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THE REFORMATION AND ‘THE DISENCHANTMENT OF THE WORLD’ REASSESSED

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2008

ALEXANDRA WALSHAM
ALEXANDRA WALSHAM*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
*
Department of History, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4RJ[email protected]
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Abstract

This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the ongoing debate about the role of the Protestant Reformation in the process of ‘the disenchantment of the world’. It considers the development of this thesis in the work of Max Weber and subsequent scholars, its links with wider claims about the origins of modernity, and the challenges to this influential paradigm that have emerged in the last twenty-five years. Setting the literature on England within its wider European context, it explores the links between Protestantism and the transformation of assumptions about the sacred and the supernatural, and places renewed emphasis on the equivocal and ambiguous legacy left by the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Attention is also paid to the ways in which the Reformation converged with other intellectual, cultural, political, and social developments which cumulatively brought about subtle, but decisive, transformations in individual and collective mentalities. It is suggested that thinking in terms of cycles of desacralization and resacralization may help to counteract the potential distortions of a narrative that emphasizes a linear path of development.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 2008 , pp. 497 - 528
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Earlier versions of this article were presented to audiences in Birmingham, Exeter, London, and Warwick. I am grateful to those who offered comments and asked incisive questions on these occasions, especially Joseph Melling, and to Jonathan Barry, Patrick Collinson, Grace Davie, Henry French, Michael Hunter, Sachiko Kusukawa, Peter Marshall, and Matthias Pohlig for careful readings of various drafts.

2 Max Weber, The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (first English edn, London, 1930), pp. 105, 125. Parsons's translation renders the key phrase entzauberung der welt as ‘the elimination of magic from the world’. See also From Max Weber: essays in sociology, trans. and eds. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London, 1948), ch. 5, esp. pp. 139, 155; Marianne Weber, Max Weber: a biography, trans. and ed. Harry Zohn (New York, 1926; first publ. 1926), pp. 331–3, 339–40; and Max Weber, The sociology of religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (London, 1963), pp. 171, 175. For discussion of the concept, see Hans G. Kippenberg, ed., Discovering religious history in the modern age, trans. Barbara Harshav (Princeton and Oxford, 2002), ch. 11, ‘The great process of disenchantment’.

3 Ernst Troeltsch, Protestantism and progress: the significance of Protestantism for the rise of the modern world, ed. B. A. Gerrish (Philadelphia, 1986; first English edn 1912).

4 As embodied, for instance, in A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London, 1964).

5 Keith Thomas, Religion and the decline of magic: studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England (Harmondsworth, 1973; first edn, 1971), pp. 88, ix, chs. 3, 21–2, and passim. Despite pointing to inconsistencies and complexities, Lawrence Stone's review of Thomas, entitled ‘The disenchantment of the world’ in the New York Review of Books, 17 (2 Dec. 1971), itself endorsed the general line of argument and was underpinned by implicit contempt for ‘wholly irrational beliefs which stunt the mind and prevent effective action for human betterment’: repr. as ‘Magic, religion and reason’, in his The past and the present (Boston, London, and Henley, 1981), pp. 154–74, at p. 174. See Jonathan Barry's perceptive discussion of Thomas and his influences in ‘Introduction: Keith Thomas and the problem of witchcraft’, in Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts, eds., Witchcraft in early modern Europe: studies in culture and belief (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 1–45.

6 Vogler, Bernhard, ‘Die Enstehung der protestantischen Volksfrömmigkeit in der rheinsichen Pfalz zwischen 1555 und 1619’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 72 (1981), pp. 158–95Google Scholar; van Dülmen, Richard, ‘Reformation und Neuzeit: Ein versuch’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 14 (1987), pp. 1–25Google Scholar, trans. as ‘The Reformation and the modern age’, in C. Scott Dixon, ed., The German Reformation: the essential readings (Oxford, 1999), pp. 196–219; Thomas Nipperdey, ‘The Reformation and the modern world’, in E. I. Kouri and Tom Scott, eds., Politics and society in Reformation Europe: essays for Sir Geoffrey Elton on his sixty-fifth birthday (Basingstoke, 1987), pp. 535–52; Carlos M. N. Eire, War against the idols: the reformation of worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, 1986), conclusion, esp. p. 312. See also Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Magic, science, religion and the scope of rationality (Cambridge, 1990), esp. chs. 1–2; Marcel Gauchet, The disenchantment of the world: a political history of religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, 1998). The latter uses the concept as a shorthand for secularization. The general thrust of Pieter Spierenburg's The broken spell: a cultural and anthropological history of preindustrial Europe (Basingstoke, 1991) echoes the Weberian paradigm, though he is more sensitive to the complexities than his title implies: see esp. pp. 9–11.

7 Robert W. Scribner, ‘The impact of the Reformation on everyday life’, in Mensch und objekt im mittelalter und in der frühen neuzeit (Österrichische Akademie der Wissenshaften, Philosphisch-Historische Klasse Sitzungsberichte, vol. 568, Vienna, 1990), pp. 315–43; idem, ‘The Reformation, popular magic and the “disenchantment of the world”’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23 (1993), pp. 475–94; idem, ‘Reformation and desacralisation: from sacramental world to moralised universe’, in R. Po-Chia Hsia and R. W. Scribner, eds., Problems in the historical anthropology of early modern Europe (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, vol. 78, Wiesbaden, 1997), pp. 75–92; idem, ‘Magic and the formation of Protestant popular culture in Germany’, in his Religion and culture in Germany (1400–1800), ed. Lyndal Roper (Leiden, 2001), pp. 323–45. See also Thomas A. Brady, ‘Robert W. Scribner, a historian of the German Reformation’, in ibid., pp. 9–26. The thesis was also implicit in Scribner's earlier For the sake of simple folk: popular propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge, 1981).

