Abstract
Reviewed by: Malcolm Gaskill, University of East Anglia, UK
This is a wide-ranging book, which scholars and students alike will find useful. Steven P. Marrone examines the religious and scientific discourses that the modern world tends to separate, but which once flowed together in a single stream of knowledge and enquiry. As he notes, the common perception that the Scientific Revolution not only succeeded but somehow corrected the thinking of the Middle Ages overlooks the extent to which these were overlapping eras, indeed eras in which the spirit of intellectual investigation was inextricably linked.
Marrone’s structure is simple. He begins in 200 BCE, and, with a few chronological overlaps, works forward to the early Middle Ages. From here we enter the age of heresy and witchcraft, ending with ‘desacralized science’ and its relationship to early modern state and society. The early chapters explore the meaning of ‘magic’ in antiquity, and its evolution into ‘superstition’ with the rise of the Christian church. From the twelfth century, distinctions were drawn between learned magic derived from Greek, Arabic and Hebrew wisdom, and the popular practices disdained as religious error. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, learned magic, too, came under attack from sustained religious rationalization. Magic and heresy were more firmly welded together. The paranoid fantasy of an anti-Christian conspiracy began to take shape, and the determination of the inquisitorial courts to extirpate it intensified. ‘The argument had to be established’, writes Marrone, ‘that the practice of ceremonial magic was tantamount to heresy’ (162). That point had been reached by around 1400.
The next stage in the development of the dark fantasy of ritual magic was the ‘witch craze’ – a term Marrone uses freely, but which some historians find unhelpful. A process we see beginning in alpine communities in the early fifteenth century involved the hardening of two closely connected stereotypes, one relating to who witches were, and the other to what they did. The concept of the witches’ ‘sabbat’, developed by demonologists, evolved from the idea of a heretical conspiracy. To complete the picture, the wicked deeds at the sabbat, ‘smacked plainly of magic as performed among the common folk’ (184).
Marrone’s argument is broadly that modern scientific understanding emerged from social and cultural change between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. He maps a familiar yet contested modernization thesis, combined with Max Weber’s equally controversial ‘the disenchantment of the world’, onto the sort of bipolar ‘division of cultures’ model popularized by Peter Burke. Marrone’s longue durée ‘must be taken as an historical unit susceptible to a narrative giving it a clear beginning and a distinct end, the latter following a social crisis whose resolution brought the period to a close and signaled the start of modernity’ (viii). No editor should have let Marrone get away with that sentence (and many tangled formulations besides). Not only is it clumsy, but the idea it contains is suspect. Did anything really signal the start of modernity? What is or was modernity? Nowadays, even historians who don’t actually reject Keith Thomas’s ‘decline of magic’ still work hard to qualify it.
There are many good things about this book. Marrone has read widely, uses vivid examples, tells a good story, and simplifies some complex ideas about medieval magic to make them intelligible to lay readers. Indeed, he seems more confident in the Middle Ages than in the early modern period. But it is distracting that he is comfortable with so many ideas that specialist scholars have left behind, principally the popular/elite divide in culture and belief, the idea of ‘social control’ (who was controlling whom exactly?), and the beguiling vision of a long, slow march of secularization into the uplands of modernity.
There is a powerful story in this book, and Marrone’s decision to treat it as a story is to be applauded. Yet, however dramatic all his turning (and tipping) points, radical shifts, and disintegrating boundaries, they are not always convincing when the truth was so ambiguous and nuanced. Some of Marrone’s statements contain more portent than actual meaning. When he reaches the subject of political ideology, he writes this: ‘And here not simply the decline of witch trials is at stake but also the establishment of a new social order linked ultimately to the early modern nation state’ (198). I’m not sure what this means, but once again a good editor should have pressed for clarity.