More provocatively, some scholars have underlined the long tradition of doubt that surrounded claims about the physical reality of human and demonic interaction. They have suggested that the elaboration of demonological theory that began in the thirteenth century and laid the foundations for systematic witch-hunting was a paradoxical product of these deep-seated anxieties – a side-effect of what has been termed ‘a crisis of belief’.Footnote ²³ In the face of such scholarship, the settled assumptions about medieval ‘credulity’ upon which the Weberian paradigm of disenchantment is predicated are becoming increasingly untenable.Footnote ²⁴ The idea of an enchanted middle ages is gradually evaporating. So too should the easy commonplaces and distorting characterizations in which early modernists are apt to engage about the era before 1500.Footnote ²⁵ This is not a certain touchstone by which we can measure or judge the alleged desacralization wrought by the Reformation. Thereby we perpetuate the polemical contrast between ‘darkness’ and ‘light’ that has been the invidious legacy of this movement, in combination with the Renaissance, and which remains fossilized in the conventional academic division drawn between ‘medieval’ and (early) ‘modern’ history. The centuries preceding the theological and liturgical upheavals of the mid-sixteenth century need to be seen as part of the problem, rather than as a prelude to it.

A third tendency can be dealt with more briefly and that is a postmodernist preoccupation with the relativity of what we define as ‘reason’. One of the most distinctive features of recent work in this field has been its determination to rescue early modern beliefs about witches, angels, demons, fairies, ghosts, and the unruly interventions of the deity Himself from what E. P. Thompson, in another context, called the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’.Footnote ²⁶ It is no longer acceptable to dismiss assumptions about astrology, providence, and the apocalypse as forms of irrational delusion. Instead we have to recognize their inner logic and intellectual coherence. ‘Truth’, we have been taught, is culturally and socially constructed.Footnote ²⁷

The consequence of all the historiographical trends I have been describing has been to throw traditional periodization into disarray and to undercut the foundations of the teleological paradigms upon which they rest and which, simultaneously, they support. This is a theme to which I shall return at the end of the article, but first it is necessary to review in more detail the findings of recent work on the links between Protestantism and the transformation of assumptions about the sacred and the supernatural. Here renewed emphasis will be placed on the equivocal and ambiguous legacy left by the upheavals associated with the Reformation. I shall then consider how it converged with other intellectual, cultural, political, and social developments in ways that further complicate the task of assessing its immediate impact and long-term repercussions.

A few preliminary caveats must be made at the outset. The first is that I shall be principally concerned with ‘desacralization’ rather than with ‘secularization’: with the decline of belief in divine immanence rather than the rejection or marginalization of religion per se. The latter, equally contested development, though not unconnected with or easily disentangled from the first, must be set aside for another occasion.Footnote ²⁸ The second is that my use of the word ‘supernatural’ is at once loose and precise: I employ it both as a convenient shorthand for the broad cluster of phenomena that have been deemed casualties of the ‘disenchantment’ process and in its technical sense to designate a thing or event that was above or beyond the realm of nature, as understood by contemporaries. This must be distinguished from the category of the ‘preternatural’, incidents and entities which only seemed to be abnormal, extraordinary, or mysterious and whose natural causes were merely ‘occult’ or hidden from feeble human perception. Thirdly, space precludes as full an exploration of the differences between divergent strands of the Reformation, Lutheran, Zwinglian and Calvinist, magisterial and radical, as might be wished. Nor is there room to examine in sufficient depth the relationship between individual and collective mentalities and the distorted perceptions of change that are a function of the survival and visibility of certain types of sources and classes of evidence.Footnote ²⁹

II

We may begin with the observation that, in its early stages, Protestantism deliberately adopted a rhetoric of rationality and enlightenment. In the polemic that poured from the pulpit and press, it overtly presented itself as a movement that would purge the dross of ‘magic’ from the pure metal of the Christian ‘religion’ and prune away the ‘superstitious’ popish and pagan accretions that had sprung up around it. The reformers liberally employed the metaphor of light dispelling intellectual darkness; they spoke of the Gospel as an instrument for liberating the mass of the populace from the yoke of ignorance in which they had been kept by the papacy; and they poured scorn on the crude materialism and credulity that characterized late medieval piety. Here they were echoing elements of a critique which had already been enunciated by various groups of medieval heretics, including the Lollards, against aspects of popular religious belief and practice.Footnote ³⁰ Nor was this confined to educated theologians and dissident thinkers like John Wyclif. An earthy, ‘rationalist’ contempt for consecrated and hallowed objects as ‘mere stocks and stones’ and for the host as common bread also found more than occasional expression among the unlearned.Footnote ³¹ To this extent the linguistic resources for launching an attack upon sacramentalism were already partially present.

This is not to undermine the fact that, assessed in the abstract, Protestant theology did in many respects constitute a significant and original assault upon the assumptions that buttressed the medieval economy of the sacred. Especially as expounded by the Swiss reformers, it represented what Edward Muir calls a ‘revolution in ritual theory’ and embodied a ‘new theological metaphysics’. The sacraments were reconceptualized as mere signs rather than automatic bearers or mechanisms of spiritual grace. While Luther sought to retain a sense of divine presence in the Eucharist by the doctrine of ubiquity, Zwingli radically reconceptualized it as a memorial of Christ's sacrifice rather than a miraculous re-enactment of it. The physical rituals that were supposed to reify these holy mysteries were likewise redefined as symbolic gestures, lacking intrinsic efficacy in and of themselves. Calvin adopted a different and more complex position, which preserved the notion that the communion was an instrument by which God actively united believers to their redeemer and saviour. Protestants also rejected emphatically the idea that forms of words such as blessings and prayers and material objects like sacramentals could operate as conduits or receptacles of holy power. Images of the deity and saints were simply representations: to believe that they had any kind of implanted sacredness was equivalent to heathen idolatry and placed a barrier between the Almighty and the soul of the individual. Transcendental spiritual truth could not be accessed through the mediation of the mundane physical world.Footnote ³² Nor, in theory, could there be any form of communication between the living and the dead: the abolition of purgatory and a soteriology which stressed the helplessness of mankind to affect its fate in the afterlife ruled out any possibility of reciprocal intercession to assist each other to secure a resting place in heaven.Footnote ³³ To recognize that some of its tenets had roots in the thinking of medieval scholastics and mystics is not to detract from the fact that Protestantism disrupted and undercut at least some of the foundations of the contemporary understanding of the relationship between the divine and the terrestrial realms. It systematized strands in the Western philosophical tradition in a way that had profound intellectual implications.Footnote ³⁴