8 See the classic article by Strauss, Gerald, ‘Success and failure in the German Reformation’, Past and Present, 67 (1975), pp. 30–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the English context, see Haigh, Christopher, ‘Success and failure in the English Reformation’, Past and Present, 173 (2001), pp. 28–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 A key contribution here was Peter Burke, Popular culture in early modern Europe (New York, 1978).

10 Ulinka Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2005), esp. pp. 10–11, 155–7. This is not, by contrast, a theme or problem explicitly tackled by Diarmaid MacCulloch's influential work of synthesis, Reformation: Europe's house divided, 1490–1700 (London, 2003), though his discussion does take account of the general historiographical trends described in this essay.

11 Nicholas Tyacke, ed., England's long Reformation, 1500–1800 (London, 1998); Peter G. Wallace, The long European Reformation: religion, political conflict and the search for conformity, 1350–1750 (Basingstoke, 2004).

12 Owen Davies, Witchcraft, magic and culture, 1736–1951 (Manchester, 1999); Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven, 2006); Sasha Handley, Visions of an unseen world: ghost beliefs and ghost stories in eighteenth-century England (London, 2007); Owen Davies and Willem de Blécourt, eds., Beyond the witch trials: witchcraft and magic in Enlightenment Europe (Manchester, 2004); idem and idem, Witchcraft continued: popular magic in modern Europe (Manchester, 2004); Jonathan Barry, ‘Piety and the patient: medicine and religion in eighteenth-century Bristol’, in Roy Porter, ed., Patients and practitioners: lay perceptions of medicine in pre-industrial society (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 145–75, and other unpublished work by the same author also exemplifies these tendencies. See also James Obelkevitch, Religion and rural society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875 (Oxford, 1976), for a percipient anticipation of some of these interpretative trends, esp. pp. 302, 307. See also Clark, Jonathan, ‘Providence, predestination and progress: or, did the Enlightenment fail?’, Albion, 35 (2003), pp. 559–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which provides a foretaste of a monograph in preparation.

13 Notably Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire (London, 1978), and Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des élites dans la France moderne (XVe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris, 1978), trans. as Popular culture and elite culture in France 1400–1750, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baton Rouge, 1985).

14 See, among others, Robert Evans, The making of the Habsburg monarchy, 1550–1750: an interpretation (Oxford, 1984), ch. 11; Trevor Johnson, ‘The recatholicisation of the Upper Palatinate (c. 1621–c. 1700)’ (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge, 1991); Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in his saints: Counter-Reformation propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley, 1993); Marc M. Forster, Catholic revival in the age of the Baroque: religious identity in southwest Germany, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 2001); Walsham, Alexandra, ‘Miracles and the Counter Reformation mission to England’, Historical Journal, 46 (2003), pp. 779–815CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On attempts to authenticate the sacred, see Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, sanctity and history in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the preservation of the particular (Cambridge, 1995); Nancy G. Siraisi, ‘Signs and evidence: autopsy and sanctity in late sixteenth-century Italy’, in eadem, Medicine and the Italian universities, 1250–1600 (Leiden, 2001), pp. 356–80.

15 See Anne Jacobson Schutte, Aspiring saints: pretense of holiness, Inquisition and gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618–1750 (Baltimore, 2001); Stephen Haliczer, Between exaltation and infamy: female mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (New York, 2002); Keitt, Andrew, ‘Religious enthusiasm, the Spanish Inquisition, and the disenchantment of the world’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 65 (2004), pp. 231–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Inventing the sacred: imposture, Inquisition, and the boundaries of the supernatural in Golden Age Spain (Leiden, 2005).

16 Euan Cameron, ‘For reasoned faith or embattled creed? Religion for the people in early modern Europe’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 8 (1998), pp. 165–87.

17 Eamon Duffy, The stripping of the altars: traditional religion in England, c. 1400–1580 (New Haven, 1992).

18 For the argument that Christianity willing co-operated with and appropriated pagan magic, see Valerie I. J. Flint, The rise of magic in early medieval Europe (Oxford 1991); but note the critical review by Murray, Alexander, ‘Missionaries and magic in Dark-Age Europe’, Past and Present, 136 (1992), pp. 186–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Engen, John Van, ‘The Christian middle ages as an historiographical problem’, American Historical Review, 91 (1986), pp. 519–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is directed against Delumeau's thesis of the Catholic Reformation as a crusade to ‘christianize’ Europe for the first time, and broadly against other approaches inspired by the discipline of anthropology.

20 Thomas, Religion and the decline of magic, ch. 2; and see the critique by Hildred Geertz and Thomas's reply, ‘An anthroplogy of religion and magic’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (1975), pp. 71–109. Note also the comments of Duffy, Stripping of the altars, pp. 2, 8.

21 See R. I. Moore, ‘Guibert de Nogent and his world’, in Henry Mayr-Harting and R. I. Moore, eds., Studies in medieval history presented to R. H. C. Davis (London, 1985), pp. 107–18; Smith, Julia, ‘Oral and written: saints, miracles and relics in Brittany, c. 850–1250’, Speculum, 65 (1990), pp. 309–43Google Scholar; Elliot, Dyan, ‘Seeing double: John Gerson, the discernment of spirits, and Joan of Arc’, American Historical Review, 107 (2002), pp. 26–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 For sophisticated discussions, see Alexander Murray, ‘Piety and impiety in thirteenth-century Italy’, in G. J. Cuming and Derek Baker, eds., Popular belief and practice (Studies in Church History, vol. 8, Cambridge, 1984), pp. 83–106; Reynolds, Susan, ‘Social mentalities and the case of medieval scepticism’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 1 (1991), pp. 21–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John Arnold, Belief and unbelief in medieval Europe (London, 2005), esp. pp. 216–30. See also S. J. Ridyard, ‘Condigna veneratio: post Conquest attitudes to the saints of the Anglo-Saxons’, in R. Allen Brown, ed., Anglo-Norman studies IX: proceedings of the Battle Conference, 1986 (Woodbridge, 1987), pp. 179–206, for selective scepticism as a reflection of political imperatives. On canonization proceedings and tests of sanctity, see André Vauchez, Sainthood in the later middle ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 16; Katharine Park, ‘Relics of a fertile heart: the “autopsy” of Clare of Montefalco’, in Anne L. McClanan and Karen Rosoff Encarnación, eds., The material culture of sex, procreation, and marriage in premodern Europe (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 115–33. Carl Watkins's History and the supernatural in medieval England (Cambridge, 2008) will also offer a nuanced view of attitudes in the pre-Reformation period.

