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MAGIC, SCIENCE, AND RELIGION IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE by Mark A. Waddell. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021. x + 220 pages, including an annotated bibliography and index. Paperback; $25.99. ISBN: 9781108441650. *For decades, it has been commonplace among historians of science to recognize the essential interconnections between Christianity and the early origins of the natural sciences, even if some non-historians continue to struggle to relinquish the more titillating revival of a conflict between them. The reality is that the social and intellectual history of theology and natural philosophy have vast overlapping boundaries. The history of the modern natural sciences is no less continuous with the ideas and practices of magic, alchemy, and astrology. While Enlightenment sensibilities chafe at the notion, historical research, much in the same vein as studies in "Science and Religion," is incontestable. Mark A. Waddell's brief introduction to the subject quickly brings the reader into this consensus without sacrificing the nuance needed to avoid oversimplification. *The strongest chapters are in the first half of the book, where Waddell introduces the Renaissance interest in Hermetic philosophy (chap. 1), then newly discovered among ancient texts (though not so ancient as they were first thought to be). The author proves to be a practiced communicator, able to simplify and condense a range of philosophical principles. He also succeeds in connecting philosophies with the perennial social problems and questions of ordinary human experience. In this way, he is consistent with a long line of scholars writing on the subject, from Keith Thomas's, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) forward. The subject of witchcraft and demonology (chap. 2) is treated as the manifestation of social anxieties within European culture more generally. *The broadest principle of magic is covered in chapter 3, "Magic, Medicine, and the Microcosm," in which Waddell explains the overarching analogy between the greater universe out there and our mundane existence down here. This forms the basis for both astrology-based medicine (noting concordances between either herbs or organs with their astrological counterparts and using them to heal) or judicial astrology, which sought to understand the past and map the future by virtue of astrological motions. And Waddell presents this as a normal part of early-modern thinking among churchmen and commoners alike. *The second half of the book covers topics which may be more easily recognized as parts of modern natural science: Galileo, Copernicus, Boyle, and Newton. Chapter 4, "A New Cosmos," uses a most creative and pedagogically sensitive introduction to the radical proposal of a world system in which the earth is not motionless and at the center of the universe. Waddell uses the demotion of Pluto from planetary status in 2006 and the subsequent public backlash, and asks the reader to imagine, a fortiori, how the public might react to an even greater disruption of received astronomical dogma, however empirically informed. Waddell returns again in chapter 5, "Looking for God in the Cosmic Machine," to ancient philosophy, showing how Epicurean atomism presented an old philosophical problem anew in the philosophies of René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi, focusing on the question of the nature of the soul. Here the continuity of ancient and new philosophies is maintained, illustrating the ongoing development and connected history between modern natural science, magic, and religion. *That continuity might have been better represented with more emphasis on the philosophy of Aristotle and scholasticism. While Aristotle's philosophy is discussed in several places throughout the book, such as in the discussion above on the soul, a dedicated chapter would have been appropriate given the dominance of Aristotle in Western intellectual culture from the end of the thirteenth century through the end of the seventeenth. This weakness of the book was evident in chapter 6 in the section on Francis Bacon and the inductive method. Waddell says, "Bacon founded his ideas about experience and experiment on what is known as inductive reasoning, or induction … In choosing to focus on singular observations, Bacon was of course doing exactly what Aristotle taught his students not to do" (p. 166). *Aristotle never gave such instruction. In fact, Aristotle describes induction in his Posterior Analytics, Book I, in the first sentence: "All teaching and learning of an intellectual kind proceed from pre-existent knowledge … Similarly with arguments, both deductive and inductive: they effect their teaching through what we already know, the former assuming items which we are presumed to grasp, the latter proving something universal by way of the fact that the particular cases are plain" (Barnes translation, 1975). *Waddell misses that Bacon's emphasis on induction was not novel except in emphasis. The new science was an extension of old principles newly revived. *This introduction closes with a coda, extending briefly into the Enlightenment. This section is handled a little too quickly, but well enough to present some of the subtleties necessary to link it to its past. Not only does he present how Enlightenment intellectuals were embarrassed by Newton's alchemical adventures, but how the mechanical forces of modern science themselves still betray underlying occult qualities that formerly traveled under other names. *The author often used the word "problematic" (over twenty times) throughout the book: for example, in the sentence, "It is important to note that, however problematic the idea of a mechanical universe might have been, it did not disappear." The author uses the word so often, it is unclear if he merely means something less specific, like "challenging," as in "difficult to absorb" in one's concepts of the natural world, or more narrowly as something that violates social and political norms. Since Waddell in other places in the book seeks to contextualize these events of four hundred years ago within a modern idiom, it is at least plausible that he wishes us to connect the intensity of the social dramas of today with those past events. If so, an explicit recognition of that would have been helpful to the reader. *This book is suitable for an undergraduate course in the history of science, especially if flanked by primary source readings under the guidance of the instructor. A person with no background in the subject would also find this an accessible entry point into the subject, from which they could move on to more detailed studies, such as those noted in the bibliography. *Reviewed by Jason M. Rampelt, History of Science and Medicine Archivist, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsPeter Gorzolla, Magie, Politik und Religion: Theologische Magiekritik als politisches Handeln im Frankreich Karls VI. (Geschichte 166). Münster: LIT, 2019. Paper. Pp. vi, 499; black-and-white figures. €49.90. ISBN: 978-3-6431-4279-5.Michael D. BaileyMichael D. BaileyIowa State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 97, Number 1January 2022 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/717709 Views: 14Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Frank Klaassen and Sharon Hubbs Wright, The Magic of Rogues: Necromancers in Early Tudor England. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021. IX-161 pp. 9780271089294.The historical study of magic and the occult in Western Europe is often split in two. One main approach, drawing on the fact that practices deemed to be magical have frequently been condemned by both secular and religious authorities, approaches magic as an illicit activity and studies the records of that condemnation. Such an approach is centered above all on the study of witchcraft and witch trials, even though the sort of

