In Magic in Early Modern England: Literature, Politics, and Supernatural Power, Andrew Moore contests Max Weber’s famous “disenchantment of the world” thesis and argues that the advent of modernity did not see belief in magic fade in the wake of rationalist perspectives. Instead Moore contends that interest in magic spiked in early modern times and argues that rather this was bolstered by modernist trends rather than opposed to them.
Andrew Moore is an associate professor of Great Books at Saint Thomas University. Moore has a PhD in English Language and Literature and he specializes in renaissance literature. He has had an interdisciplinary focus on his work dating back to his undergraduate when he dual-majored in English and interdisciplinary studies. Accordingly, Magic in Early Modern England is itself a hybrid work. Moore analyzes his source base of Early Modern English literature to get at a broader point about Early Modern English culture and ideologies.
Moore begins his work by describing the paradigmatic thesis proposed by Max Weber in that he is responding to. In his lecture, Science as a Vocation, [1] Weber associated magic with a primitive mysticism characteristic of the medieval world. As science replaced magic, so too did it replace the systems of meaning associated with a premodern mystical worldview. Moore argues that this argument relies on the idea that magic is necessarily mystical, which he contests.
Moore argues that the ends of magic were generally both material and practical. He writes that “The impulse to magic in early modern literature and early modern society more broadly is an impulse toward controlling nature, an impulse to escape the limitations of the human condition, and, in extreme cases, to enslave or subjugate the world to one’s will.” (16) He argues that “Both magic and science need to be understood as parallel enterprises that were concerned with this ambition.” (48) Magic-users sought to heal, harm, bring fortune, and make decisions that had bearing on the material world.
Moore also argues for the the affinity between Early Modernity and magic through examples of Early Modern Writers who argued that magic was part of the natural world. Moore references an account of a 1696 witch trial in which the author theorized that the witch may have used optical illusions and “speaking trumpets” to perform her acts of wickedness. (47-49) Moore argues that some saw magic “as misunderstood things that the new science will make clear and perhaps even possible to replicate.” While these anecdotes demonstrate the part of Moore’s thesis that Early Modern thinkers often approached magic from a rationalist perspective, it is less convincing, in that, in these cases, it is not clear that the thinkers really saw the abilities they investigated as supernatural. Nevertheless, these examples do show the blurred lines between magic and science.
But many early modern figures believed in magic straightforwardly, and throughout his book, Moore gives many examples of the degrees to which magic was ubiquitous in the society and argues that even realist political philosophers might also practice necromancy. (55)
Another trend of Early Modern thought that Moore covers is those who were skeptical of magic’s veracity but took belief in it seriously. Moore points out that in Thomas’ Hobbes’ Leviathan, Hobbes’ explicitly speaks about the unreality of magic, but still calls for the punishment of witches as dangerous individuals to society. (155) Moore argues that even skeptics were deeply involved and connected to the world of magic around them. This argument is more weakly aligned with Moore’s thesis, as the engagement of rationalist figures with the magical beliefs around them does not indicate that such beliefs were aligned with theirs.
Moore’s thesis reminds me of the arguments of Paul Griffith in Information, Institutions, and Local Government in England: 1550-1700. Like Moore, Griffiths argues against a prominent academic’s foundational thesis about modernity. Foucault argued that modernity brought a variety of changes to systems of authority ranging from shifts from public to private, corporal to psychological, and reputation to data. [2] Griffiths describes these changes as “turning inward” and argues that Foucault implies that this changes happened in late modernity and could be contrasted starkly with early modern times, but that they actually occurred earlier and more gradually. [3] Moore similarly contests Weber’s thesis that modernity brought disbelief in magic by highlighting the ubiquity of magic in Early Modern England.
However Moore goes farther than Griffiths in contesting the foundational historiography and argues that the advent of modernity actually drove an obsession with magic. This is a different type of argument about modernity than Griffith’s and reminds me more of Lloyd Bowen’s argument in his book Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean English: Gentry Honour, Violence, and the Law. Bowen argues against a historiography that sees private violence dwindling in the wake of an expanded legal system in Early Modern England. Bowen argues that the Early Modern increase in litigation actually drove an upswing in private violence instead of replacing it. [4] This is more similar to Moore’s argument about modernity. Nevertheless, all three works serve as examples of a historiographical trend of complicating the boundaries and assumptions of what modernity meant.
Moore concludes his work by arguing that Early Modern thinkers “were fascinated with magic because they were fascinated with questions about human power and natural limits.” (152) He argues that this fascination was core to the project of modernity and that even the skeptics built upon it. Rather than representing a rejection of magic, Moore argues that modernity represented a fulfillment of it.
While Moore makes a compelling argument about the material aims of magic, he does not show the causality as strongly as I might have liked. Nevertheless, he successfully showcases myriad ways one in which the boundaries between magic and science were thin in Early Modern England.
[1] Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 1946, 382–94, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25249-7_17.
[2] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage, 2012).
[3] Paul Griffiths, Information, Institutions, and Local Government in England, 1550-1700: Turning Inside (OUP Oxford, 2024).
[4] Lloyd Bowen, Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean England: Gentry Honour, Violence and the Law (Boydell & Brewer, 2021), 9.