What deserves more emphasis than it has sometimes received is the impact which the translation of these theological precepts into practice may have had upon those who witnessed and participated in them during the initial and later phases of the Reformation. To watch, or to collaborate in, the physical dissolution of monasteries and chantry chapels and the iconoclastic destruction of statutes and crucifixes in churches was to have personal experience of the desacralization of the physical world. To see a great abbey reduced to rubble or to cast an image on to a pyre without disaster striking was to be convinced that these structures and artefacts were indeed lifeless and vacuous and that acts against them were not, in fact, forms of sacrilege. It was to become an accomplice to processes of profanation that then necessitated the internalization of ideological justifications for such destructive acts, or indeed helped to engender them.Footnote ³⁵ It was to acquire palpable proof that they were impotent and powerless, even or perhaps especially when those carrying out these ordeals by axe and fire had not been certain of this at the outset. ‘The supernatural’, to echo Margaret Aston, was ‘discredited by inertia’.Footnote ³⁶ The carnivalesque rituals of defilement and desecration directed against priests, monks, and the mass also had the visible effect of dispelling the aura of reverence that had formerly surrounded them. So too did the satirical plays, songs, and pictures poking fun at the pope and the cult of saints that were a feature of Protestantism when it was an unruly and rebellious protest movement.Footnote ³⁷ We need to recapture a sense of the corrosive power exerted by humour and laughter and the ways in which comedy served as a highly successful mechanism for demystification in this period.

Attention must also be paid to the preoccupation with Catholic forgery, imposture, and fraudulence which accompanied this moment of cultural rupture.Footnote ³⁸ Protestants denounced reports of thaumaturgic cures and apparitions of the saints as instances of popish deceit and duplicity. The tales that saturated medieval hagiography were similarly dismissed as fables devised by idle friars intent upon deluding a gullible laity.Footnote ³⁹ Wonder-working images and relics like the Rood of Boxley and the Blood of Hailes were exposed as ingenious fakes, and divine visions that appeared to prophets, seers, and ‘holy maids’ like Elizabeth Barton, the infamous Nun of Kent, were attributed to either human guile or the effects of psychosomatic illness. Such strategies for discrediting reputed intrusions of the supernatural had precedents in the medieval past but neither the immediate effects of this strain of ‘scepticism’ nor the rich bequest it left to later polemicists should be underestimated. Yet in so far as the devil was seen to be the ultimate source of such fabrications and fictions and the papacy and priesthood were literally believed to be his agents and minions this line of argument was by no means inherently desacralizing. The rhetoric of ‘disenchantment’ that was so central to the reformers' assault upon the Church of Rome paradoxically acquired much of its urgency from a heightened sense that supernatural or preternatural forces were at work in the world. Protestant condemnations of Catholicism as a form of witchcraft, sorcery, and magic reflected an ingrained conviction, inspired and sanctioned by Scripture, that Satan and his disciples would be particularly active in the lead up to the end of the world. Such lies and illusions were themselves evidence of the reign of Antichrist and proof that the Apocalypse, the culmination of a great cosmic battle between good and evil, was nigh. The Reformation may thus be argued to have intensified eschatological expectancy and anxiety. Protestant preoccupation with manifestations of diabolical malice stimulated demonological writing and helped to inspire drives to eradicate witches from society as the enemies of God.Footnote ⁴⁰

This brings us to the point that Protestantism, in no sense, rejected the notion that the sacred could intervene in the world. In the guise of the doctrine of providence, it placed fresh emphasis on the power and omnipotence of God and defended vigorously the precept that he interceded to warn, punish, chastise, try, and reward individuals and communities alike. This renewed stress on divine foresight and might arose because of, and in tandem with, an attempt to deflect attention away from saintly intermediaries and to underline the utter depravity and helplessness of human beings. If anything the reformers strengthened the tendency to detect the hand of the Almighty behind floods, fires, storms, and other strange accidents and catastrophic events and to interpret these visitations as divine judgements for sin and impiety. Anomalies of nature like prodigies, monsters, and strange visions in the sky were the ‘extraordinary preachers’ and ‘visible sermons’ he sent to encourage his people to repent and amend.Footnote ⁴¹ The very vehemence with which Protestants attacked Catholicism as a form of superstition and magic was itself a function of their fear of divine intervention: they believed that if the false religion and idolatry practised by the papists was not swiftly eradicated God would step in to plague the nations that tolerated it. The world thus remained what Scribner called a ‘moralized universe’ and one, moreover, that continued to be populated by angels and demons.Footnote ⁴² If Protestant propagandists repeatedly reiterated the slogan that ‘miracles had ceased’, they did not mean that God himself could no longer disrupt, change, or subvert nature, but only that, since the truth had been revealed and received, He saw less need to do so. What they denied was that miracles could occur at the behest of human beings, whether clergy or laity – a fundamental, if fine, distinction that has not always been sufficiently recognized by modern historians.Footnote ⁴³ Nor did the reformers deprive the devil of his ability to bring about puzzling effects, even if they maintained the traditional view that these were no more than clever tricks permitted by the Lord for his own mysterious (but ultimately benign) purposes.Footnote ⁴⁴ To this extent Protestants shared the same cosmology as medieval and contemporary Catholics. What the Reformation may be said to have done – as much for polemical reasons as for any other – was to help to expand the category of the preternatural and to collapse the miraculous into the natural, the latter being increasingly the medium by which God chose to communicate his messages to humanity at large. The problem was that these hair-splitting distinctions about the precise status of events were largely lost on the unlearned populace. Furthermore, in a context in which advances in natural philosophy were pushing back the frontiers of scientific knowledge, the boundary between such categories was not merely subjective and porous but also in a continual state of flux. Confidence that human vision provided reliable access to and knowledge of the world was itself under strain. It was giving way, under the influence of a conjunction of religious, cultural, and intellectual developments, to unprecedented emphasis on the fallibility and malleability of sight. Early modern people began to be tormented by the fear that their eyes might be deceiving them.Footnote ⁴⁵

It is also a mistake to position the religion of inner conviction and spiritual intensity that was a consequence of Protestant predestinarianism in opposition to an outlook suffused by assumptions about the presence and unpredictable intervention of occult forces. On the contrary, this was a piety which revolved around the idea that the Lord actively infused miraculous grace into the conscience of the true believer. It also fostered an obsessive scrutiny of tangible and intangible signs that might provide assurance that one numbered among the elect – from a devastating personal disaster like the death of a friend or relative to a minor mishap like the discovery of a spider in a porridge bowl.Footnote ⁴⁶ To observe that this brand of introspective providentialism may have exerted a moderating influence on the so-called ‘witchcraze’ is in no sense to see it as an agent of desacralization: by deflecting attention away from external scapegoats towards the private sins that had exposed one to the wrath of the Almighty, it merely relocated the operations of the supernatural inside the soul.Footnote ⁴⁷ For fervent Protestants, moreover, hearing or reading the Word of God itself could be a near sacramental and mystical experience. The word was not ‘just a communicative sign. It could mediate the divine.’Footnote ⁴⁸ This inspired some puritans and sectaries to believe that they were vessels and instruments of the Holy Spirit.Footnote ⁴⁹ To an outsider, they might seem to have made idols of themselves.Footnote ⁵⁰