23 Walter Stephens, Demon lovers: witchcraft, sex, and the crisis of belief (Chicago and London, 2002). See also Karen Jolly, ‘Beliefs about magic: conceptual shifts and the nature of evidence’, and Edward Peters, ‘Superstition and magic from Augustine to Isidore of Seville’, in Karen Jolly, Catharina Raudvere, and Edward Peters, Witchcraft and magic in Europe: the middle ages (London, 2002), pp. 13–26, 178–86 respectively.

24 See also Kieckhefer, Richard, ‘The specific rationality of medieval magic’, American Historical Review, 99 (1994), pp. 813–36CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

25 For a collection that challenges the tendency to label the middle ages ‘superstitious’, see P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, ed., The occult in medieval Europe (Basingstoke, 2005), introduction, pp. 1–10.

26 E. P. Thompson, The making of the English working class (Harmondsworth, 1968; first edn, 1963), p. 12. Stuart Clark's Thinking with demons: the idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe (Oxford, 1997) is perhaps the most powerful and profound example of this interpretative trend.

27 See, notably, Steven Shapin, A social history of truth: civility and science in seventeenth-century England (Chicago, 1994).

28 For some notable discussions, see Owen Chadwick, The secularization of the European mind in the nineteenth century (Cambridge, 1975); C. John Sommerville, The secularization of early modern England: from religious culture to religious faith (New York, 1992); Blair Worden, ‘The question of secularization’, in Alan Houston and Steve Pincus, eds., A nation transformed: England after the Restoration (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 20–40. For recent sociological discussion with reference to the modern period, see José Casanova, Public religions in the modern world (Chicago, 1994), ch. 1; David Martin, On secularization: towards a revised general theory (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2005); Grace Davie, The sociology of religion (London, 2007), ch. 3. Cf. the different definitions of these terms offered by S. S. Acquaviva, The decline of the sacred in industrial society, trans. Patricia Lipscomb (Oxford, 1979), esp. p. 35. For Acquaviva, secularization is the rejection of the magical use of the sacred or of the attribution of sacred significance to behaviour, whereas desacralization is a change in the intensity and the diffusion of the experience of the sacred as a psychological experience.

29 For important remarks about the relationship between individual and collective mentalities and their role in intellectual change, see Michael Hunter, Science and the shape of orthodoxy: intellectual change in late seventeenth-century Britain (Woodbridge, 1995), esp. pp. 11–18; and idem, Robert Boyle (1627–91): scrupulosity and science (Woodbridge, 2000), p. 14 and ch. 10.

30 On Wycliffite views on these topics, see Ann Hudson, The premature Reformation: Wycliffite texts and Lollard history (Oxford, 1988), pp. 281–90, 302–3, Anne Hudson, ed., Selections from English Wycliffite writings (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 83–8, 110–15. This was not a universal feature of medieval heresy: Hussitism, for instance, retained a deep reverence for the real presence in the Eucharist. See Thomas A. Fudge, The magnificent ride: the first Reformation in Hussite Bohemia (Aldershot, 1998).

31 See, for example, Wakefield, Walter L., ‘Some unorthodox popular ideas of the thirteenth century’, Medievalia et humanistica: studies in medieval and renaissance culture, n.s. 4 (1973), pp. 25–35Google Scholar. For representations of this strand of popular rationalism, see, for example, Andreas Karlstadt's ‘Dialogue on the Lord's Supper’, 1524, in Carl Lindberg, ed., The European Reformations sourcebook (Oxford, 2000), pp. 116–18.

32 See Eire, War against the idols; Edward Muir, Ritual in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 5, and p. 181. On the Eucharist, see Brian A. Gerrish, ‘Sign and reality: the Lord's Supper in the reformed confessions’, in Gerrish, The old Protestantism and the new (Chicago and Edinburgh, 1982); Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: the Eucharistic theology of John Calvin (Minneapolis and Edinburgh, 1993); Christopher Elwood, The body broken: the Calvinist doctrine of the Eucharist and the symbolization of power in sixteenth-century France (New York, 1999), esp. pp. 4–5, 167, 170; Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation (Cambridge, 2006).

33 Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002); Craig Kolokofsky, The Reformation of the dead: death and ritual in early modern Germany, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke, 2000). See also Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, eds., The place of the dead: death and remembrance in late medieval and early modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000).

34 See Alister E. McGrath, The intellectual origins of the European Reformation (2nd edn, Oxford, 2004; first edn, 1987); Heiko Oberman, Forerunners of the Reformation: the shape of late medieval thought: illustrated by key documents (London, 1967); idem, The Reformation: roots and ramifications, trans. Andrew Colin Gow (Edinburgh, 1994).