Reviewed by: Magic: A History, from Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present by Chris Gosden Michael D. Bailey magic, witchcraft, archeology, alchemy, worldview, definition of magic, shamanism, China chris gosden. Magic: A History, from Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. Pp. 492. This is a revolutionary book in many ways. It attempts to decenter the history of magic from Western Europe and to displace the medieval and early modern periods from that history's chronological core. As an archeologist, Gosden is well-positioned to bring the deep history of magic to light and to work on a global scale. He is also inclined to stress the material record magic has left, rather than focusing exclusively on its textual trail, and he emphasizes the quotidian as much as he can. Moreover, although he puts witchcraft in his title, he largely avoids retelling the history of magic's legal or social condemnation. His most revolutionary step, however, is to propose an overarching definition of magic that hearkens back to those advanced by late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century anthropologists, although he is quick to decry their teleology and Western triumphalism. There is much to like in Gosden's maneuvers. He wants to be global, for example, although he falls somewhat short in this attempt. Excluding his more conceptual first and last chapters, his book has eight regional/chronological chapters, the majority of which (five) still focus on the West. The rest of the world is then covered in a single chapter on China, one on Eurasian shamanism, and one that lumps together Africa, Australia, and the Americas. One might have hoped that Gosden's archeological approach would allow those last three regions to stand more independently alongside the literate, text-producing societies of the West and East Asia. Instead, we are told (about Africa at least) that "the archeological record provides us with little that we can recognize as magical" (293). Instead, Gosden focuses mainly on these regions' colonial and postcolonial periods, thereby framing them in terms of their relationship to the modern West. He omits South Asia entirely, claiming not too little information on that region but too much, more than he can reasonably synthesize (27–28). Gosden's archeological bent leads him to favor, as much as he can, the material record of magic, but this introduces its own problems. Objects in isolation are not often completely comprehensible. In particular, very few [End Page 114] objects are obviously or explicitly magical; they must be interpreted as such, and these interpretations can be open to debate. Gosden also wants to emphasize the widespread and quotidian presence of magic in human societies, but he acknowledges that many archeological records, like written ones, more directly reflect elite practices. Finally, he wants to argue that magic was not just present but a positive force throughout human history, which leads him to avoid extended discussions of harmful magic or many societies' anxieties or outright condemnations of what they regard as magic. This is also reflective of the largest innovation in Gosden's approach: his promotion of a universalizing definition of magic, which carries some cost in terms of specific, contextual understandings. Ever since the rupture between anthropological and historical approaches to magic in the 1970s, scholars have largely turned away from sweeping systematization to focus instead on specific instantiations of magical practice and belief. This has rendered comparative work difficult and has led some to reject the category of "magic" altogether. Gosden, in contrast, joins a growing group of scholars who are returning to larger comparative frameworks, but he does not directly engage with any of them. Instead, he frames his work entirely in terms of the outmoded anthropology of E. B. Tylor and James Frazer. He castigates their evolutionary interpretation, which drew a trajectory from "primitive" magic through religion to modern scientific rationality, but his own system is quite similar in some of its fundamentals. Gosden frames magic through its relationship with religion and science. He frequently asserts that the three are not necessarily antagonistic and in fact work best in conjunction, but at other points he sets up...

Abstract:This article contains the first complete English translation of Claude Tholosan's treatise on the crime of witchcraft, usually known by its opening sentence, "So that the Errors of Magicians and Witches Might be Made Evident to Ignorant People." Written in the 1430s, a crucial decade in the growth of the idea of diabolical, conspiratorial witchcraft in Western Europe, Tholosan's treatise provides important insight into early articulations of secular authority over the crime of witchcraft. The English here is based on the Latin edition by Pierette Paravy.

Jan Machielsen, ed. The Science of Demons: Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil. Routledge Studies in the History of Witchcraft, Demonology and Magic. London: Routledge, 2020. Pp. 324. $155.00 (cloth). - Volume 60 Issue 3

AbstractThis article analyzes the scant treatment of Muslims in medieval inquisitorial thought, focusing mainly on the late fourteenth-century Aragonese inquisitor Nicolau Eymeric's Directorium inquisitorum (1376). It argues for four contexts in which to understand his engagement with Islam. First, as background, is a longstanding Christian (although not inquisitorial) tradition categorizing Islam as a heresy, with which he did not substantially engage. Second is his own goal to extend inquisitorial authority to new subjects, in which he drew on previous inquisitorial thought about Jews. The third involves conflicts between church officials and the Crown of Aragon about jurisdiction over non-Christian subjects. The fourth centers on the supposition that he did not view Muslims living within Christendom as an especially covert or insidious threat requiring special investigation to uncover, which speaks to how he and other inquisitors viewed their role and the nature of the threats they aimed to counter. In broad terms, this article contributes to our understanding of one important way in which medieval Christianity engaged with other religions. It also provides a basis for understanding later developments in early modern Europe.

Heresy in Late Medieval Germany: The Inquisitor Petrus Zwicker and the Waldensians. By Reima Välimäki. Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages 6. Woodbridge: York Medieval, 2019. xv + 335 pp. $130.00 hardcover. - Volume 89 Issue 1