This is just one respect in which Protestantism may be said to have retained a place for the notion of sacred persons. Although it demoted many men and women canonized by the medieval church from the ranks of sainthood, it sanctioned a degree of respect for other members of the traditional company of heaven, albeit on the basis of their exemplary virtue rather than intercessory power, which it denied they could exercise in either this world or the next.Footnote ⁵¹ Furthermore, in the guise of martyrs who had sacrificed their lives for the faith and charismatic preachers who were the centre of popular cults of celebrity the Reformation not entirely unwittingly perpetuated the tendency to regard some living human beings as set apart or specially chosen by God. The deaths of some of the former were allegedly accompanied by prodigious signs like eerie lights and claps of thunder while some of the latter like John Foxe and James Ussher acquired a reputation for expelling demons and foretelling future events such as the defeat of the Spanish Armada.Footnote ⁵² Famously, Martin Luther himself was represented and posthumously revered in a manner that was highly reminiscent of the medieval cult of saints.Footnote ⁵³ Similar superficial continuities with earlier patterns of piety are apparent in the case of the many Lutheran prophets who were blessed with angelical apparitions and charged with warning their communities of impending punishments and the female and adolescent seers whose pronouncements were sometimes given serious attention by the ecclesiastical authorities in post-Reformation England. That some of these were branded witches, demoniacs, and fraudsters should not distract from the fact that others were indeed regarded as divine messengers, by ministers and lay people alike.Footnote ⁵⁴ In a further reinterpretation of older modes of religious behaviour, young women who starved themselves were sometimes seen as the recipients of providential mercy and beneficence, though just as frequently as victims of satanic delusion.Footnote ⁵⁵ Protestants may not have prayed to these ‘saints’ after the fashion of their Catholic counterparts, but the areas of overlap between pre- and post-Reformation mentalities must be acknowledged alongside the differences and ruptures.

Nor can we ignore the fact that English monarchs continued to be seen as conduits of thaumaturgic power capable of healing diseases like scrofula, notwithstanding puritan doubts about the popish elements of the ceremonies through which it was dispensed and the later tainting of these procedures by association with the deposed Stuart dynasty.Footnote ⁵⁶ John Bossy has made the provocative suggestion that the sacralization of early modern rulers was in part a by-product of the Reformation repudiation of the miracle of transubstantiation at the heart of the mass: sacred presence passed from the host to the person of the king.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the light of the work of Stuart Clark and others, it is certainly increasingly difficult to agree with narratives that seek to chart the smooth displacement of a quasi-magical, ‘medieval’ conception of monarchy by the ‘modern’ rational state.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the context of England, Charles I's own martyrdom at the hands of parliament in 1649 may have infused the idea of the divinity of kingship with a new lease of life, even as his literal dismemberment on the scaffold temporarily shattered the notion of the inviolability of those the Lord anointed to rule as his earthly deputies. Charles II energetically cultivated his claim to possess the royal touch after the Restoration and the crowds which flocked to court to partake of this benefit did not dry up after the accession of William III, despite his studied refusal to perpetuate the royal ritual.Footnote ⁵⁹

In practice, Protestantism also seems to have found room for hallowed objects. The mysterious incombustibility of some portraits of Martin Luther is a particularly intriguing and striking example,Footnote ⁶⁰ but we may also note that during Mary's reign people scrambled for charred relics of the Protestant martyrs burnt at the stake.Footnote ⁶¹ Similarly, handkerchiefs soaked in the blood of the executed King Charles I were supposed by some to have curative properties in the 1650s.Footnote ⁶² A degree of slippage between souvenir and sacramental, sign and receptacle of supernatural virtue was hard to prevent and seems if anything to have increased the further the Reformation travelled from the heady days of the mid-sixteenth century. Both in Germany and England bibles, prayerbooks, and sometimes catechisms came to be viewed as possessing divine potency and to be used in a manner strongly evocative of Catholic sacramentals, as amulets and prophylactics.Footnote ⁶³ The mutilated remains of images and pictures destroyed by Protestant zealots were themselves sometimes lovingly preserved as memorials of the Reformation: Nehemiah Wallington kept fragments of stained glass broken in the early 1640s ‘to show to the generation to come what God hath done for us’.Footnote ⁶⁴ More broadly, iconoclasm had the capacity to invest material objects with the very numinous power it was designed to disprove: the void it left behind became the subject of a kind of sacred aura itself.Footnote ⁶⁵

Churches, churchyards, and other places in the wider landscape likewise continued to be regarded as, in some sense, sanctified. Reformed theologians insisted that it was the presence of the congregation of the godly, rather than any inherent sanctity in the material building itself that made it the Lord's temple, but this did not effect the evacuation of the presence of the sacred from the spatial domain so much as its liturgical reconceptualization. Moreover, both new and old structures became subject to forms of consecration and formally set apart for worship in ways which allowed the concept of sacrilege to survive the upheavals of the early Reformation and re-emerge in a modified form.Footnote ⁶⁶ The growth of anxiety about the fates that had befallen those who purchased sites of dissolved monasteries in the seventeenth century may be seen as a symptom of the partial resacralization of space that accompanied the Laudian programme to restore ‘the beauty of holiness’.Footnote ⁶⁷ In the form of healing mineral springs whose medicinal waters were attributed to the benevolence of the Almighty and celebrated for effecting providential or even miraculous cures, Protestantism may also be said to have helped to perpetuate, even as it subtly transformed, the notion that divine power was concentrated in particular locations. The natural world was not simply an emblem of God's majesty or a canvas on which he sketched His intentions; it was still perceived by some ministers, doctors, and patients to be a source of access to supernatural virtue and therapeutic potency itself.Footnote ⁶⁸

Although it severely pruned the calendar of saints and dispensed with dozens of former ‘holy days’ it would be a mistake to suggest that the Reformation completely demystified or neutralized the concept of time. This is evident in the series of Protestant and patriotic anniversaries that sprang up in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – days on which the nation commemorated its divine deliverances from popish plots and conspiracies such as the Gunpowder Treason of 1605 with bonfires and bells on the streets and the ecclesiastical solemnities of psalms, addresses, and prayers.Footnote ⁶⁹ It may also be detected in the supreme importance which puritans attached to the proper keeping of the sabbath. Profanation of the Lord's Day by work or sport was nothing less than a Protestant taboo: it reflected a continuing belief that time, like space, could be violated in a way that might draw down heavenly vengeance upon men's and women's heads. Hence the proliferation of stories of providential judgement on those who laboured or engaged in recreation on Sunday instead of listening to sermons and attending divine service.Footnote ⁷⁰