35 Ethan H. Shagan, Popular politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), esp. ch. 5.

36 Margaret Aston, ‘Rites of destruction by fire’, in her Faith and fire: popular and unpopular religion, 1350–1600 (London and Ronceverte, 1993), pp. 291–313, at p. 302; David Freedberg, The power of images: studies in the history and theory of response (Chicago, 1991). See also the remarks of Sommerville, Secularization, p. 62; Helen L. Parish, Monks, miracles and magic: Reformation representations of the medieval church (London and New York, 2005), pp. 159–60. More generally see Aston, England's iconoclasts, i:Laws against images (Oxford, 1988); Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious idols and violent hands: iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge, 1994); Julie Spraggon, Puritan iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003): Walter, John, ‘“Abolishing superstition with sedition”? The politics of popular iconoclasm in England, 1640–1642’, Past and Present, 183 (2004), pp. 79–123CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 R. W. Scribner, ‘Reformation, carnival and the world turned upside-down’, in his Popular culture and popular movements in Refomation Germany (London and Ronceverte, 1987), pp. 71–101; Patrick Collinson, From iconoclasm to iconophobia: the cultural impact of the second English Reformation: the Stenton Lecture 1985 (Reading, 1986).

38 Marshall, Peter, ‘Forgery and miracles in the reign of Henry VIII’, Past and Present, 178 (2003), pp. 39–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Rob Iliffe, ‘Lying wonders and juggling tricks: religion, nature and imposture in early modern England’, in James E. Force and David S. Katz, eds., Everything connects: in conference with Richard E. Popkin, essays in his honour (Leiden, 1999).

39 See Parish, Helen, ‘“Impudent and abominable fictions”: rewriting saints’ lives in the English Reformation', Sixteenth Century Journal, 32 (2001), pp. 45–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parish, Monks, miracles and magic, esp. chs. 3, 5, 6.

40 See Clark, Thinking with demons, pt iii; Gary K. Waite, Heresy, magic, and witchcraft in early modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2003); P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, ‘Rational superstition: the writings of Protestant demonologists’, in Helen Parish and William G. Naphy, eds., Religion and superstition in Reformation Europe (Manchester, 2002), pp. 170–87. For apocalypticism more generally, see Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The four horsemen of the apocalypse: religion, war, famine and death in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2000), esp. ch. 1; and in the context of France, Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525–vers 1610) (2 vols., Seyssel, 1990).

41 Robin Bruce Barnes, Prophecy and gnosis: apocalypticism in the wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford, CA, 1988); Alexandra Walsham, Providence in early modern England (Oxford, 1999); Julie Crawford, Marvellous Protestantism: monstrous births in post-Reformation England (Baltimore and London, 2005); William E. Burns, An age of wonders: prodigies, politics and providence in England, 1657–1727 (Manchester, 2002). Philip Soergel is currently completing a book on this subject in the context of Reformation Germany.

42 Scribner, ‘The Reformation, popular magic and the “disenchantment of the world”’ and ‘Reformation and desacralisation: from sacramental world to moralised universe’. On the devil in English Protestant culture, see Darren Oldridge, The devil in early modern England (Stroud, 2000); Brian Levack, The witchhunt in early modern Europe (3rd edn, Basingstoke, 2006); Nathan Johnstone, The devil and demonism in early modern England (Cambridge, 2006). On angels, see Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham, eds., Angels in the early modern world (Cambridge, 2006), especially the editors' introduction, ‘Migrations of angels in the early modern world’, pp. 13–21.

43 D. P. Walker, ‘The cessation of miracles’, in Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus, eds., Hermeticism and the Renaissance: intellectual history and the occult in early modern Europe (1988); Sluhovsky, Mosche, ‘Calvinist miracles and the concept of the miraculous in sixteenth-century Huguenot thought’, Renaissance and Reformation, 19 (1995), pp. 5–25Google Scholar; Alexandra Walsham, ‘Miracles in post-Reformation England’, in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory, eds., Signs, wonders and miracles: representations of divine power in the life of the church (Studies in Church History, vol. 41, Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 273–306; Shaw, Miracles, esp. pp. 22–33.

44 Clark, Thinking with demons, pt ii, esp. ch. 11.

45 Ibid., pp. 153–5, 161–78, 262–6, 279; Daston, Lorraine, ‘Marvelous facts and miraculous evidence in early modern Europe’, Critical Enquiry, 18 (1991), pp. 93–124CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the order of nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998). On the ‘de-rationalization of sight’, see Stuart Clark, Vanities of the eye: vision in early modern European culture (Oxford, 2007).

46 See Kaspar von Greyerz, Vorsehungsglaube und Kosmologie: Studien zu englischen Selbstzeugnissen des 17. Jahrhunderts (Veröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts London, vol. 25, Göttingen and Zurich, 1990); idem, ‘Biographical evidence on predestination, covenant, and special providence’, in Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth, eds., Weber's Protestant ethic: origins, evidence, contexts (Washington, DC, and Cambridge, 1993), pp. 273–84; Paul Seaver, Wallington's world: a puritan artisan in seventeenth-century London (London, 1985); John Spurr, English puritanism, 1603–1689 (Basingstoke, 1998), ch. 10; John Stachniewski, The persecutory imagination: English puritanism and the literature of religious despair (Oxford, 1991).

47 On this theme, see Alan Macfarlane, ‘A Tudor anthropologist: George Gifford's Discourse and Dialogue’, in Sydney Anglo, ed., The damned art: essays in the literature of witchcraft (London, 1977), pp. 140–55; Stuart Clark, ‘Protestant demonology: sin, superstition and society, c. 1520–1630’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds., Early modern European witchcraft: centres and peripheries (Oxford, 1993), pp. 45–81; Clark, Thinking with demons, chs. 29, 30, 32.

48 Rublack, Reformation Europe, p. 157.

49 Phyllis Mack, Visionary women: ecstatic prophecy in seventeenth-century England (Berkeley, 1992); Nigel Smith, Perfection proclaimed: language and literature in English radical religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989); Nicholas McDowell, The English radical imagination: culture, religion, and revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford, 2003).

50 Ann Kibbey, The interpretation of material shapes in puritanism: a study of rhetoric, prejudice, and violence (Cambridge, 1986).

51 See Carol Piper Heming, Protestants and the cult of the saints in German-speaking Europe, 1517–1531 (Kirksville, MI, 2003).

