In 1968, Trevor-Roper had confessed to his confidante, the one-time Somerville historian Valerie Pearl, that he could not face a conference in the United States, ‘listening to all the Keith Thomases of America pontificating about “new ways in history” — it is too much’. However subtle, the modernizing thesis implicit in RDM and Thomas’s wider ethnographic project has not aged well. In 1970, Thomas contributed a chapter, tellingly entitled ‘The Relevance of Social Anthropology to the Historical Study of English Witchcraft’, to Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, a volume edited by Douglas. Together they create a legitimate space for beliefs that conflict with the central thesis, as either ahead of their time or relics of an earlier mentality.

Thomas saw the medieval church — a tapestry of diverse rituals — as blurring the distinctions between two distinct concepts or categories, religion and magic, offering so many supernatural solutions to earthly problems that on a popular level it was viewed as ‘a vast reservoir of magical power’.I would suggest that one key change, and one that has been little studied, was the extent to which theories and practices of magic were increasingly historicised throughout this period. As Charles Webster argued some time ago in From Paracelsus to Newton (1982), “we must look in places other than science for the explanation of these changes” (p. Moreover, as Geertz realized in 1975, the dry wit with which Thomas handles early modern beliefs and practices entails a crucial sense of distance between himself and his subjects.

There is, however, a considerable irony in this, one that may also explain why methodological concerns are missing from Thomas’s own story of RDM’s origins. And, as Michael Hunter recently pointed out, RDM devotes remarkably few pages to explicit discussion of magic’s ‘decline’.

richness and freshness’ — the facets that propelled our analysis — but also to the ultimately literary reasons why the book is so loved: ‘for its generosity, for its humor, for the rewards on every page’. As Geertz pointed out, the book assumed that, ‘as a means for overcoming specific practical difficulties, [magic was] necessarily ineffective’ — hence Thomas’s suggestion that when technological tools for solving mundane problems were eventually developed, magic declined. In his review, Copenhaver lamented ‘the open-endedness and self-doubting’ that ‘marred’ the end of the work; William Monter claimed that ‘the only thing which prevents this book from being an unrelieved masterpiece is its conclusion, or rather its lack of one’.

Half a century after its first publication, Thomas’s masterpiece remains an inspiration — and a foil — for countless students of social, cultural and religious history. When he reviewed the Douglas volume, he charged Thomas and Macfarlane with setting off together ‘on the fashionable anthropological broomstick, non-stop to darkest Africa’. Indeed, some readers, especially critical ones, immediately embraced an anthropological reading of RDM.The concluding conviction that a ‘functional interpretation of the role of witch beliefs’ could be combined ‘with a theory of social and intellectual change’ helped to set the expectations with which RDM — a book ‘which I plan to publish shortly’ — would be greeted. Moreover, were these changes primarily economic, technological, social, cultural, religious, or intellectual? When pressed to trace the book’s beginnings, Thomas himself has repeatedly depicted RDM as fundamentally an Oxford book. In 1972, it won an inaugural Wolfson History Prize, while the American Historical Association allocated it a session at its annual conference.