Protestantism also retained and developed its own forms of ritual, some of which crossed the line between supplication and coercion to acquire a near-automatic efficacy, at least in the eyes and hands of the laity. The sessions of humiliation, fasting, and prayer that followed outbreaks of plague and other disasters may be mentioned, along with rogationtide processions and puritan rites of exorcism.Footnote ⁷¹ Protestant theology may have taught that heartfelt displays of contrition from sin could not in themselves persuade God to lift His sword of vengeance (all such decisions having been foreseen and preordained at the beginning of time), but in practice many continued to cling to the idea that humble repentance could indeed induce him to change his mind spontaneously. And however much ministers might insist that the blessing of the fields and ejection of unclean spirits was contingent upon the will of God, there were clearly those who supposed that such rituals possessed an intrinsic ability to increase the fertility of crops and expel unwanted demons. The same applies to those popular practices designed to counteract the unpredictabilities of the natural environment which Bob Scribner described as a distinctively Protestant species of magic. These too were vulnerable to becoming forms of what he calls ‘covert evangelical sacramentalism’ rather than acts of piety whose significance was acknowledged to be purely symbolic.Footnote ⁷²

Some of these phenomena sit more than a little uneasily with the orthodoxies of Protestant theology as detailed in confessional formularies and learned compilations of doctrine. How, then, should we interpret them? One approach is to regard them as an index of the patent failure of Protestantism to transform the mentalities of ordinary people–as a measure of the gap between lofty clerical ideals and prescriptions and messy practical and parochial realities. Like contemporary ministers and commentators, later folklorists and a distinguished phalanx of more recent historians, we might see them as stubborn survivals of essentially Catholic beliefs and observances, evidence of conservative resistance to a religious revolution imposed from above and of a determination to preserve aspects of traditional culture that seemed to provide more tangible methods of coping with their vicissitudes than the arduous ethic of self-help that underpinned Protestantism.Footnote ⁷³ This argument can be linked with Keith Thomas's influential suggestion that the Reformation may, in fact, have encouraged greater recourse to non-religious strategies for counteracting tribulation and misfortune: for him, cunning men and astrologers filled the vacuum left by Protestantism's decision to disarm itself of the ecclesiastical ‘magic’ of the medieval church.Footnote ⁷⁴ There is a danger here of underestimating the inherent appeal of providentialism, as well as of falling into the trap of an anthropological functionalism that sees religion merely as a mechanism for meeting particular social and psychological needs. Nevertheless Thomas's thesis still deserves attention. It may assist in explaining why, in desperation, some committed Protestants continued to resort to the Catholic priesthood itself for help, utilizing the sacramental magic of the Church of Rome as part of an eclectic repertoire of solutions and remedies.

Indeed, there is much to suggest that the Tridentine Church sought to exploit precisely those aspects of thaumaturgic ritual and sacred protection which the reformers had deliberately repudiated in their struggle for religious supremacy. As the influence of the humanist critique of the medieval cult of saints and miracles declined Roman Catholicism eagerly reasserted its credentials as a repository of numinous power.Footnote ⁷⁵ In turn, this may help to account for the way in which Protestantism began to engender wonder-working features of its own. To this extent, confessional conflict and rivalry may be seen to have promoted the Protestant culture of the supernatural, just as, in other respects, it quite clearly operated to restrain and inhibit it. Furthermore, increasingly disillusioned by the failure of the preaching of the Gospel to make a significant impression on the laity, some clergymen deliberately tried to harness their fascination with the occult for both devotional and polemical ends. Thus second-generation Lutheran ministers exploited popular interest in astrology, using the ‘preaching of the stars’ to press home the message that God was angry with a society that refused to pay heed to sermons and to urge the readers of almanacs and prognostications to transform their evil lives. Frustration, it may be inferred from this example, helped to foster a degree of concession to what (with some reservations) we may term ‘popular culture’.Footnote ⁷⁶

A more subtle variation on this theme explains the Protestant culture of the supernatural in terms of the clergy either passively condoning or actively finding ways of absorbing what it proved unable to reform or eradicate. As recent studies by Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall have shown, in the face of an ingrained conviction that the dead had not passed irretrievably beyond the realm of human apprehension, Protestant writers found themselves obliged to accommodate ghosts in the reformed universe. Since they could not be the souls of the departed, they had to redefine apparitions as either demons or angels in a manner which reveals not merely the intransigence of the populace but the pastoral sensitivity of those who ministered to them. As a result, wraiths and revenants persisted in Protestant consciousness long after the theology of purgatory had all but withered out of existence.Footnote ⁷⁷ Not that the clergy themselves stood outside this process: they too had to devise methods of reconciling the discrepancies between the doctrinal tenets they had been taught and the unruly reality of their own subjective experiences. They too had to find a way of living with ostensible contradictions.

Such examples bear witness to forms of cultural exchange and negotiation in which old and new beliefs mingled, in a marriage that was not without its ideological tensions and frictions but which nevertheless worked well enough. Together with other forms of syncretism, they provide evidence of processes of adaptation that facilitated the rehabilitation of aspects of the medieval ‘economy or system of the sacred’ in a distinctively Protestant guise. It is also important to recognize that this occurred not merely despite, but also because of, the Reformation: while the theology of the reformers challenged some of the most fundamental assumptions that supported traditional conceptions of the divine, it reinforced others powerfully to create a general climate in which beliefs and practices connected with the supernatural continued to survive, if not to thrive. Rather than underlining the inability of the Reformation to penetrate the popular mind, some of the phenomena I have been describing may paradoxically testify to a deep internalization of its central precepts. If Protestant laypeople continued to make use of forms of divination of which their pastors disapproved, this may be because they provided some release from precisely those anxieties about one's spiritual status engendered by the doctrine of double predestination itself – they helped to assuage the doubts of the godly about their election and salvation.Footnote ⁷⁸ It is misleading, moreover, to approach reformed theology as a static body of doctrine, frozen in form once it was enshrined in writing and print by the founding fathers of the Protestant religion. Instead it needs to be analysed as a living and breathing tissue, as an organism responsive to alterations in the successive social and cultural climates in which it found itself.

Simultaneously, we need to take account of generational change. The fact that such beliefs and practices were as, if not more, often a feature of Protestantism in its later manifestations than its initial phases alerts us to the ways in which attitudes altered as original controversial priorities waxed and waned and were replaced by new practical and ideological pressures and challenges. Thus the anti-Catholic agenda that had animated England's earliest Protestants gave way to the fresh dilemma of intensifying piety and rousing the populace out of its perceived indifference and apathy. In turn, the radical rejection of the immanence of the holy that had characterized the iconoclastic stages of the movement resurfaced in response to particular crises – to the renewed drive to reinforce the sacredness of ritual and worship associated with Archbishop Laud's programme to promote ‘the beauty of holiness’ and to the threat posed by the renewed supernaturalism of the ‘enthusiastic’ sects which sprang up in the 1640s and 50s. The first Quakers, Muggletonians, and Ranters were people who believed that their mission and vocation was affirmed by signs, wonders, and miracles.Footnote ⁷⁹ Such crises sparked fresh outbursts of religious vandalism and new polemical campaigns against those who claimed divine inspiration. Such writers revived and extended long-standing tactics for discrediting ecstatic spirituality and enthusiasm, including the strategy of medicalizing it as a form of insanity.Footnote ⁸⁰ If the confessional agendas that had demanded the adoption of a rationalist rhetoric of ‘disenchantment’ and spurred on a phase of ‘desacralization’ at the beginning of the period receded as Protestantism became settled and institutionalized, they did not disappear completely. If the evidence suggests that Protestantism played an equivocal role in eliminating magic from the world, this is not to say that either the intellectual and linguistic or the practical and physical legacies of this movement were insignificant. Indeed, later much the same language would be taken up by Socinians and Deists in their assault upon the superstition and fanaticism with which they believed mainstream religion itself was riddled – a series of initiatives that, in their own way, may be seen as a kind of second Reformation.Footnote ⁸¹ In turn, this fostered a counter tendency to defend godly Protestantism, whether Anglican or Nonconformist, from the effects of what was perceived as a dangerous form of theological reductionism. Such remarks lead to the further observation that if processes of ‘disenchantment’ were occurring, they did not travel steadily in one direction. On the contrary, it may be more helpful to envisage a complex cycle in which opposing impulses interacted dynamically and played off each other in a reciprocal and dialectical fashion.