52 On martyrs, see Freeman, Thomas S., ‘Fate, faction and fiction in Foxe's Book of Martyrs’, Historical Journal, 43 (2000), pp. 601–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar, among his many other contributions; Brad S. Gregory, Salvation by stake: martyrdom in early modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999), esp. ch. 5. On Foxe as a thaumaturge, see Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Through a venice glass darkly: John Foxe's most famous miracle’, in Cooper and Gregory, eds., Signs, wonders and miracles, pp. 307–20. For Ussher, see Ute Lotz-Heumann, ‘“The spirit of prophecy has not wholly left the world”: the stylisation of Archbishop James Ussher as a prophet’, in Parish and Naphy, eds., Religion and superstition, pp. 119–32.

53 Scribner, R. W., ‘Incombustible Luther: the image of the reformer in early modern Germany’, Past and Present, 110 (1986), pp. 38–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 For prophets, see Mack, Visionary women; Diane Watt, Secretaries of God: women prophets in late medieval and early modern England (Woodbridge, 1997); Walsham, Providence, ch. 4, esp. pp. 203–18; eadem, ‘Frantick Hacket: prophecy, sorcery, insanity and the Elizabethan puritan movement’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), pp. 27–66; eadem, ‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings: prophecy, puritanism and childhood in Elizabethan Suffolk’; and Susan Hardmann-Moore, ‘“Such perfecting of praise out of the mouth of a babe”: Sarah Wight as child prophet’, in Diana Wood, ed., The church and childhood (Studies in Church History, vol. 31, Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 285–99, 313–24; Jürgen Beyer, ‘A Lübeck prophet in local and Lutheran context’, in Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson, eds., Popular religion in Germany and central Europe 1400–1800 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 166–82; idem, ‘Lutherische Propheten in Deutschland und Skandinavien im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Entstehung und ausbreitung eines Kulturmusters zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit’, in Robert Bohn, ed., Europa in Scandinavia: Kulturelle und soziale Dialoge in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), pp. 35–55.

55 Rollins, Hyder E., ‘Notes on some English accounts of miraculous fasts’, Journal of American Folklore, 34 (1921), pp. 357–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shaw, Miracles, ch. 5.

56 Raymond Crawfurd, The king's evil (Oxford, 1911); Marc Bloch, The royal touch: sacred monarchy and scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London, 1973); Thomas, Religion and the decline of magic, pp. 227–36; Shaw, Miracles, pp. 64–71.

57 Bossy, John, ‘The mass as a social institution, 1200–1700’, Past and Present, 100 (1983), pp. 29–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Christianity in the west, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 153–61.

58 Clark, Thinking with demons, ch. 4; Keitt, Inventing the sacred, ch. 7; J. C. D. Clark, ‘The re-enchantment of the world? Religion and monarchy in eighteenth-century Europe’, in Michael Schaich, ed., Monarchy and religion: the transformation of royal culture in eighteenth-century Europe (Oxford, 2007). Paul Monod, The power of kings: monarchy and religion in Europe, 1589–1715 (New Haven, 1999), however, explicitly relates his study to the Weberian paradigm of disenchantment.

59 Andrew Lacey, The cult of King Charles the martyr (Woodbridge, 2003); Zaller, Robert, ‘Breaking the vessels: the desacralization of monarchy in early modern England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 29 (1998), pp. 757–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Scribner, ‘Incombustible Luther’.

61 As attested by Miles Huggarde in The displaying of protestantes, with a description of divers their abuses (London, 1556), fo. 54v, and see Gregory, Salvation by stake, pp. 175–6.

62 See A miracle of miracles: wrought by the blood of King Charles the first, of happy memory, upon a mayd at Detford (London, 1649); Lacey, Cult of King Charles the martyr, pp. 62–4.

63 Rublack, Reformation Europe, pp. 157–69; Scribner, ‘The Reformation, popular magic and the “disenchantment of the world”’, repr. in Dixon, ed., German Reformation, p. 270; Cressy, David, ‘Books as totems in seventeenth-century England and New England’, Journal of Library History, 21 (1981), pp. 92–106Google Scholar.

64 Seaver, Wallington's world, p. 151.

65 See Joseph Leo Koerner in The Reformation of the image (London, 2004), esp. chs. 6–8.

66 Christian Grosse, ‘Places of sanctification: the liturgical sacrality of Genevan reformed churches, 1535–1566’, and Andrew Spicer, ‘“What kinde of house a kirk is”: conventicles, consecration and the concept of sacred space in post-Reformation Scotland’, in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, eds., Sacred space in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 60–80 and 81–103 respectively. See also Andrew Spicer, ‘“God will have a house”: defining sacred space and rites of consecration in early seventeenth-century England’ and Graeme Murdock, ‘“Pure and white”: reformed space for worship in seventeenth-century Hungary’, in Sarah Hamilton and Andrew Spicer, eds., Defining the holy: sacred space in medieval and early modern Europe (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 207–30 and 231–50 respectively.

67 See, for example, Sir Henry Spelman, The history and fate of sacrilege (London, 1698). On this topic, see Thomas, Religion and the decline of magic, pp. 112–21; Alexandra Walsham, The reformation of the landscape: religion, identity and memory in early modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, forthcoming).

68 Johansen, Jens Chr V., ‘Holy springs and Protestantism in early modern Denmark: a medical rationale for a religious practice’, Medical History, 41 (1997), pp. 59–69CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Alexandra Walsham, ‘Reforming the waters: holy wells and healing springs in Protestant England’, in Diana Wood, ed., Life and thought in the northern church, c. 1100–1700 (Studies in Church History Subsidia, vol. 12, Woodbridge, 1999); eadem, ‘Sacred spas? Healing springs and religion in post-Reformation England’, in Ole Grell and Bridget Heal, eds., The impact of the European Reformation (Aldershot, forthcoming). Ute Lotz-Heumann is currently reaching similar conclusions on the basis of her research about healing springs in post-Reformation Gemany.

