The Decline of Magic by Michael Hunter

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It might just have been the tiny type but I found this book harder to engage with than I expected. Nevertheless it was interesting and certainly helped me think again about “science” developed.

One of the main myths Hunter exposes is the idea that there has been a linear and inevitable march of progress towards the secular Dawkinist future – it was often the religious not the secular voices that were first to attach “magic” - and we need to remember how late real medical understandings arrived leaving space for all sorts of “cures” to retain legitimacy.

The focus on written sources and on the forum of debate rather that the every day practice is completely valid but at times it was a little dry as Hunter offered comparative readings of texts when accounts of “folk religion/customs” would probably have been more colourful.

I was amused by a quote from Boyle, in the late 1600s, who remarked about “’the great and deplorable Growth of Irreglion’ in his day, and it was London, ‘this libertine City’, that he saw as its focus.” which saws that concern about the metropolitan elite is really nothing new.