III

Yet it cannot be denied that subtle shifts and developments took place over the course of the early modern period which, cumulatively, were decisive. In thinking about these transitions, John Bossy's more neutral phrase ‘migrations of the holy’ has some conceptual advantages as a tool for exploring the gradual displacement of the sacred and supernatural into new social, cultural, conceptual, and discursive contexts and spaces.Footnote ⁸² Some may be symptoms, rather than causes, of cultural change and many are interconnected with each other. It is perhaps only by concentrating on the conjunction and interaction of these various forces and factors that we will best be able to understand how (even if we cannot fully comprehend why) perceptions of the invisible world evolved in this period.

First, it is possible to detect signs of a process by which certain sacred rituals and practices were displaced out of the realm of religion and piety into the domains of leisure and recreation. This was largely a consequence of the Protestant campaign to prune away unnecessary ceremonies and superstitious observances. Ronald Hutton has shown how liturgical rites associated with Easter, Whitsun, All Souls Day, and other key dates in the ecclesiastical calendar that were proscribed and driven out of the church during the Reformation were gradually translated into domestic contexts and transmuted into festive and seasonal customs, in a fashion which at least some eighteenth-century clergymen seem to have regard as more or less harmless.Footnote ⁸³ The practice of pilgrimage to hallowed shrines and sites in the landscape like holy springs appears to have undergone a comparable transmutation: people may have ceased to believe that such journeys would earn them merit in the eyes of God, but they continued to make visits to them for the purposes of refreshment and relaxation.Footnote ⁸⁴ Such transpositions contributed to the eventual emergence of a more ‘secular’ concept of tourism and also perhaps to the evolution of a more aesthetic appreciation of nature and scenery, though the motor behind these developments is no less obscure and elusive. Daniel Woolf has identified a somewhat similar transformation taking place at a more intellectual level: he speculates that the abolition of relic-worship in the 1530s was an indirect stimulus to antiquarian interest in them as historical and archaeological artefacts. Gradually denuded of their magical associations, such objects continued to evoke a kind of fascination which some contemporaries equated, if only rhetorically, with idolatry.Footnote ⁸⁵

There also seem grounds for considering the suggestion that the supernatural was very slowly migrating into the sphere of art and the imagination. While there had always been a tension between the titillating and moralistic aspects of reports of ghosts, apparitions, witches, and demons, in the eighteenth century the balance does appear to tip further away from awe and edification to curiosity and entertainment. This may be related in complex ways to the emerging split between the genres of ‘news’ and the ‘novel’Footnote ⁸⁶ – to a growing distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ that was linked not simply with the rise of empiricism but also, it may be suspected, to Protestantism's determination to differentiate signs from the sacred things they signified and representations from the spiritual beings and entities of which they were a symbol. It also built upon a polemical tradition which dismissed Catholic miracle stories as ‘mere’ tales and ‘monkish’ fables, worthy of hilarious laughter rather than solemn reverence and it involved a redrawing of the boundary between ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’. The fictionalisation of the ghost and other encounters with the spirit world in gothic literature is one measure of these developments.Footnote ⁸⁷ Another is the increasing tendency for the supernatural to be relocated into the interior space of the unconscious via the medium of the dream – a space less vulnerable to contestation because it was mysterious, unreachable, and difficult to subject to empirical verification. Somewhere in the midst of this we need to situate the emergence of a willingness to suspend disbelief – to set aside scepticism in the interests of simple enjoyment – and the decline of hell, providence, and the devil as reified concepts.Footnote ⁸⁸ Was it in this period that men and women came to think of these primarily as metaphors rather than real physical entities, forces, or geographical locations? Or is this yet another manifestation of our patronizing modern attitude towards the medieval past? Perhaps, on the contrary, people had always exhibited an ability to engage with providential stories and miraculous tales on several different conceptual levels. Nevertheless the manner in which magic and the supernatural were becoming absorbed into a culture of commodified amusement and transformed into objects of aesthetic pleasure and fascination cannot be ignored.

In this regard, changes taking place in the realm of communication deserve careful scrutiny. Here the advent and spread of printing as a medium for publication is critical, though we should discard models which present this technology, in conjunction with literacy, as a natural enemy of ‘superstition’ in favour of a recognition that it was more like a double-edged sword. Not only were books used as magical talismans in both Catholic and Protestant contexts; increasingly, writing and print also helped to disseminate knowledge of occult techniques, dispersing the contents of arcane Latin tracts in the promiscuous sphere of the vernacular.Footnote ⁸⁹ Similarly, the mass circulation facilitated by print seems to have initially intensified interest in the prodigious and supernatural, exacerbating fear and anxiety about providential intervention, diabolical malevolence, and the end of the world. In the longer term, however, it arguably placed the credibility of the phenomena reported in newspapers and pamphlets under growing strain. The commercialization of the genre of stories of the ‘strange but true’ led to their abuse and doubts about their authenticity arose in the context of the fabrication of wonders by unscrupulous journalists and booksellers intent upon making profit out of what increasingly came to be seen as popular ‘credulity’.Footnote ⁹⁰ From the early seventeenth century onwards, there is a distinct sense, that, at least in some quarters, familiarity began to breed contempt. Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy have advanced a not dissimilar thesis about the role which the expansion of the periodical press played in transforming the hermeneutics of suicide: they argue that the literary style and tone of such texts promoted an increasingly ‘secular’, sympathetic, and even sentimental attitude towards those who committed the sin of self-murder, a crime that had earlier been regarded as a consequence of acute diabolical temptation.Footnote ⁹¹ We need to take seriously suggestions that alterations in literary form can be agents, as well as mirrors, of historical change.