69 David Cressy, Bonfires and bells: national memory and the Protestant calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London, 1989); Ronald Hutton, The rise and fall of merry England: the ritual year, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994); Walsham, Providence, ch. 5.

70 Patrick Collinson, ‘The beginnings of English sabbatarianism’, repr. in his Godly people: essays on English Protestantism and puritanism (London, 1983), pp. 429–43. See also Kenneth L. Parker, The English sabbath: a study of doctrine and discipline from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1988), though he downplays its Protestant distinctiveness. On Scotland, see Margo Todd, The culture of Protestantism in early modern Scotland (New Haven, 2002), esp. ch. 7. But cf. the argument of Sommerville, Secularization, ch. 3. For stories of divine judgement, see, for example, Thomas Beard, The theatre of Gods judgements (London, 1597); Henry Burton, A divine tragedie lately acted ([London], 1636).

71 See Susan Karant Nunn, The Reformation of ritual: an interpretation of early modern Germany (London, 1997); David Hall, Worlds of wonder, days of judgement: popular religious belief in early New England (Cambridge, MA, 1990), ch. 4. On exorcism, see D. P. Walker, Unclean spirits: possession and exorcism in France and England in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (London, 1981); Oldridge, Devil in early modern England, ch. 6; Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Demons, deviance and defiance: John Darrell and the politics of exorcism in late Elizabethan England’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier, eds., Conformity and orthodoxy in the English church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 34–63. On fasting and prayer, see Walsham, Providence, pp. 142–50; Todd, Culture of Protestantism, pp. 343–52; Durston, Christopher, ‘“For the better humiliation of the people”: public days of fasting and thanksgiving during the English Revolution’, Seventeenth Century, 7 (1992), pp. 129–49Google Scholar. On rogation, see Walsham, The reformation of the landscape, ch. 4.

72 R. W. Scribner, ‘Magic and the formation of Protestant popular culture in Germany’, in Roper, ed., Religion and culture in Germany, pp. 323–45.

73 This is implicit in the work of Bob Scribner: see for instance his ‘Introduction’ to Scribner and Johnson, eds., Popular religion in Germany and central Europe, pp. 8–10. See also Strauss, ‘Success and failure in the German Reformation’; Christopher Haigh, ed., The English Reformation revised (Cambridge, 1987); idem, English Reformations: religion, politics and society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993); idem, ‘Success and failure in the English Reformation’.

74 Thomas, Religion and the decline of magic, ch. 9, and pp. 132, 763. This argument also influences Bernard Capp's account of the flourishing state of astrology in post-Reformation England: Astrology and the popular press: English almanacs, 1500–1800 (London and Boston, MA, 1979).

75 See Soergel, Wondrous in his saints; Johnson, ‘Recatholicisation of the Upper Palatinate’; idem, ‘Blood, tears and Xavier-water: Jesuit missionaries and popular religion in the eighteenth-century Upper Palatinate’, in Scribner and Johnson, eds., Popular religion in Germany and central Europe, pp. 183–202; Walsham, ‘Miracles and the Counter-Reformation mission’.

76 C. Scott Dixon, ‘Popular astrology and Lutheran propaganda in Reformation Germany’, History, 84 (1999), pp. 403–18. See also Hall, Worlds of wonder, days of judgement, pp. 58–61, for somewhat similar developments in New England.

77 Bruce Gordon, ‘Malevolent ghosts and ministering angels: apparitions and pastoral care in the Swiss Reformation’, in Gordon and Marshall, eds., Place of the dead, pp. 87–109; Marshall, Beliefs and the dead, ch. 6; idem, ‘Deceptive appearances: ghosts and reformers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England’, in Parish and Naphy, eds., Religion and superstition, pp. 188–208.

78 See Richard Godbeer, The devil's dominion: magic and religion in early New England (Cambridge, 1992), p. 52.

79 See among others, Rosemary Moore, ‘Late seventeenth-century Quakerism and the miraculous: a new look at George Fox's ‘Book of Miracles’, in Cooper and Gregory, eds., Signs, wonders and miracles, pp. 335–43.

80 See R. A. Knox, Enthusiasm: a chapter in the history of religion, with special reference to the XVII and XVIII centuries (Oxford, 1950); Mack, Visionary women; Heyd, Michael, ‘The reaction to enthusiasm in the seventeenth century: towards an integrative approach’, Journal of Modern History, 53 (1981), pp. 258–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘The reaction to enthusiasm in the seventeenth Century: from anti-structure to structure’, Religion, 15 (1985), pp. 279–89; idem, Be sober and reasonable: the critique of enthusiasm in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Leiden, 1995).

81 Worden, ‘Question of secularization’, p. 28.

82 Bossy, Christianity in the west, ch. 8.

83 Hutton, Ronald, ‘The English Reformation and the evidence of folklore’, Past and Present, 148 (1995), pp. 89–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 Walsham, ‘Reforming the waters’, and eadem, The Reformation of the landscape.

85 Daniel Woolf, The social circulation of the past: English historical culture, 1500–1730 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 191–7.

86 Lennard J. Davis, Factual fictions: the origins of the English novel (New York, 1983); Michael McKeon, The origins of the English novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore and London, 1987).

87 E. J. Clery, The rise of supernatural fiction, 1768–1800 (Cambridge, 1995); Handley, Visions of an unseen world, esp. ch. 4.

88 A classic exposition of this theme is D. P. Walker, The decline of hell (London, 1964). For the internalization of idolatry, see Aston, England's iconoclasts, pp. 452–66.

89 See Davies, Witchcraft, magic and culture, esp. ch. 3; idem, ‘Newspapers and the popular belief in witchcraft and magic in the modern period’, Journal of British Studies, 37 (1998), pp. 139–66; Sabine Doering-Manteuffel, ‘The supernatural and the development of print culture’, and Stephan Bachter, ‘Grimoires and the transmission of magical knowledge’, in Davies and de Blécourt, eds., Beyond the witch trials, pp. 187–296. For books as magical talismans, see Cressy, ‘Books as totems’.