Consideration must naturally be given to the long-standing claim that perceptions of the supernatural were increasingly shaped by, or reflected, processes of social polarization. This is critical, for instance, to Patrick Curry's argument about the making of astrology into ‘a vulgar knowledge’ by the end of the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁹² While the speed with and extent to which a divide between the ‘learned’ and the ‘vulgar’ appeared may be questioned, the educated do seem to have treated ephemeral publications about marvels and wonders with growing contempt as evidence of the ignorant and ‘superstitious’ outlook of their unlettered inferiors. Here, though, it is hard to know how far this was new and how far it was simply becoming more vocal and visible. The ostensible exile of beliefs about the supernatural out of written into oral culture increasingly looks like an optical illusion for the same reason. Even so, something was certainly happening. The mixture of anti-Catholic prejudice, nostalgia, and condescension which prompted the folklorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to collect evidence of the beliefs of the common people about the occult is suggestive of some sort of schism or fragmentation of attitudes. It may be remarked, in passing, that the distorting tendency of such collectors to see these beliefs through the lens of a theory of pagan and popish ‘survivals’ has seriously hampered historical understanding of both the literate origins and the genuinely Protestant character of much of this popular culture of the supernatural.Footnote ⁹³

Further signs that the climate of opinion was changing may lie in the rise of contemporary claims that assumptions about the intrusion of otherworldly forces in human affairs were the preserve of elderly women and the mentally ill. Neither the language of insanity nor the notion of ‘old wives' tales’ was in any sense new. Allegations about madness had long been deployed to discredit particular instances of diabolical or divine intercession such as prophecy and possession.Footnote ⁹⁴ Likewise, the trope that miracle stories were merely the foolish ‘dotages’ of the female sex had roots not merely in Reformation polemic, but also in medieval satire itself. The apparent strengthening of a gender bias against such beliefs in the long eighteenth century probably has more to do with the declining authority of speech and memory as vehicles of cultural transmission than with any widening gap between the mentality of men and women.Footnote ⁹⁵ That such suggestions were growing in volume is nevertheless indicative that some kind of shift in perception was occurring. No less interesting are early hints of the process by which beliefs in witches, werewolves, and ghosts would eventually be relegated to the nursery and become confined to the outlook of children rather than adults. This too had a long-standing rhetorical lineage and its onset, as Lyndal Roper has shown, was not without some paradoxical consequences. In Germany it manifested itself in an ambivalent fascination with the imaginative world of the young which temporarily resulted in the pursuit and prosecution of child witches.Footnote ⁹⁶

There also seems to be some mileage in the proposition that magic and the supernatural did not so much disappear or decline as retreat from the public domain into the private sphere. That educated English writers of the 1690s found the fervent providentialism and millenarianism of their predecessors somewhat embarrassing and discomfiting and sought to suppress or edit it out of their memoirs does not necessarily signal a rejection of this outlook. Rather, to echo Blair Worden, it registers a change in public fashion and taste.Footnote ⁹⁷ Gentlemen anxious to align themselves with the culture of ‘reason’, ‘civilization’, and ‘Enlightenment’ might overtly disparage belief in the diabolical and prodigious but this did not mean that they ceased to ponder and speculate about it seriously in the seclusion of their libraries, closets, and the inner chambers of their minds.Footnote ⁹⁸ In excavating the archive of Robert Boyle, Michael Hunter has uncovered a similar disjuncture between his public and private persona – a complex negotiation between his own preoccupation with aspects of the supernatural and the collective norms that dictated the boundaries of legitimate activity in late Stuart society. His reticence in this area was a function of a desire to preserve his reputation and adhere to the expectations of genteel decorum, combined with a pronounced moral scrupulosity about the permissibility of meddling with the spiritual realm. These processes of self-censorship were reinforced in the following century by the efforts of Boyle's biographers to purge his manuscript remains of traces of what were now considered evidence of ‘superstition’ and ‘credulity’. Signalling an important but gradual shift in the centre of intellectual gravity, Hunter suggests that they should be seen as an index less of the ‘decline of magic’ than the ‘rise of schizophrenia’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Such suggestions make the apparent resurgence of interest in occult phenomena and the wide appeal which techniques like mesmerism exercised in the polite society of Victorian and Edwardian England seem less bewildering and puzzling.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Was this an aspect of culture that re-emerged from the shadows when the conditions that had driven it underground became more favourable and when it once again became intellectually and socially respectable?

Another issue that warrants further examination concerns the extent to which the supernatural was implicated in confessional and party politics. Once again this was true of the medieval no less than the early modern period. Claims of miraculous intervention and allegations of diabolism had always been a tool of faction, but there are grounds for thinking that propagandist use of them intensified in the wake of the Reformation and in the context of the upheavals of the European Wars of Religion – partly because of the emergence of more effective forms of mass communication.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In a world in which the monopoly of a single version of Christian truth was yielding to denominational plurality and in which political polarization was taking permanent institutional shape in the rivalry between Tories and Whigs, the exploitation of this potent vocabulary had contradictory effects. In the short term it raised the heat of ideological controversy and invested it with cosmic, even eschatological significance. In the long run, however, as Ian Bostridge and Peter Elmer have argued persuasively with regard to demonology and witchcraft, its deployment against a proliferation of targets contributed to destabilizing and relativizing these categories of analysis in a way that eventually undermined their power to inspire dread and contributed to their marginalization from the mainstream.Footnote ¹⁰² In these accounts, ‘scepticism’ about the supernatural was far more the byproduct of ecclesiastical infighting and rage of party than it was the result of the inevitable triumph of science or ‘rational religion’. The passage of the act repealing witchcraft legislation in 1736 was less a function of declining belief in this diabolical crime than of the disintegration of demonology's symbolic role as an expression of the sacral state and its aspirations. Political, rather than intellectual, factors lay behind its loss of credibility and did not preclude the persistence of interest in it at other levels and in less conspicuous contexts.Footnote ¹⁰³ This fits with Michael MacDonald's reading of elite dissociation from such beliefs in the later seventeenth century, which he sees as a consequence of their perceived connection with lower-class sectarian enthusiasm during the Civil Wars of the 1640s and 1650s and the anarchic political experiment of the Interregnum.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It may be commented that, although such interpretations repudiate the notion of the inexorable progress of reason as a mode of explanation, ironically they often still rest upon and reinforce the linear paradigm of disenchantment that is intertwined with it.

They may also run the risk of underemphasizing the indirect effects wrought by the unstoppable spread of religious pluralism that was a chief legacy of the Reformation, and by its institutionalization in the Act of Toleration of 1689. Could it be that decades of peaceful coexistence with individuals who were theoretically damnable heretics and antichristian papists played a part not just in undermining the commitment to religious uniformity as a prerequisite for political and social stability, but also in eroding (or at least reducing the intensity of) belief in a moralized universe in which God intervened to defend those who upheld the true religion? To live alongside dissenters without an angry God striking one dead for tolerating falsehood was to see the transparent and comforting polarities of truth and falsehood, good and evil, that underpinned persecution dissolve and evaporate.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It is at least worth considering the possibility that this state of affairs and the legislation that belatedly legitimized it contributed to changing both individual and collective sensibilities.