90 Walsham, Providence, pp. 218–24.

91 Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless souls: suicide in early modern England (Oxford, 1990), esp. ch. 9.

92 Patrick Curry, ‘Astrology in early modern England: the making of a vulgar knowledge’, in Stephen Pumfrey, Paolo L. Rossi, and Maurice Slawinski, eds., Science, culture and popular belief in Renaissance Europe (Manchester, 1991), pp. 274–91; idem, Prophecy and power: astrology in early modern England (Cambridge, 1989). Burns, Age of wonders, presents transformations in prodigy belief in similar terms: see esp. ch. 5, and conclusion.

93 See Alexandra Walsham, ‘Recording superstition in early modern Britain: the origins of folklore revisited’, in Steve Smith and Alan Knight, eds., The religion of fools? Superstition past and present, Past and Present Supplement Series (Oxford, forthcoming, 2008).

94 See MacDonald, Michael, ‘Insanity and the realities of history in early modern England’, Psychological Medicine, 11 (1981), pp. 11–25CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Walsham, ‘Frantick Hacket’. For earlier manifestations, see Nancy Caciola, Discerning spirits: divine and demonic possession in the middle ages (Ithaca and London, 2003).

95 J. Agrimi and C. Crisciani, ‘Savoir medical et anthropologie religieuse: Les representations et les functions de la vetula XIIIe–XVe siècle’, Annales ESC (1993), pp. 1281–308; Adam Fox, Oral and literate culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), ch. 3, and Woolf, Daniel, ‘A feminine past? Gender, genre, and historical knowledge in England, 1500–1800’, American Historical Review, 102 (1997), pp. 645–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96 Roper, Lyndal, ‘“Evil imaginings and fantasies”: child-witches and the end of the witch craze’, Past and Present, 167 (2000), pp. 107–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

97 Worden, ‘Problem of secularization’, pp. 24–6; and see Chadwick, Secularization, p. 14. See also Moore, ‘Quakerism and the miraculous’, for growing embarrassment about George Fox's miracles within the Society of Friends by the late seventeenth century.

98 Jonathan Barry, ‘Public infidelity and private belief? The discourse of spirits in Enlightenment Bristol’, in Davies and de Blécourt, eds., Beyond the witch trials, pp. 117–43.

99 Michael Hunter, ‘Magic, science and reputation: Robert Boyle, the Royal Society and the occult in the late seventeenth century’, in idem, Robert Boyle, pp. 223–44, at p. 244.

100 Winter, Alison, ‘Mesmerism and popular culture in early Victorian England’, History of Science, 32 (1994), pp. 317–43CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; eadem, Mesmerized: powers of mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago and London, 1998).

101 The same is true of astrology. As Luc Racaut shows, the label superstition was levelled by both Catholics and Protestants against each other: ‘A Protestant or Catholic superstition? Astrology and eschatology during the French wars of religion’, in Parish and Naphy, eds., Religion and superstition, pp. 154–69.

102 Peter Elmer, ‘“Saints or sorcerers”: Quakerism, demonology and the decline of witchcraft in seventeenth-century England’, and Ian Bostridge, ‘Witchcraft repealed’, in Barry, Hester, and Roberts, eds., Witchcraft in early modern Europe, pp. 145–79, 309–34 respectively; Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and its transformations c. 1650–c. 1750 (Oxford, 1997).

103 Bostridge Witchcraft and its transformations. See also Michael Hunter's remarks in reviewing this: ‘Witchcraft and the decline of belief’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 22 (1998), pp. 139–47, at 143–7.

104 MacDonald, , ‘Insanity and the realities of history’. See also Roy Porter, ‘The rage of party: a glorious revolution in English psychiatry?’, Medical History, 27 (1983), pp. 35–50Google Scholar.

105 See Waite, Heresy, magic, and witchcraft, ch. 6, for a variation on this theme.

106 It is impossible to do justice to this vast and complex literature in the space of a few paragraphs. What follows is inevitably partial. For two nuanced syntheses, see John Hedley Brooke, Science and religion: some historical perspectives (Cambridge, 1991); John Henry, The scientific revolution and the origins of modern science (Basingstoke, 1997), ch. 5.

107 Barnes, Prophecy and gnosis; Sachiko Kusukawa, The transformation of natural philosophy: the case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge, 1991).

108 See Prior, Moody E., ‘Joseph Glanvill, witchcraft, and seventeenth-century science’, Modern Philology, 30 (1932), pp. 167–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jacob, M. C. and Jacob, J. R., ‘The Anglican origins of modern science’, Isis, 71 (1980), pp. 251–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jobe, Thomas Harmon, ‘The devil in Restoration science: the Glanvill–Webster witchcraft debate’, Isis, 72 (1981), pp. 342–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schaffer, Simon, ‘Godly men and mechanical philosophers: souls and spirits in Restoration natural philosophy’, Science in Context, 1 (1987), pp. 55–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; A. R. Hall, Henry More: magic, religion and experiment (Oxford, 1990). Much of this owes a debt to Charles Webster, The great instauration: science, medicine and reform, 1626–1660 (London, 1975).

109 See Shaw, Miracles, chs. 4, 7, and passim. Also Dear, Peter, ‘Miracles, experiments, and the ordinary course of nature’, Isis, 81 (1990), pp. 663–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

110 Michael P. Winship, Seers of God: puritan providentialism in the Restoration and early Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD, 1996).