Finally, something must be said about the intellectual and philosophical shifts which we conventionally group under the grand headings of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ and the ‘Enlightenment’. Recent historiographical developments have done much to unsettle traditional presuppositions about the role that the rise of Baconian empiricism and the transformation of natural philosophy played in exterminating ‘superstitious’ notions about the operations of God and the wider spirit world. Against claims about their inherent incompatibility, it is increasingly apparent that religious conviction frequently stimulated, rather than inhibited, scientific inquiry.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Eagerness to enumerate evidence of the imminence of the Second Coming and a concern to unravel the divine messages encoded in wonders and portents fostered ever closer scrutiny of the mysteries of nature.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It is also wrong to position empirical investigation and belief in a vibrant, but invisible, world of incorporeal spirits in antithesis. Figures like the Anglican clergyman, Joseph Glanvill, eagerly harnessed these techniques to demonstrate its inner workings and to prove its existence.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The same observations apply to apparitions and to events which late seventeenth-century Englishmen and women recognized as miracles: these too were tried and tested in the crucible of the laboratory.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ More generally, Protestant providentialism demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt itself to the regularities of the mechanical universe in a way which delayed its demise.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The activities of Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and other natural philosophers were themselves underpinned by a pious determination to protect, defend, demonstrate, and illuminate the sovereignty of God and his continuing intervention in the universe he had created. As Andrew Cunningham has reminded us, early modern natural philosophy was ‘by its very nature God-oriented’. It remained an ally and adjunct of theology, the queen of the sciences.Footnote ¹¹¹ The active involvement of these men in alchemy and other ‘occult’ arts has not merely complicated received wisdom about the inevitable demise of these disciplines.Footnote ¹¹² It has also reinforced growing awareness that magical philosophies and practices exerted a considerable and creative influence on the development of modern science. The Neoplatonic and hermetic pursuit of a profound knowledge of nature's secrets and the attempt to manipulate it to work special effects supplied one of the streams that fed this. In the world of medicine, Paracelsianism was infused with convictions about an inner spark and about the quasi-religious office of the physician that earned it the nickname ‘chemical divinity’.Footnote ¹¹³ The history of ventriloquism inverts our settled assumptions in reverse, questioning the suggestion that the practice of magic was a residue of ‘backward’ mentalities which resisted the tide of philosophical advance. On the contrary, it originated as an experimental method of proving that many reputedly prodigious phenomena were no more than mere illusions – as an antidote to ‘superstition’, a ‘tool of Enlightenment’, and a strategy for disenchantment. Its transmutation into a form of stage entertainment and subsequent re-coupling with the disreputable world of wizardry warns against underestimating the complexities of the nexus between science and the supernatural in the post-Reformation.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Approaching the problem from another perspective, Stuart Clark has taught us that demonology itself was a highly sophisticated and specialized science, dedicated to comprehending the elaborate, but ultimately ‘natural’, mechanisms by which the devil, that master of ‘Experimental Knowledge’, wrought deceptive illusions and deluded the senses.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The collective effect of these endeavours was to push more phenomena out of the category of the literally ‘supernatural’ over the boundary into the classes of the ‘preternatural’ and ‘natural’. It was not fundamentally to overturn the providential framework which these inhabited: God remained the first and final cause. Nor should the speed of the process by which anomalies and prodigies like monstrous births cast off their religious associations be exaggerated, even if emphasis shifted away from the wrath of the Almighty towards His ingenuity and benevolence, and fear slowly gave way to admiration.Footnote ¹¹⁶ This arguably reflected an alteration in assumptions about the personality of the deity, who was coming to be seen less as a wrathful dictator than as a merciful and loving father and patron.Footnote ¹¹⁷ It coincided with a growing tendency to regard God less as a busy and unpredictable meddler, than as a distant and passive spectator, a clockmaker deity who did not normally need to tinker with the machine he had created. This latter trend did not so much undermine Christian cosmology as adjust its parameters. Newton himself envisaged a cyclical cosmos which preserved a place for the Almighty to intervene to correct mistakes, make adjustments to the mechanism, and carry out some form of ‘Reformation’ or servicing. Comets were one of the instruments the Lord used as his instruments, but he did not rule out acts of direct fiat. He conceived of the universe as one in which God still had ‘essential chores’ to perform if it was to operate. Leibnitz would even accuse Newton of making the action of gravity itself a perpetual miracle. The late seventeenth-century systematization of the laws of nature did not spell the end of the concept of the miraculous: it redefined it in a manner that revived an earlier strand of thinking rooted in the writing of Augustine.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Meanwhile in the light of the work of Simon Schaffer, Steven Shapin, and other scholars the victory of mechanical philosophy and the experimental techniques that were so intimately linked with it are coming to look less like an inevitability than the confection of a series of political and social contingencies.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Extending this argument further, Adrian Johns sees it as a consequence not of the inherent intellectual superiority of these ideas, but of the imprimatur they were given by their enshrinement in print.Footnote ¹²⁰ The relativism that underpins such perspectives has proved tendentious, but it has had the beneficial effect of challenging the enduring paradigm that posits the rapid collapse of old-fashioned ideas about the workings of the physical world in the face of the sweeping advance of ‘rational’ thought.

Nor did the development of deism and fashionable doubt unequivocally favour the elimination of magic from the collective worldview. Not only is the extent to which celebrated statements by key Enlightenment thinkers reflected wider opinion now being questioned, but also the tendency of past historians to play down the religious roots and dimensions of a movement that has long been synonymous with radical scepticism. Christianity is gradually reclaiming its place at the heart of this project in a way that severs the assumed link between the forces of modernity and secularization.Footnote ¹²¹ Thus the texts in which John Toland, Charles Blount, and others launched their assault upon the pillars of priestcraft were not anti-religious in essence or origin. Justin Champion's work demonstrates that they sought to debunk the false authority of the clergy and institutional church, rather than to put God on trial or question theological mystery per se. Contrary to our instinctive assumptions, their efforts to effect demystification were a function of religious, rather than anti-religious, zeal.Footnote ¹²²

In addition it is becoming increasingly plausible to argue that Enlightenment actually served to foster a resurgence of interest in, and discussion of, the supernatural. Against the backdrop of what was perceived to be a rising tide of indifference and atheism, ministers like Joseph Glanvill, William Turner, and Richard Baxter energetically compiled evidence of the continuing interference of demons and spirits in the temporal realm and of providential intervention to punish sin and impiety. Miracles, witches, ghosts, and angels were powerful weapons in the crusade to hold back the flood of irreligion and these, as we have seen, were themselves defended and authenticated by new scientific methodologies.Footnote ¹²³ Contemporary efforts to revise natural philosophy were prompted by a desire to fight against the perceived threat of atheism and infidelity, labels that would ironically be deployed against those engaged in this pious enterprise. In turn, the clockwork universe which Newton, Boyle, and others formulated to buttress a traditional sense of the sacred was exploited by deists to transform God into an absentee landlord.Footnote ¹²⁴

There seems some justification therefore for speaking of a partial ‘re-enchantment of the world’ in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – and for arguing that this was itself a backlash against the drive for disenchantment that preceded and coincided with it. In this sense, the Enlightenment was no less ambiguous than the Reformation itself. Both may be seen as part of a perennial process by which the boundaries between ‘religion’ and ‘magic’ were readjusted and the malleable category of ‘superstition’ was redefined, as successive loops in a perpetual spiral of desacralization and resacralization.