111 Cunningham, Andrew, ‘How the Principia got its name; or, taking natural philosophy seriously’, History of Science, 29 (1991), pp. 377–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Fisch, Harold, ‘The scientist as priest: a note on Robert Boyle's natural philosophy’, Isis, 44 (1953), pp. 252–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

112 See R. S. Westfall, ‘Newton and the hermetic tradition’, in A. G. Debus, ed., Science, medicine and society in the Renaissance (New York, 1972), pp. 183–93; idem, ‘Newton and alchemy’, in Brian Vickers, ed., Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984); Figala, Karin, ‘Newton as alchemist’, History of Science, 15 (1977), pp. 102–37Google Scholar; B. J. Dobbs, The foundations of Newton's alchemy: or ‘the hunting of the green lyon’ (Cambridge, 1975); J. W. Wojcik, Robert Boyle and the limits of reason (Cambridge, 1997); Lawrence Principe, The aspiring adept: Robert Boyle and his alchemical quest (Princeton, 1998).

113 Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: magic and the making of modern science (Cambridge, 1982); Brian P. Copenhaver, ‘Natural magic, hermeticism, and occultism in early modern science’, in David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, eds., Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 261–302; Henry, Scientific revolution, ch. 3; idem, ‘Magic and science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in R. C. Olby, G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie, and M. J. S. Hodge, eds., Companion to the history of modern science (London and New York, 1990); Charles Webster, ‘Alchemical and Paracelsian medicine’, in idem, ed., Health, medicine and mortality in the sixteenth century (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 301–34.

114 Schmidt, Leigh Eric, ‘From demon possession to magic show: ventriloquism, religion, and the Enlightenment’, Church History, 67 (1998), pp. 274–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Lamont, Peter, ‘Spiritualism and a mid-Victorian crisis of evidence’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), pp. 897–920CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

115 Stuart Clark, ‘The rational witchfinder: conscience, demonological naturalism and popular superstitions’, in Pumfrey, Rossi, and Slawinski, eds., Science, culture and popular belief in Renaissance Europe, pp. 222–48; idem, Thinking with demons, pt ii, chs. 10–11; idem, Vanities of the eye, ch. 4. See also Kirsch, Irving, ‘Demonology and science during the Scientific Revolution’, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, 16 (1980), pp. 359–683.0.CO;2-S>CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

116 Daston and Park, Wonders and the order of nature, which offers a more subtle exposition than their earlier, ‘Unnatural conceptions: the study of monsters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France and England’, Past and Present, 92 (1981), pp. 20–54.

117 Blair Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian protectorate’, in W. J. Sheils, ed., Persecution and toleration (Studies in Church History, vol. 21, Oxford, 1984), pp. 199–223, at p. 223; Worden, ‘Question of secularization’, pp. 35–6.

118 Kubrin, David, ‘Newton and the cyclical cosmos: providence and the mechanical philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 28 (1967), pp. 325–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. J. Macintosh, ‘Locke and Boyle on miracles and God's existence’, in Michael Hunter, ed., Robert Boyle reconsidered (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 193–214; Harrison, Peter, ‘Newtonian science, miracles and the laws of nature’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 56 (1995), pp. 531–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. E. McGuire, ‘The nature of Newton's “holy alliance” between science and religion: from the Scientific Revolution to Newton (and back again)’, in Margaret J. Osler, ed., Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 247–70.

119 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the air pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the experimental life (Princeton, 1985); Shapin, Social history of truth.

120 Adrian Johns, The nature of the book: print and knowledge in the making (Chicago, 1998).

121 See, among others, Dror Wahrham, ‘God and the Enlightenment’, and Sheehan, Jonathan, ‘Enlightenment, religion, and the enigma of secularization: a review essay’, American Historical Review, 108 (2003), pp. 1057–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 1061–80 respectively; S. J. Barnett, Enlightenment and religion: the myths of modernity (Manchester, 2003); Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the making of the modern world (London, 2000); Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2005), esp. chs. 7–8.

122 J. A. I. Champion, The pillars of priestcraft shaken: the Church of England and its enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992).

123 On ghosts, see Sasha Handley, ‘Reclaiming ghosts in 1690s England’, in Cooper and Gregory, eds., Signs, wonders and miracles, pp. 345–55; eadem, Visions of an unseen world, ch. 1; on miracles, Shaw, Miracles, ch. 7. On angels, see Alexandra Walsham, ‘Invisible helpers: angelic intervention in post-Reformation England’ (forthcoming).

124 Brooke, Science and religion, pp. 118, 143.

125 Walsham, ‘Recording superstition’.

126 Henry D. Rack, ‘Doctors, demons and early Methodist healing’, in W. J. Sheils, ed., The church and healing (Studies in Church History, vol. 19, Oxford, 1982); idem, Reasonable enthusiast: John Wesley and the rise of Methodism (Philadelphia, 1989); David Hempton, The religion of the people: Methodism and popular religion c. 1750–1900 (London and New York, 1996), pp. 18, 23–4, 33, 34; Robert Webster, ‘Seeing salvation: the place of dreams and visions in John Wesley's Arminian Magazine’, and John W. B. Tomlinson, ‘The magic Methodists and their influence on the early Primitive Methodist movement’, in Cooper and Gregory, eds., Signs, wonders and miracles, pp. 376–88, 389–99 respectively; Handley, Visions of an unseen world, ch. 5.

127 Greisman, H. C., ‘“Disenchantment of the world”: Romanticism, aesthetics and sociological theory’, British Journal of Sociology, 27 (1976), pp. 495–507CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

128 See here Jonathan Clark's overview in ‘The re-enchantment of the world?’. His English society, 1688–1832: ideology, social structure and political practice during the ancient regime (Cambridge, 1985) was also a landmark in this regard.

129 Chadwick, Secularization, p. 17.

130 See the rather similar argument of Martin in On secularization, p. 3 and passim. Martin speaks of ‘successive Christianizations, followed or accompanied by recoils’.

131 For a perceptive discussion of this theme in a broader context, see Garthine Walker, ‘Modernization’, in eadem, ed., Writing early modern history (London, 2005), pp. 25–48.