It should not really surprise us that the ‘Enlightenment’ produced its own counter-reactions and alter egos. One is the ambivalent impulses enshrined in the discipline of folklore. The folklorists' nostalgic quest to preserve and recover traces of the quaint ‘superstitions’ that new philosophies and industrial technologies were driving into extinction was a quest that simultaneously celebrated and mourned the onward march of progress and ‘civilization’.Footnote ¹²⁵ A second is the resurgence of the supernatural that was part and parcel of the Methodist revival,Footnote ¹²⁶ while the rise of romanticism, a movement which embodied the lament of artists, musicians, and poets for the barren rationalism of the modern world and a desire to re-spiritualize it aesthetically, provides a third example. The term Schiller employed to articulate this sentiment of regret was entzauberung, disenchantment. Even in the thought of Weber, whose use of this borrowed phrase has helped to immortalize him as a pioneering theorist of ‘modernity’, it is possible to detect a sense of the spiritual loss that accompanied its emergence.Footnote ¹²⁷ It is perhaps a measure of the distorting polarities and linear paradigms that still shape historical discourse that we are inclined to see a certain paradox in these developments. Finally, the current surge of interest in the supernatural might itself be regarded as a further cycle in this ongoing process: a symptom of a yearning for the numinous and a recoil against the rule of ‘scientific reason’. Perhaps the same may be said about the parallel revival of religion as a crucial explanation of and engine of historical change,Footnote ¹²⁸ one reflection of which is the flourishing state of the field of Reformation studies itself.

IV

Several lessons and themes have emerged from this attempt to revisit the classic thesis that posits a link between the Reformation, the decline of magic, and ‘the disenchantment of the world’. The first is that the Reformation (envisaged here as a prolonged process that stretched from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century) must be conceived of as both an intellectual and social process: we have to recognize the capacity of thought to shape and influence, precipitate and anticipate action and practice and vice versa. Both ideas and events must be accorded an element of agency. Secondly, theology is not a passive entity or thing. It is rather a dynamic process that is constantly modulating and altering. Owen Chadwick's wise warning against making ‘the crass error that minds were at any time not in motion’ is of importance here.Footnote ¹²⁹ Thirdly, sensitivity must constantly be shown to the transactions that took place both between and within the clergy and laity, learned elites and ordinary laypeople, collective and individual mentalities, and to the compromises and negotiations that occurred between belief and unbelief, scepticism and credulity, settled doctrine and lived experience throughout the early modern era – as, of course, in others too. Testing and endeavouring to transcend these comfortable polarities is essential if we are to reach a nuanced understanding. Similarly, ambivalence and contradiction should not be regarded as anomalies but normalities, at the level of both theory and practice. Protestantism's radical assault upon the sanctity of the material world coexisted with an emphatic insistence that God and the devil intervened unpredictably, providentially, and indeed miraculously, in human affairs. Room must also be made for the general untidiness of the human mind, for the eclectic intermingling of inconsistent opinions that is a perennial feature of individual and collective mentalities. Fourthly, we have seen that the Reformation did not have sole responsibility for the intellectual and cultural shifts that took place: if it proved significant in this respect it was because it converged with other trends in a manner that remains hard to pinpoint and analyse precisely. A fifth suggestion is that thinking in terms of cycles of desacralization and resacralization, disenchantment and re-enchantment, may help to counteract the liabilities and dangers of a narrative that emphasizes a linear path of development.Footnote ¹³⁰ There are surely advantages in adopting a perspective that recognizes that the early Reformation (both Catholic and Protestant) grew out of and embodied a moment of scepticism and ‘rationalism’ that slowly faded, giving way in later generations to a fresh receptiveness to the supernatural and sacred. No less important is the insight that the so-called middle ages witnessed developments and reversals in this sphere that are not separate from, but integral to, the wider pattern identified here.

None of these observations should be allowed to eclipse the fact of long-term change. We still have to acknowledge, even if we cannot completely explain, the accumulation of individual transformations that have made many aspects of the past seem like a foreign country. Change, as well as continuity and stasis, is and should be a central part of the remit of historians. The problem we face is that teleological assumptions about how to interpret these changes are ingrained in the very sources upon which we rely to construct the past, as well as in the models and tools to which we resort to explain it. They are also institutionalized in the periodization that taxonomically classifies scholars as ‘medievalists’, ‘early modernists’, and ‘modernists’. This in itself perpetuates the ubiquitous modernizing paradigm of which the notion of ‘the disenchantment of the world’ is just one reflection. Even the studied determination of postmodernists like Michel Foucault to discard and subvert it have often ended up reproducing it by inversion.Footnote ¹³¹ The very effort of recent scholars to recover the ‘rationality’ of belief systems formerly written off as ‘irrational’ and ‘delusionary’ may itself be a measure of the hold this thesis still has over us. The debate about the ‘rationality’ or ‘modernity’ of the Reformation is in this sense both a question mal posée and a crippling barrier to clear thinking. It is salutary to remind ourselves that the very paradigms that have so long dominated our understanding of the impact of this movement were themselves partly a deliberate product of their own propaganda, polemic, and retrospective, mythologizing rhetoric. Ironically, the power and urgency of this rhetoric was initially symptomatic of the strength of contemporary convictions about the vulnerability of the early modern world to supernatural intrusion. It was symptomatic of a belief that if steps were not taken to suppress superstition and reform the sacred then God would intervene to crush society and bring the world to a final apocalyptic confusion.

Ultimately, the task of writing a history of Protestantism with the notion of ‘progress’ left out remains a formidable one. It is complicated not only by the lingering influence of confessional sentiment in the study of the Reformation, but also by the extent to which such assumptions are bound up with the development both of the historical discipline in Britain and the Anglo-American world and of a residually Protestant sense of national identity that has yet to be completely eroded by multiculturalism and ethnic and religious diversity. We cannot escape the fact that we are heirs and prisoners of the past we are endeavouring to excavate, or avoid the long shadows it casts. That said, it may be argued that the tenacious grip which these teleological paradigms hold over the academy is gradually dissolving of its own accord: the equation of Protestantism with processes of modernization which underpins them is no longer as self-evident to our post-Christian society as it was to preceding generations. To this extent the disenchantment thesis may have nearly run its course and be approaching the end of its natural life. Future scholars are likely to regard the protracted debate about it as an historiographical red herring and an interpretative cul de sac.